Three Views of Hell, Part 2 - Translation Problems

Before I begin an exploration of what I now consider to be the three Biblically acceptable views of Hell, we need to clear a few misconceptions and problems out of the way. Unfortunately, when it comes to this subject, there is one tremendous roadblock in particular that prevents many people from coming to a clear understanding of what the Bible actually teaches about Hell: The King James Version of the Bible.

No offense to those who love the King James Version of the Bible - for its time it was a marvelous feat of scholarship and it still is the most beautifully rendered of all Bible versions - but we now know that there are a quite a few places where the translation is misleading or simply flat out wrong. This is the case with the KJV use of the word “Hell.” Unfortunately, the wide familiarity of the KJV rendering of many passages has led to quite a few misunderstandings regarding what the Bible actually teaches about Hell (among other subjects).

As we go through these posts on Hell you must keep in mind that no matter which of the three views you accept Hell is place where the unrighteous are condemned to go following the judgment of Christ at His second coming. While there are places described in the Bible that look similar to our understanding of Hell, some of these are described as existing before the Judgment, and therefore cannot be what Christians understand to be Hell. They might be precursors to Hell, but not Hell itself.

If you look up the word “Hell” in the KJV you will find that it appears exactly 31 times in the Old Testament. The Hebrew word that the translators chose to render as “Hell” in the OT is “Sheol,” which scholars now know is a severe mistranslation. Sheol literally means “the place of the dead;” it either refers to the place where everyone, both the righteous and the unrighteous, go when they die or it refers to the physical state of death. There is no notion of suffering or separation from God in the word at all. Few, if any, of the modern translations even attempt to translate sheol, as there is not a good modern English equivalent, most just leave it as it is. Later on, as I go through all the verses that are generally cited as telling us something about Hell, you will notice that none of them come from the OT, which apparently (and interestingly) has nothing to tell us about Hell.

In the New Testament, there are three different Greek words that have been translated as “Hell,” particularly in the KJV, and “Hades” is the most numerous of the three. If you’re familiar with the Greek myths, you know that Hades is the land of the dead. Just like sheol, it is either the place where both the good and the bad go or it is simply the state of physical death. It has no equivalence with Hell, as Christians understand the word, but is instead a direct equivalent of sheol. This is most apparent in the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) into Koine Greek made between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, which translates all instances of "sheol" as0 "hades."

The second Greek word translated as Hell in the New Testament is “tartarus.” Tartarus only appears once in the entire Bible, in 2 Peter 2:4 which reads:

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into [tartarus]
and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment;

This might sound like the Lake of Fire described in Revelation but it can’t be. The verse tells us that the angels who are held in Tartarus are waiting for the judgment day (it’s a temporary prison) while the Lake of Fire in Revelation 19 and 20 appears to be a final holding place for the beast, the false prophet, and anyone whose names are not found in the Book of Life. Unfortunately, little else is known about Tartarus – it could be the name of the location that the rich man, from the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, found himself in; although there are several dissimilarities between the two places. Or it could be somewhere else completely. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be Hell.

The third and final word often translated as Hell in the New Testament, “Gehenna,” is also the one which is most justifiably translated as "Hell." The word appears several times in the teaching of Jesus and once in the book of James (3:6). Gehenna literally refers to a narrow ravine just outside of Jerusalem, known also as the “Valley of Hinnom” or “Topheth” (pronounced: toff-et) where a number of unsavory things occurred throughout Jewish history.

In the time of the Jewish kings Ahaz and Manasseh the Jews were conducting ritual infant sacrifices to the demon-god Moloch in the Valley (2 Kings 16:2-3, 2 Chron 28:3; 33:6). When King Josiah took the throne of Judah he put an end to this practice by making the Valley unclean through the disposing of bodies of executed criminals and dead animals there and draining the sewage of Jerusalem’s upper city ("Bethso") into it. The fires of Gehenna were kept burning day and night without end to destroy the carcasses and garbage that were dumped there. Apparently, brimstone (that’s sulphur to us) was also used in the valley to assist in the burning of the garbage as well as for it’s disinfectant qualities.

The singular Jamesian reference to Gehenna tells us nothing about the word, other than it has bad undertones. James writes that, “The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by [Gehenna].” While this is a strong warning against undisciplined speech it really doesn’t tell us anything about Hell or Gehenna, as James understood those words.

While the word Gehenna is used by Jesus only 7 unique times (11 times total among the synoptic Gospels), the ways in which it is used lend themselves far better toward being translated as Hell then any of the other three words I covered above. Of course, whether this translation is appropriate remains to be seen; I will go over all the passages that appear to say something about Hell in my next post, which will make the argument for the Eternal Torment view.