Where did hell come from?

Gehenna is the valley of the son of Hinnom, on the south side of Jerusalem. Jeremiah says what was done there: "they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I didn’t command, nor did it come into my mind", and that it would be renamed "The valley of Slaughter".

When Mark has Jesus warn about being thrown "into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire", where "their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched", the name is that valley. The translation quoted throughout this site prints Gehenna and footnotes it "or, Hell", which is the whole problem in one line.

Luke’s story of the rich man puts him "in Hades", in torment, with a great gulf fixed, and puts the beggar somewhere else. Hades is the word the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures almost always used for Sheol, the underworld where all the dead went down, and in Luke it has arrived carrying compartments and a view.

The same English word has now covered two different things: a burning valley and the place of the dead.

Near its end, Revelation has "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire."

Whatever that sentence means, it settles one thing: the lake of fire is not Hades, because Hades is disposed of in it. In this verse the translation footnotes Hades "or, Hell": on its own terms, hell is what is thrown into the lake. Three words, three things, and one English word over two of them.

In the last books of the City of God, finished in 426, Augustine opens a chapter by saying he must "enter the lists of amicable controversy with those tender-hearted Christians who decline to believe" that the condemned suffer eternally, and who suppose they are released after a fixed term.

He is arguing against them, and in the course of it he records that they exist inside the church, in several varieties, four hundred years in; he gives the next chapters to one after another, and names Origen as more indulgent still. Anyone who presents the eternity of hell as the one thing Christians never questioned has not read Augustine, who defended it.

Eternal conscious punishment reads the unquenchable fire and the undying worm as permanent. Annihilation reads "the second death" and the language of destruction as meaning the destroyed do not continue. Universal restoration reads the passages about everything being reconciled as eventually including everyone.

Each position has texts. The disagreement is not between people who read the Bible and people who do not, which is what makes it hard.

A prophet naming a valley where children were burned, and saying it will be called the valley of Slaughter, is making a threat about this world in language his hearers could smell. Whether the later use of that name is a description of a state after death or a warning in inherited imagery is exactly what is argued.

Apocalyptic writing is the hardest genre in the collection to read literally and the easiest to read literally by accident.

They knew the valley. They knew what the word for the place of the dead had meant in their own scriptures, and they lived at the point where that meaning was changing. What they took the warning to be about cannot be recovered, and every reading since has been made without it.

Nothing observable bears on this. Not weak evidence, none: there is no observation that would distinguish a universe with such a state from one without, which puts it outside what this site can do anything with.

That is worth saying plainly rather than leaving the section looking like a gap someone forgot to fill.

The horned figure with a fork, the tiers, the punishments matched to the sins: none of it is in the passages cited here, and a reader can confirm that in about ten minutes by opening them. It comes from later writing and from art, over centuries: the Apocalypse of Peter, an early apocalypse outside the canon, already matches punishments to sins, and few medieval cathedrals were without a scene of the damned. It is now what the word calls to mind.

That is not an argument against the doctrine. It is a reason to be clear which thing is being discussed.

The Catholic catechism names the chief punishment as separation rather than as fire, in the paragraph that also affirms the "eternal fire": "the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs". It adds that "God predestines no one to go to hell".

It distinguishes hell from purgatory, the "final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned".

The Lutheran and Reformed confessions teach the same permanence in other terms: the Augsburg Confession has the ungodly "tormented without end", and the Westminster Confession has them "cast into eternal torments". Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others, teach that the lost cease to exist rather than continue. Some Christians, Origen among them, have held that all are finally restored, a view the Augsburg Confession condemns. The range is wider than the word suggests, and it always has been.