What the hell is hell?

So I've been chewing on this hell business for awhile now and the more I think about it, the more I don't get it - and I find that exciting. I guess that's postmodernism for ya.

I feel like we've been handed down so much garbage along with the notion of hell. Now we have to deconstruct the whole thing, break it all down and put it back together again. And what I'm finding is that as I do that, it's like when I took my old Sega Genesis apart.

When I was done putting it back together, I had a perfectly functional streamlined console...but I was also left with all of these fiddley bits. You know what I mean - some plastic pieces that broke off when I was prying the thing apart, a port that connected to some extra feature I'd never bought, some metal dohickies, and a couple little wires.

I think hell is like that. When you deconstruct it and put it back together again you're left with all of these things that the Bible never actually talks about, or things that the Bible never intended.

To get an idea of this, throughout the whole Old Testament hell isn't mentioned once. They just never seemed to nail down a good theology on the afterlife - it didn't seem too important. Instead there's this word Sheol which gets translated as pit, grave, death, etc. It seems to be where EVERYONE went - sort of like a generic underworld I guess. That has some interesting implications.

In the New Testament there are 3 words translated as "hell."

Tartarus appears once (2 Peter2:4) and is where the angels went when they sinned. Back then Tartarus had all sorts of Roman/Greek mythological connotations. For now, the important thing is just that it is like a big pit within hell/Hades.

Hades, then is another word translated as hell. This, of course, was also loaded with all sorts of mythological meanings back then. So when the people heard a Jewish Rabbi talking about "the gates of Hades" for instance, they had a very clear picture in their minds what he was talking about - a picture very different than we picture hell.

Gehenna is the last term and it was a physical place just outside of Jerusalem (as in, "Gehenna? Sure, just take a left at the 7-11 and keep going for 3 blocks, you can't miss it"). It was a place where people used to sacrifice their first born children to the god Molech (2 Kings 23:10). It was this tainted place where it was as though the opposite of God's will had been done for a long time. It wasn't the type of place good little Jewish boys go to take picnics with their girlfriends. So it became a town dump and to get rid of the trash they'd set various parts of it on fire so it was a place where the fire never went out. Wild dogs would come here and fight over scraps of food so that there could often be heard gnashing of teeth (gnashing: "to grind or strike (teeth) together, to bite with grinding teeth" dictionary.com) and loud wailing.

So if we just look at the places where hell is mentioned specifically, that's it. It's only mentioned by name 15 times in the NIV and several of those are in parallel versions (same story in 2+ different gospels). I may get into some other references of punishment and stuff some other time, but this is the streamlined version. It's what the first hearers would have heard specifically about hell.

This is before we got all of the fiddley bits where Satan is this fallen angel figure ruling over hell and he's got cloven hooves, horns, and a spiked tail (and didn't he steal that trident from the little mermaid's dad?). It's before Dante and Milton, much less Frank Peretti and Tim LaHaye all gave us their own ideas of hell.

So then what does this streamlined version tell us? How can we really seperate, in our minds, the fiddley bits made up in the middle ages from what Jesus was talking about? If Jesus was using the language of his day to express some deeper reality, what was that reality? What does IT look like?