hell

← Encyclopedia

Hell is the name, in several religious traditions, for a posthumous condition of suffering or punishment reserved for the dead — or for some of them. The word in English descends from a Germanic term for the concealed underworld, and it has come to cover a family of ideas that were not, at the outset, the same idea at all.

The Germanic root is itself a clue to how the idea behaves. Hell comes from a verb meaning to cover, to conceal, to hide — the same root that gives English hole, hollow, hull, and the Halle of a covered building. Hel in the Norse imagination was the hidden realm of the dead below the world and the name of the figure who keeps it, and the place it named was not, originally, a place of fire. It was simply the covered ground into which the dead are lowered. When the Germanic word was pressed into Christian service to translate Latin infernus and Greek terms of very different pedigree, it carried that older sense forward like a stowaway — so that the English word for the most fiery and forensic of afterworlds still says, underneath, only the concealed place.

The older layer beneath most of these conceptions is not a place of punishment but simply the abode of the dead: a dim, undifferentiated underworld where every shade ends regardless of conduct. The Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades both began this way — gray, comfortless, and morally neutral. Sheol is the pit, the silence, the land of forgetting; the dead in it are rephaim, faded shadows of what they were, and the early strata of the Hebrew Bible do not sort them by righteousness. The Homeric Hades is the same in a Greek key: the shade of Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be a hired laborer alive than king over all the perished dead. In both, the grave levels everyone. There is no fire kept for the wicked because there is, yet, no machinery for telling the wicked from the rest. The dead are not punished; they are merely dead, and the underworld is the negative space their absence leaves behind.

The moralization of the underworld

The notion that the underworld sorts the dead, rewarding some and tormenting others, develops later, and unevenly across the traditions that would later share the single English word. In the Greek world the sorting first attaches not to ordinary mortals but to a handful of mythic criminals. Beneath Hades lies Tartarus, a deep pit as far below the earth as heaven is above it, and in it the named offenders pay without end: Tantalus reaching for water and fruit that withdraw, Sisyphus rolling the stone that always returns, Ixion bound to the turning wheel, the daughters of Danaus filling a vessel that will not hold. These are exemplary punishments, fitted to particular crimes, and at the start they are reserved for those who outraged the gods directly. The democratization of the verdict — the idea that any soul faces judgment, that the ordinary unjust man might end where Tantalus stands — enters Greek thought through the mystery cults and through philosophy. The myths at the close of Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic describe the soul stripped naked before judges who read its scars, sent up to reward or down to correction; and in the Republic most of the punished are eventually released, while the incurable tyrants are flung back into Tartarus forever. The forensic underworld, the underworld as courtroom, begins here.

In Second Temple Judaism the decisive image is Gehenna. The name is a contraction of the Valley of Hinnom, Ge-Hinnom, a real ravine running below the southern wall of Jerusalem. In the prophetic memory it was a place of horror — a site where, the books of Kings and Jeremiah record, children had been passed through fire to a foreign god, and which Jeremiah cursed as the future Valley of Slaughter, choked with the unburied dead. A real geography of pollution and burning became, by the turn of the era, a name for the place where the wicked are destroyed or punished after death. Gehenna is not Sheol. Sheol holds everyone; Gehenna is selective, and it burns. By the time of the New Testament the word can be used without explanation, a fixed term for the fiery fate of the unrighteous, while Sheol and Hades survive alongside it as the older neutral holding-place — so that the Old Testament underworld and the punitive afterworld coexist in the same scriptures under different names.

Where the architecture takes shape

Much of the architecture of later Western hell — the tiered torments graded to the sin, the angelic and demonic wardens, the fire and the chains kept for the unrighteous, the guided tour of the abyss — first takes detailed shape not in law or in the Gospels but in the apocalyptic writings of Second Temple Judaism. The crucial witness is the composite Book of Enoch (1 Enoch). Its oldest stratum, the Book of the Watchers, takes Enoch on a journey to the ends of the earth, where he sees the hollow places that hold the spirits of the dead, divided already by their deserts, and the prison of the fallen angels — the Watchers who took human wives — bound in a chaos of fire to await final judgment. Here the elements assemble: separation of the dead by conduct before the last day, a place of binding and burning, supervising powers, a sentence still to be ratified. The apocalypse as a genre is the workshop in which hell is built. Its successors carry the work forward — the second-century Christian Apocalypse of Peter, the first sustained guided tour of the damned, with punishments measured exactly to the sin and sinners hung by the offending member; and later the Apocalypse of Paul, which fixes much of the imagery the Latin Middle Ages inherited. The vision-journey, the angel who explains each torment, the principle that the punishment fits the crime: the machinery of hell is assembled in this literature long before it is dogma.

Two pressures drive the assembly. One is the problem of sin and the demand for cosmic justice — the conviction that the cruel who prosper and the faithful who suffer cannot simply vanish alike into one gray silence. The other is the rise of the resurrection and the last judgment: once the dead are to be raised and assessed, the underworld can no longer be a single undifferentiated waiting-room. It must hold the wicked and the righteous apart, provisionally now and permanently later. Hell, in this sense, is the shadow cast by judgment. It is what the demand for justice requires the afterlife to contain.

Two further developments populate it. The first is the staffing of hell. The neutral underworld needed no wardens; the dead in Sheol and Homeric Hades are not guarded, because there is nothing for them to do and nowhere for them to escape. A punitive hell, by contrast, requires keepers — and the apocalyptic imagination supplies them, drawing on the fallen angels bound in the Watchers tradition and on the figure who comes to preside over the whole domain. Around the devil gather subordinate tormentors, the demons who in later picturings work the fires and turn the wheels; the place acquires an administration. The second development is the wager of free will: if hell is a just sentence and not a fate, then the soul must in some sense have chosen its road, and the doctrine becomes inseparable from a theory of responsibility. A hell without freedom is mere cruelty; a hell with it is the visible weight of a life’s own choosing. Much of the long argument over hell is really an argument over how much was ever in the chooser’s hands.

This Western settlement was not reached in isolation. Persian thought, in the centuries when the apocalyptic forms were taking shape, already imagined the dead crossing a narrow bridge that widened for the righteous and shrank to a blade’s edge beneath the wicked, who fell into a House of the Lie — a graded realm of darkness and torment that, in its later development, would be cleansed and emptied at the world’s renewal. The Mesopotamian netherworld, the Land of No Return, kept its dust-fed dead in a great walled city beneath the earth, neither rewarded nor punished but merely held. Egypt set against its blessed fields the real possibility of annihilation: the heart weighed against the feather of truth, and the devourer waiting at the scale to unmake the soul that failed the balance. The materials out of which hell would be built — the bridge, the scale, the second death, the bounded house of torment — were scattered across the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean long before any single tradition gathered them under one roof.

The divergent keys

Traditions hold these inherited materials in markedly different keys, and the differences are doctrinal, not cosmetic.

Mainstream Christian theology came to teach hell as the eternal, conscious separation of the damned from God — the second death, the outer darkness, the lake of fire. Yet Scripture’s own language is mixed, and the disputes that run through Christian history grow directly out of that mixture. The texts speak of unquenchable fire and the worm that does not die; they also speak of destruction, of the chaff burned up, of the body and soul lost — language an annihilationist can read as the wicked ceasing to be rather than suffering forever. Against both stands the universalist hope: that the fire purifies rather than destroys, and that all rational creatures are finally restored. Its great early exponent is Origen of Alexandria, whose apokatastasis — the restoration of all things, in which even the devil might at the last be reconciled — was debated for centuries and formally condemned under the emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The three positions — eternal conscious punishment, conditional immortality and annihilation, and final universal restoration — have each claimed Scripture, each claimed the early Church, and each persisted. The question of how long hell lasts, and for whom, is not a settled matter quietly held but a fault line the tradition has argued across its whole length.

Islam describes Jahannam in vivid and specific detail, a place of fire ordered by degrees, with its gatekeepers, its scalding drink, its tree of bitter fruit, and its bridge over the abyss that the resurrected must cross. The structure is graded — distinct levels for distinct classes of the damned — and the punishment, for many of the theologians, is not in every case final: a recurring teaching holds that some who enter Jahannam, the believers among them weighed down by their sins, are eventually drawn out by divine mercy once their measure is paid, while the fire remains for others. Here too the tradition argues within itself over the duration and the limits of the sentence, and over whether even the fire is at the last temporary.

Other traditions decline the forensic framework entirely. The Buddhist and Hindu hells — the naraka of both — are real, elaborately mapped, and terrible; cold hells and hot hells, hells of crushing and cutting and burning, each with its enormous but finite span. They are not, however, a final verdict. They are stations within the turning of rebirth, places where the weight of an action is discharged before the being who bears that weight is reborn elsewhere — higher or lower, according to the same law of karma that sent it down. No soul is consigned to such a hell forever, because nothing in this scheme is forever short of release from the whole cycle itself. The hell here is a correction inside a long arc, not the floor beneath the world. To call both this and the Christian lake of fire by the one word hell is to fold two different ideas of time, and of the self that endures it, into a single name.

Scholarship and the primary texts

Modern study treats hell less as a fixed doctrine than as a long, traceable negotiation — the slow moralization of the underworld, by which the question where do the dead go? became the question where do the wicked go? The standard narrative history of the Western development is Alan E. Bernstein’s The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Cornell University Press, 1993), which follows the idea from Mesopotamia and Egypt through Greece and Israel into the early Church (Cornell University Press, The Formation of Hell). Jan N. Bremmer’s The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (Routledge, 2002) sets the Greek and early-Christian material in comparative frame and is precise on the journey of Tartarus and Gehenna into the shared vocabulary (Routledge, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife). For the apocalyptic workshop specifically, Martha Himmelfarb’s Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (1983) anatomizes the guided-tour genre and the principle of measured-for-the-crime punishment that the Apocalypse of Peter perfected.

The primary apparatus is largely available in public-domain translation. The Book of Enoch, in which the architecture first assembles, is hosted here in R. H. Charles’s 1912 translation (Charles, The Book of Enoch); its Book of the Watchers contains the earliest sustained description of the prison of fire and the sorted hollows of the dead. The Greek philosophical underworld is set out in the closing myths of Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic, where the soul is judged on the meadow at the crossroads of the two roads. The forensic vocabulary of the New Testament — Gehenna, the outer darkness, the unquenchable fire, the second death — sits across the older neutral underworld of Sheol and Hades, and the tension between the two is itself the seam along which later doctrine divides.

Traditions hold these ideas in irreconcilable keys: eternal against temporary, conscious against annihilating, final verdict against station in a longer round. Scholarship does not adjudicate between them, and neither does comparison dissolve them into one. What it can do is show the genealogy — the concealed Germanic underworld, the neutral pit of Sheol and Hades, the criminal-pit of Tartarus, the burning valley of Gehenna, the sorted hollows of Enoch — converging on a single English word that hides, under its surface of fire, a history of quite separate ideas.

The pressure behind the whole development was the demand that the universe be just: that the cruel who prosper and the faithful who suffer not simply vanish alike into the same gray silence. Whether the answer is read as warning, as threat, or as the moral order made visible, the conviction underneath it is constant — that what a life was should finally matter, and that something keeps the account.

→ In the library: The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912) · The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Budge, 1913)

→ Related: Soul · Sin · Free Will · Christianity · Islam · New Testament · Old Testament · Buddhism · Hinduism · Book Of Enoch · Origen · Devil · Demon · Angel · Second Temple Judaism · Eschatology · Purgatory · Apocalypse · Immortality · Karma · Reincarnation