I have gotten the impression that the fire-and-brimstone, burning-in-eternal-damnation sort of hell promulgated by most branches of Christianity was (and probably is) unknown to Christianity’s root religion, Judaism. How did hell enter the equation? Where did it come from? Is there any basis for such an afterlife for unrepentant sinners in the Torah?
~~Baloo
More than curious, less than obsessed.
I am not sure I can answer your question about hell precisely, but what I DO know about Hell follows:
In mythology part of the underworld was called Tartarus. It resembles Hell in many respects… At least the broadest one, being its the nasty place that bad people go after they die. Its been a while since I have read the Aeneid, which gives a decent description of it, so I am a bit sketchy on the details.
Most of the imagery that we identify with Hell came from Dante’s Inferno. Notice, that God left out a lot of details about it in the Bible, so Dante made up for that in his comedy with the gruesome details of all the tortures that come from each sin.
In terms of the afterlife, early Christianity was totally within the context of some Jewish thought of that time. (As regards to the Messiah, dietary laws, the Trinity vs One God, and other aspects of Judaism that clearly differ from Christianity in current belief, the diverse thoughts began early; regarding the afterlife, Christianity closely followed one of the threads of Jewish thought.)
Most of the beliefs of Christianity regarding the afterlife can be found in Jewish works in the time period 200 BCE - 100 CE. Since those works did not make it into the Jewish canon, as closed at Jamnia around 100 CE, they do not appear in the Jewish Bible (or in the Protestant Old Testament).
The concept of a Hell in which sinners are tormented eternally (usually by fire) appears in the (apocryphal to Jews and Christians, alike) Assumption of Moses and Apocaplypse of Baruch, and in 3 Esdras. (3 Esdras is a name given to a Greek copy of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah that includes additional stories and verses not found in the canonical originals.) Much of the imagery that Jesus used is found in those books. The valley of Gehenna to the south of Jerusalem was a refuse pit, but it also, at one time or another, was the site of the worship of Molech that was supposed to include human sacrifice (2 Kings 23:10, 2 Chron. 28:3). Because of its unholy history, Jeremiah cursed it and the passage in Is 66:24 is often taken to mean that the bodies of the rebels against God (real and figurative) will be thrown there for everlasting torment.
Building on the curses of Jeremiah and the prediction of Isaiah, the later authors of Jewish religious texts symbolically linked the smoldering trash fires of the valley to the ongoing and everlasting torments awaiting those who died in sin.
The imagery that appears on the lips of Jesus and the writings of Paul regarding hell and damnation very closely parallels the imagery that is portrayed in the books I mentioned, above.
In the same way, nearly all the early Christian references to both the resurrection of the saved and to heaven have foreshadowings or parallels in the Jewish apaocrypha (and in the books of the Maccabees that the Catholic church accepts as Scripture). The concept of Paradise (a garden to which the holy will return at the end of time to bring full circle the idea of beginning in the garden of Eden) was promulgated and expanded upon in the apocalyptic books 4 Esdras, The Secrets of Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 3 Baruch.
In other words, the mesage and imagery of Jesus did not attract followers because it was a totally new interpretation of Jewish belief, but because it followed and expanded upon one of the sets of belief common among some Jews in the first century.
On the other hand, the very rise of Christianity probably killed those lines of thought within Judaism. Especially after the early Christians began to see Jesus as man-and-God and create a theology of the Trinity, devout Jews recoiled from this blasphemy. The conflict between Judaism and Christianity became heated. One result was the formal decision of Judaism to close the canon and declare, finally, which sacred writings were and were not truly Scripture. The Jews did not simply say “If Christians use it, we reject it.” However, they did consider characteristics (an age of 500 years as they reckoned it, an origin in the Hebrew tongue to preclude outside influence, along with a consistence of expression throughout all Jewish Scripture) that placed most of the predictions and beliefs that Christians were citing outside the canon.
Could various aspects of Heaven and Hell found in Greek or Roman belief have influenced early Christian thoughts on the matter? Certainly. On the other hand, the basic concepts were pretty well established in Christian thought before Christianity got sufficiently settled into the hellenistic Roman Empire to begin borrowing theology. Descriptions were probably borrowed from the gentiles while the whys and hows were probably based on the older Jewish concepts.
Tomndeb is right. You can also see the beginning of the line of thought that Hell would be a place of eternal punishment in Isaiah 30:33*. The Jewish hell was originally a place that was dark, dank, and joyless- especially so as there was no G-d to comfort you. Not “torment”, true, but hardly a vacation spot. Later, as in Isaiah, the thought that some might be punished in fires for eternity came about. The Jews in the centuries just before JC began to expand on it. The early Christian version was very much like the contemporary Jewish thought. However, from there on, it diverged. AFAIK, now the Jewish Hell is considered more like the early/mid OT version- joyless & dark. And, i think no-one is supposed to stay for very long, perhaps a year, altho my Talmudic brethren will expound upon this (and correct me), i am sure.
Oddly enuf, the Celtic Church idea of Hell is similar. The unrepentant go there until they TRULY repent. There is some thought that those who forced/deluded others to sin, such as Hitler, might be doomed forever. Ie, it is not so hard to repent for YOUR sins, but the sins you caused others to do are worse. Isa30:33 seems to indicate that, also.
This was covered in a fairly recent Staff Report: Who Invented Hell?
Parables in Matthew 13:36-43 and 13:47-51 speak of the unsaved being thrown into a “furnace of fire”, as if weeds from a harvest or “bad” fish from a fisherman’s catch. The implication is that they will be destroyed, though they will suffer at least briefly. Revelation(19:20, 20:10, and 21:8) mentions a “lake of fire”. 21:8 is most specific: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and {fornicators} (KJV says ‘whoremongers’), and sorcerers, and idolators, and all liars (televangelists please note), shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” (Scofield Reference translation.) So there!!