One really feels the need to observe that of bloody well course the word “Hell” didn’t appear in the Bible until the Bible was translated into English! Neither did the word “Heaven” or the word “people” or the word “fish” or the word “piss”.
But Jesus, at least, is very clear about the idea of Hell, most notably in the parable of the sheep and the goats.
The link to the Staff Report under discussion is: Who invented hell?
Um, John? I don’t think David mentions the etymology of the word “hell”, he’s trying to track the evolution of the notion of “hell”, as a place of eternal damnation. He comments that there is no such notion in Old Testament, and only vaguely in New Testament (relies on readings of various bits of text).
Speaking from the standpoint of being a Christian myself, the “Christian” idea hell really heated up with the onset of biblical literalism and keeps boiling through the efforts of bloodthirsty conservative Christian types today. Of course, I’m really mean and believe that the term “conservative Christian” is an oxymoron, but some conservative a-Christian will tell me I’m going to burn in hell for saying such a thing. Unfortunately, I can’t cast the same threat in return, because I understand the concept of “metaphor.”
Sigh, - I know I answered this before. Prior to the Captivity, and the introduction of Jews to Zorastianism, there was “Sheol”, which was unpleasant, but not horrible. However, later in the NT, Sheol/Tophet/hell, gets less pleasant. In Job, it is “the PIT” (hmm, sounds familiar?). In Isaiah 30, it is called “Tophet” (:33 “For Tophet is ordained of old, yea, for the king it is prepared; he has made it deep and large; the pile therof isis fire and much wood; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it”). Here we have the classic “fire & brimstone”- altho it does appear it is a special section of hell, or a special hell for a very bad king.
Mattew, writing from a mainly Jewish perspective, very early has the (13:42) “pit of fire”. So, it appears, that sometime late, about the time that the Jews started to use Lucifer/satan as “the Adversary”, Hell began to be more a place of punishment for the wicked, and unbeleivers. Thus, “hell” was “invented” by the Later Jewish Prophets, but much 'expanded on" by Christians.
The name “Hell” I believe is derived from the Norse/Germanic Hel. I’m not up on my mythology, so I couldn’t tell you if any of the features of the pagan Hel were incorporated into the medieval Hell.
I do know that many cultures have the idea that the afterlife includes a sort of “trash bin” for those whose lives were not up to par.
I just wanted to add a little relativity and anthropology to this debate.
In the religeons that originated in warm climates, such as Christianity, “hell” is thought of as terribly hot, with it’s burning river and brimstone and whatnot.
However, the ancient Nordic religeons all depicted hell as a frozen pit of ice and snow. See the corolation ? 
One always fears the extremes one is subjected to, especially in nature. Being an Icelander I must confess to a more profound fear of freezing to death (this actually happens to a few of our people every year) than burning to death in a smoldering heat. At least it’s something that springs to mind more easily than the notion of hot = bad.
Could this not be proof that hell is a fictional place, intended only as a metafor for what people knew to be unpleasant at that time and place?
— G. Raven
A) It was the original article, not I, that brought up the translation of the Bible into English.
B) The fact that the common representation of Hell is culture-based does not make Hell a fiction, except insofar as bozo fundamentalism is always a fiction. Hell is a spiritual state, and, as such, is neither hot nor cold. (By the way, the generalization is itself a bit weak; Dante, an Italian, filled the lowest circle of Hell with ice; C. S. Lewis presented two fictional Hells, one a truly nasty bureaucracy, and the other a dingy city where everyone hates his neighbors.)
You belive correctly. It’s derived from and named after the Norse goddess Hel, who was in charge of the afterworld (where those who weren’t slain in battle and subsequently transported to Valhalla, where Odin resided, ended up). Hel, IIRC is a rather dark, gloomy place were not much is going on.
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
– Robert Frost
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
John W. Kennedy replied:
I believe the line in question was
I gather your point was that “hell”, being an English word, could not enter the text until the text was rendered in English. Obviously then, you are pointing out that David B.'s sentence is a tautology?
If so, I think we all seem to agree. I think that was David’s point - that the word “hell” wasn’t coined until the English translations, the concepts behind hell were a changing set of ideas starting from the ancient Hebrew afterlife and morphing to incorporate the ideas of separating good souls from bad ones and torturing the bad ones, and that those changes began before translation to English, but weren’t there in the earliest versions. I think David was trying to point out that distinction.
B) The fact that the common representation of Hell is culture-based does not make Hell a fiction, except insofar as bozo fundamentalism is always a fiction. Hell is a spiritual state, and, as such, is neither hot nor cold. (By the way, the generalization is itself a bit weak; Dante, an Italian, filled the lowest circle of Hell with ice; C. S. Lewis presented two fictional Hells, one a truly nasty bureaucracy, and the other a dingy city where everyone hates his neighbors.)
My point was maybe not clear enough. What I meant was, that this was indeed proof that Hell was not a place, but a state of mind represented in mythology as an extreme of what people know to be true.
Temperature is only one element of Hell, Dante’s vision was no doubt influenced greatly by what HE thought of as unpleasant. That’s why I didn’t go into individuals interpritations, but rather those of cultures as a whole, and used the temperature as an example of something commonly thought of as unpleasant by people of a certain region.
Point taken about all fundamentalism being fiction, though, I believe what many fundamentalists take as fact was originally only meant as a metaphor for explaining things to the more simple minded of the teeming millions, or thousands, or whatever. Today, metaphors are still widely used as teaching tools, so no doubt they had a similar role in ancient academics, such as theology.
— G. Raven