Our concept of hell doesn’t have biblical origins

the concept of hell as we understand it today does not have biblical Origins hey everybody I'm Dan mclen I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion and if you look throughout a translation like the King James version the word hell occurs across the Old and New Testaments but it is a rendering of multiple different words in the Old Testament it's always the same Hebrew word shaol and the word shaol does not refer to the conceptual package that we understand today as hell it actually just refers to the Abode of all the dead because they had an entirely different conceptual package about the afterlife back then in ancient Israel and Judah everybody went to the same place righteous Wicked or somewhere in between and they didn't have a real clear idea of what that place was going to be like but what is pretty consistent is that nobody looked forward to it it seemed to have been understood as a kind of dreary existence that all also ran a bunch of risks associated with entities that might be occupying the Underworld the Yim the reim maybe even the Nephilim but based on burial Goods it seems that the living anticipated that the deceased needed access to light and to food and to water and based on what we can reconstruct about ancestor worship from those material remains it also seems that the deceased had things to offer the living and particularly access to to strategic information blessings curses things like that but again what is consistent is that nobody looked forward to the afterlife it was a dreary dull existence and this doesn't really begin to change until oppression and persecution begins to force Judah sites to wonder where God's justice is going to be realized because Judah sites and later judeans and Jewish folks were experiencing an awful lot of Oppression at the hands of larger Empires like Assyria like Babylon Persia and then the helenistic empires and in all of this they're seeing a lot of their own people whom they consider righteous suffering and dying without seeing God's justice and they're also seeing and off a lot of wicked people who are responsible for the oppression and the persecution and the suffering not experiencing God's judgment so this results in the wisdom literature that is contemplating the problem of evil and where God's justice is and so we see this in Ecclesiastes we see this in job we see this sometimes in the Psalms and it's also getting explored by Greco Roman period Jewish authors who are writing texts that would not end up in the Bible like the texts of first Enoch where they begin to develop ideas about postmortem Divine punishment and postmortem Divine reward maybe it is after death that God's justice is being realized and so initially they were coming up with ideas about these Wicked Angels based on Genesis 6 that introduced evil into the world and they're the group that is experiencing the tip of the sword of God's postmortem Divine punishment but there are also humans that are getting punished as well and we have one part of the book of Eno that talks about these smooth places where people are gathered to wait for judgment and depending on your comportment in life you would go to one of these different places and there's even this idea that if you were evil in life but but you received some kind of divine judgment you went to one place whereas if you were evil but did not receive Divine judgment in life you went to another place so there are a lot of different ways that these authors are exploring the idea of postmortem Divine punishment and it's not all consistent and by the time we get to the New Testament we have three different kind of General categories of postmortem Divine punishment one is just annihilationism if you're Wicked upon death you are destroyed you cease to exist another is temporary conscious torment followed either by Annihilation or salvation you are punished and then you cease to exist or your punishment pays the fine and then you go on to Salvation and then the last category is the Eternal conscious torment and these three categories bubble to the surface in a variety of different ways in different parts of the New Testament and we see all three of them in the gospels we don't see any references to hell in Paul uh we see some other folks referring to them particularly in the Book of Revelation but there are three Greek words in the New Testament that are used one is Hades which is clearly a borrowing from Greek religion where Hades like shaol was the General Abode of the dead and then you've got this other word Tartarus that only occurs once that was the place where the wicked went to be punished and then the third was GNA which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew gehenna or Valley of hom and this is the traditional Jewish idea of this Valley that ran around the southern end of Jerusalem being associated with wickedness because this is supposed to be the valley where the toet was and that was the place where Kings offered child sacrifice and things like that and for a long time there's been this idea that this was a perpetually burning landfill and somewhere where the bodies of criminals were tossed to be burnt and things like that and there are absolutely no data that support that that is something that someone made up but what we do see is this Valley which was associated with wickedness which was associated with child sacrifice being conceptually associated with a place of punishment kind of an eschatological place of punishment so you see in the very last verse of Isaiah for instance this idea of a fire not being quenched and the worm not dying and this is related to stuff that we see going on in first Enoch as well and the idea is that there are constantly bodies being he heed into this eschatological place of judgment and so the fire always has fuel and the worms always have food but that would later be reinterpreted to mean the fire never goes out and the worms never stop chewing on you in other words it's an eternal punishment but there's no one idea of Hell in the New Testament it's not until after the New Testament that readers are looking back on the New Testament and trying to harmonize it all because they're looking at a single collection of texts and they want it to speak with one single unified and consistent voice that we see the idea of Eternal conscious torment slowly taking center stage and becoming the main idea of hell and this gets further developed particularly in the medieval period with some Italian literature that was very famous that developed a lot of imagery about what hell was like but to summarize up to this point the idea of Hell develops in Greco Roman period Jewish literature that would not be included in the later developed biblical Canon and the different ideas about hell were taken up in the New Testament but this did not shake out into one single idea of hell until later Christians began to harmonize everything impose that presupposition of univocality to come up with one single principle about postmortem Divine punishment which ultimately was focused on Eternal conscious torment because that was one of the most horrifying things that people could think about which became a pretty good motivator for folks who wanted to leverage that threat to try to influence behavior so when people talk about hell today and particularly when people use hell as a threat or as a means of trying to incentivize certain Behavior they're using something that developed primarily outside of the Bible and primarily as a means of trying to structure values and power and boundaries so again our concept of hell today does not have biblical Origins it was primarily developed by authors who were not writing biblical literature who were trying to rationalize where God's judgment was and then by Christian leaders who were trying to synthesize an inconsistent notion of the afterlife in a way that made it easier for them to leverage the threat of Hell to control Behavior and 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