Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T03:03:53.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Timothy McDermott O.P.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It is the somewhat tentative conclusion of this article that there are three different, though related, notions of hell in Christian tradition. A first might be called Hell as Sheol (since this was what the Hebrews called it) or Hell as Hades (which was the Greek tran-lation). Another is Hell as Gehenna, the hellfire of the New Testament. And a third is something I shall call Hell as Tartarus for reasons which will later appear.

Sheol

What man can live and never see death?

Who can save himself from the power of Sheol?

(Ps 89.49)

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. These phrases account for over a third of all the Old Testament references to Sheol. Well over half of the remaining references explicitly couple Sheol with death as parallel concepts.

Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’. But at one period of his life, when he had lost both Joseph and Benjamin,

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 48 , Issue 560 , January 1967 , pp. 186 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1

Going down to Sheol in peace‐Job 21.13; mourning‐Genesis 37.35, 42.38, 44.29ff; with blood‐1 Kings 2.6–9; alive‐Numbers 16.30–33, Psalm 55.15.

2

Job 21.13.

3

Job 7.9, 17.13–16; Ecclesiasticus 9.10; Isaiah 38.18.

4

Jonah 8.7 cf Psalm 30.3,: 6.10; 1 Samuel 2.6.

5

Wisdom 4.8–9.

6

1 Peter 3.18–4.6.

7

Romans 6.3–4.

*

‘The Devil and his Angels,’New Blackfriars, October 1966, p. 16.

8

1 John 3.10–17.

9

‘Psalm 50.3; 97.3.

10

Isaiah 30.27–33.

11

Isaiah 66.23–24; Judith 16.17.

12

Isaiah 34.2–10.

13

1 Kings 14.10–13 cf 13.22.

14

Deuteronomy 4.24; 9.3.

15

Revelation 20.7–15; 21.8.

16

Hebrews 10.26–27; 12.25–29.

17

This explicitly at Denzinger‐Schönmetzer 411 (Anathema of Vigilius against Origen, canon 9).