I know a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about topics like Hell, death, or the afterlife.

I avoid these topics like the plague whenever I can. However, I occasionally find myself having to share my thoughts with family and close friends. I'm mainly writing this for future conversations and for anyone on the internet searching for this.

There are over two billion Christians in the world and a higher percentage believe in literal hell or heaven, a percentage of the “nones” share the same belief. The majority of humans have the assumption that these were Jesus’s beliefs because they read them in the bible (The New Testament). But this is not true, neither Jesus nor early Christians nor the Hebrew Bible he interpreted teach about everlasting torment in the afterlife (Hell).

If Hell as an everlasting torment for sinners was never mentioned by Jesus or written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Old Testament Bible, then where did it come from?

The concept of Hell was first attested to 725 years after Jesus’ death. Depending on which Bible you are reading, Hell was translated from Sheol, Gehenna, or the Abyss. None of these words means Hell though.

Let walk through the original meaning of these words.

Sheol or Hadēs

Sheol (Hebrew translation of the Greek word Hadēs) appears sixty-five times in The Old Testament and it was used to denote the place of the dead “grave”.

Like any grave, Sheol is portrayed with the presence of worms, decay, and dust (Job 17:13-16, Isaiah 14:11). Twenty times where the word Sheol was mentioned, death is mentioned in the same or previous verse in a similar language. When adjectives are used to describe Sheol, it is portrayed as a wet, dank, dark, dusty, musty hole.

Unlike most Greeks, early Jews believed dead people, good and bad, all descended permanently to the same destination (Job 7:9), which is a pit in the earth filled with darkness and silence. To the Jews, Sheol was a place of silence and no suffering where even the service of God does not continue (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

This belief lasted until the Second Temple period (roughly 500 BC–70 AD) when a more diverse set of ideas developed, some believed Sheol is the home to both the righteous and the wicked, separated into different compartments. Others believed it was a place meant for the wicked alone.

On the contrary to the modern idea of Jesus, he was a Jew so he shared the same belief that the human soul does not exist separately from the body, he believed when the judgment day comes, the wicked in Sheol will permanently perish to Abyss (wiped out of existence) and be forgotten while the righteous will be resurrected (Psalm 16:10, Hosea 13:14) from the grave to an everlasting life here on earth (not heaven).

In The New Testament, a lot of spurious insight is provided to the location of where Heaven and Hell (Sheol) is. For example, in the New Testament (Matthew 11:23), Jesus said while the city of Capernaum was exalted to heaven, it will be brought down to Hell. Does this mean people of Capernaum were in the literal heaven (up in the sky) the 21st century believes in? No, because they were literally on earth with Jesus when he made this statement.

This does not make any theological sense, it is much logical in The Old Testament that Jesus was speaking in symbolic ways because Heaven was about the blessing and glory of God. The city of Capernaum at that time had great fame, honor, glory, wealth, power, and respect in the minds of most people.

Going down to Sheol symbolizes the opposite which means they will lose their honor, glory, and wealth.

There is not a single text in The Old Testament which speaks about Sheol as a place of eternal suffering and undying fire. This makes some passages in The New Testament very absurd, even when The New Testament authors quote The Old Testament, they speak about the resurrection from Sheol (which has been translated to Hell).

Jewish Bible

for you will not abandon me to Sh’ol, you will not let your faithful one see the Abyss. (Psalm 16:10)

Kings James Bible

“For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” (Psalm 16:10)

For reference, here are some other places the authors quote The Old Testament (Hos 13:14; Acts 2:27; 13:35;). In these chapters, you will notice Hell (a place of eternal torment) doesn’t make sense because it sounds like God will end up releasing the wicked. However, it is more coherent in The Old Testament though because Sheol is simply a resting place for the dead waiting for their Judgement.

If the New Testament authors translated Sheol correctly (with the properties of a grave) in the above chapters, then you are probably already asking yourself why it was illogically translated to eternal torment and suffering in other instances.

Gehenna

Gehenna is a Greek transliteration from the Hebrew word “Ge-Hinnom” (or “Valley of Hinnom”), Gehenna appears eleven times in The Old Testament, and every instance was translated to Hell in The New Testament.

However, Gehenna is a deep gorge in the southwest of Jerusalem. During the time of Jesus, it was a place of physical and spiritual degradation and abjectness because of its history; Gehenna was initially where the Kings of Judah sacrificed their children to Molech by burning them ( Book of Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2–6).

Gehenna was also where 185,000 Assyrian soldiers that died during their siege in the days of Hezekiah were burnt (Isaiah 30:31). Besides these horrific events, Gehenna was a dump for both garbage and dead bodies of criminals, sick individuals, individuals denied proper burials and those that can’t stand their shame.

According to the tradition, Gehenna became a place of undying fire after Josiah desecrated the altar at the valley of Hinnom, the valley was burnt day and night to consume the refuse and keep down the stench.

The New Testament quotes Jesus a number of times teaching about sinners going to Hell (translated from Gehenna), meanwhile Jesus was referring to a physical location in his city.

To understand why Jesus metaphorically used Gehenna as a place for the wicked. Let’s try to picture what a morning regular trip to this valley of undying fire was like for the people of Jerusalem: you are walking down a hollowed-out pit between two hills, your left and right are covered with smolder from trash fires and half-burnt corpse covered crawling with maggots and buzzing with flies.

As you continue to walk deeper into the valley, the sky is now totally covered in smoke, you can now hear the agonized cries of babies being burned alive, the loud drums and incantations of Pagans, and then you see an armless diseased person walking towards you to eat whatever rotten food you left in your garbage. Welcome to Hell on earth.

During the days of Jesus, whenever someone used the word “Gehenna”, it referred to a place of total horror, suffering, and sordid experience.

Also to understand that Jesus was symbolically using Gehenna to teach about what can happen to sinners, here on earth and not the afterlife, let’s consider the following chapters in the Jewish bible:

“Therefore, the days are coming,” says Adonai, “when it will no longer be called either Tofet or the Ben-Hinnom Valley, but the Valley of Slaughter — they will put the dead in Tofet, because there will be no space left” (Jeremiah 7:32)

Here in Jeremiah, God was angry at the people of Y’hudah for burning their children at Beh-Hinnom (aka “Gehenna” or “the valley of Hinnom”).

If your right eye makes you sin, gouge it out and throw it away! Better that you should lose one part of you than have your whole body thrown into Gei-Hinnom. (Matt 5:29)

Another chapter where God was angry and advised against being thrown into Gei-Hinnom (aka “Gehenna'“ or “the valley of Hinnom”).

Being sent to Gehenna can’t be compared to being sent to modern-day Prison or being banished because neither is spiritually degrading, when you are sent to Gehenna, you live a life of horror, destruction, and decay till you die off the surface of the earth.

So when Jesus spoke about Gehenna, he was not referring to a place in the afterlife with everlasting burning fire, he is instead using the history and state of the valley to warn his disciples and what could befall them if they failed to follow his teaching.

Therefore Gehenna should not be translated to Hell, just the way you can’t translate Mushin in Lagos to Hell.

Abyss

Another Greek word that is often translated to Hell is abussos (Abyss in English). While the word Abyss simply means a “deep pit”, a pit so deep that is it immeasurable, abussos itself is a word translated from the Hebrew word tehom which means "the deep” or the deepest part of the ocean (Romans 10:7).

To the Hebrews, tehom had a negative connotation, it was an evil place with powerful forces of chaos arrayed against the order of God’s creation.

The symbolic nature of Abyss is particularly evident in The New Testament because it was translated to “the bottomless pit” instead of “Hell” on multiple occasions (Rev 9:1, Rev 11:7, Rev 17:18, 20:1, 3).

So just like Sheol and Gehenna, Abyss doesn’t mean a place with eternal torment and fire, it’s simply the deepest part of the ocean, and when people go down to Abyss, it symbolizes their death in the immeasurable depth of the ocean to the Greeks (Ezek 26:19).

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If you came here for facts, stop here. The next section is purely speculation from my agnostic mindset.

How did these words become Hell? A Speculation.

The idea of eternal Hell itself came pretty late to Christianity, developed hundreds of years after the death of Jesus by gentile borrowed from other religions. When Jesus was alive he preached that the end of days was coming soon when God will come to judge the living and the dead, all of his teaching were dependent on the messiah coming to earth to wipe out the evil force and only people who have been on the side of God throughout history, dead and alive will be brought into this new peaceful kingdom, here on earth.

This preaching could only last the test of time as hundreds of years passed and the messiah never came. When the messiah didn’t come, there was a turning point in the Jew’s beliefs about what happened after death, there needed to be a reward for following God’s teaching and punishment for the disobedient.

It’s not by mistake that the majority of people that came into mainstream Christianity were the Greeks rather Jews, the Jewish and Jesus didn’t subscribe to the idea that the soul existed separately from the body but the Greeks did, Going way back to before reigning of Plato (400 BC), that was the Greek belief.

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p.s This post’s feature image you saw at the top is of a synagogue, it was painted in order to compete with the many other religions being practiced in Dura-Europos.