Hell

I’ve been reading Dante’s Inferno lately and I have a few questions.

  1. What is the first Bibical mention of Hell with any kind of description attached(however vague)?

  2. In one of the lower levels Dante’s Inferno, an exact measurement is given in two cantos. I Believe it’s the 8th bolgia of the 8th circle(Canto 29) where it’s measurements are given as 22 miles in circumference, while the 9th bolgia is 11 miles in circumference. Extraporlating outward, has anyone ever tried to work out the dimensions of hell?

  3. How much of Dante’s material was his own? I know that the model for hell was a Catholic concept of the time, but did it go as far as actual punishments for sins or was that Dante’s call?

It depends on what you mean by “hell.” There are many references in the Old Testament/Tanakh to Sheol, but in the Jewish mythology of the time, Sheol was very much an equivalent concept to the Greek Hades. It was a place where everyone went after death, dreary, cold, lacking light or color, but not intended as a punishment–simply the bleak abode of all who died.

South of Jerusalem is a valley (once?) known as Gehinnon. It was believed to have been the site of a place where children were sacrificed to the pagan god Moloch, and it was reviled, becoming a trash heap where fires constantly burned that which had been discarded. Jeremiah refers to it as a place where those who defy God will wind up, but he very likely simply meant that they would come to a bad end and that their bodies would be cast into the trash rather than declaring that they would go to a place of punishment after death. Isaiah also used the imagery (without mentioning Gehinnon by name).

Between 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E., a number of Jewish religious works were written than were never adopted as Scripture by either the Jews or the (later) Christians. In those works, (as the concept of an afterlife and a resurrection developed among some Jewish groups), the name Gehinnon began to be use as a place of punishment in the afterlife for those who had done evil in their lives. Gehinnon is mentioned (sometimes by name, sometimes by allusion), as a place fiery punishment after death in the Assumption of Moses, 1 Enoch, Esdras, and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch.

It was this later allusion that was familiar to first century Jews and was employed in the Gospels (using the Greek spelling, Gehenna) to indicate a place of fiery torment. Most references to “hell” in English translations are actually of the word Gehenna, although the Greek name Hades also appears in a couple of places.

The Christian church then developed the idea over several hundred years (in ways that differed from Jewish Talmudic thought) into a place of eternal spiritual torment.

I’m sure that someone has marked out the dimensions of Dante’s *Inferno/i], but I cannot point to a specific individual who has.

Dante’s population of the various circles of hell is based on various conjectures regarding the nature of sin and the appropriate severity of punishment as laid out in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, but the explicit assignment of a particular punishment to a particular sin (along with the invention of particular colorful punishments) all springs from the fertile (or febrile) imagination of Dante.