HELL
HELL
ui;
the valley jf Hinnom (Barclay, City of the Great King, p. 90).
It lias not this sense in the OT. The nearest fvpproach to it is in such a luissage as that in which the prophet makes the diniaiul, ' Who among us shall dwell with the devouring lire '; Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings ! ' (Is 33"). But the place is not mentioned there, and the tires in question are not those of a retribution after death, but those of the divine wrath and righteous- ness which now and on earth search all sinners those in Sion no less than those in Assyria. The terrible description of judgment with which the Second Isaiah closes his great prophecy of grace might seem even more in point (Is GO-''). It is possible that the horrors of the valley of Hinnom suggisted the awful figures in which the prophet there declares of the returning Israelites, that they shall ' look upon the carcases of the men that have tran.-igrossed ' against Jehovah, ' for their worm shall not die, ncitlier shall their fire be quenchid ; and they sliall be an abhorring unto all Hesh ' (RV). But apart from the fact that here again the place is not named, and from the question whether the passage may not be of too early a date (as Uillmann supposes) for such a colouring, the ven<;eance w hich is intimated is not one that is to be looked for in the other world, but one whidi overtakes the transgressors in this world in the form of miserable overthrow and uttermost dishonour. It assumed this sense, however, in the period between the close of OT prophecy and the Christian era. Bj- the time when Christ taught and the ajiostles preached, the word Gehenna had a well-understood meaning. We can follow the history of the term, and see how it came to have that sense. The history shows us also the variations in the appli- cation of the word, and the different ideas wliich were connected with it.
The OT itself oll'ered the point of issue for the process of development. As its view of the future became enlarged, and the old notion of a Sheol which was without moral distinctions, and dealt out to all the dead the same joyless inane exist- ence, began to jjive place to the loftier and more delinite conception of a future embracing a resur- rection, the foundations of the doctrine of a heaven and a hell were laid. The idea of a final judgment, which went with that of a resurrection (Dn 12-), led naturally to the twofold expectation of a special place of reward for the righteous, and a special place of punishment for the unrighteous in a world Deyond the grave. The Jewish literature shows us how this belief shaped itself. It makes it plain, too, that Gehenna, as the definite place of future retribution, was originally understood to be some- thing distinct from Sheol or lladcs, though oilier ideas were attached to it now and again or in particu- lar schools. The apocalyptic writings are of special importance in this matter, and the Bk. of Enoch above all others. It is perhaps in it that we liave the first definite occurrence of the word as the designation of the place of just retribution destined for the wicked after the final judgment. In Eniich, however, as in the apocalyptic writings in general, there is much that is fantastic, and the statements wlii(^h meet us in dillerent parts of the book are by no means uniform. In certain sections, which are probably more deeply allccted by Hellenic ways of thinking, Undfs ajuiears as a preliminary scene of reward and punishment, and is represented as lying in the remotest tract beyond the ocean. In it the souls of dead men wait the final condition, and have a foretjiste of that condition. This moralised Hades is described as having in it inter- mediate abodes of four distinct kinds for four dillerent orders of men : one for the righteous who tUed of oppression, and another for the rest of the
righteous dciul ; one for sinners who were not judged by injustice or persecution on earth, and auoihcr fur tho.se who paid part of the penalty o» their ollences in their lifetime here (Bk. of Enoch 5. 22. ll»3' etc.). More usually these preliminary scenes of weal and woe were spoken of as only two — one for the good, called also Paradise and the Garden of Eden ; and one for the evil, separated from the other by a wall or gulf, and called, at least in the later Jewish books, by the name Gehinnom, Gc/ienna. In the Slavonic Enoch, again, or T/ie Buok tf t/ie Secrets of Enoch, the second of the seven heavens is the prison - house of the apostate angels who wait the i-ternal judgment, and the northern region of the third heaven is the jilace of punishment prepared for those who did not honour God (chs. 7 and 10). In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriurclis the place in which the spirits of the lawless are confined with a view to their punishment is the second heaven {Test, of Levi, ch. 3). In the literature of Alexandrian Judaism, on the other hand, in which we have the doctrine of an incorporeal immortality, and the idea that the souls of the pious dead are received at once by God into heaven, Hades is the jdace of punishment for the wicked dead, and is {.gain Jiractically identified with Gehmna (Wis 3'"-" 4'"-"' 5' etc. ; cl. Joseph. De Bell. Jud. II. viii. 11, 14). There is evidence enough, therefore, that opinion varied at dillerent periods and in dillerent sections of Judaism. In the theology of the Talmud and Midrash, Gehinnom, Ge/ienna meant the scene of penalty, while in certain phases of Jewish belief it appears to have been regarded at once as a place of punishment for the heathen and as a place of purgatorial detention for imperfect Israelites. But with all this there is reason to say that its original sense was that of the final place of retri- bution, that it was distinguished from Hades and from every form of an intermediate state, and that it liad this meaning with the Jewish people gener- ally (however it might be with the speculations of the schools) in Christ's time. The apocalyptic writings, which speak of a separation ot the just from the unjust between death and the resur- rection, also speak of a final punishment after the iudgment, and describe the place of that retri- Dution in terms which point to Gehenna. Enoch seems to identify it with the local GeHinnoin. He comes to the middle of earth, and sees a happy region of hills and valleys. But between the holy hiJIs he sees an accursed valley where 'shall he gathered together all those who speak with their mouths unseemly words against God, and speak impudently of his majesty (Bk. of Enoch 27-'-'). Elsewhere in the same apocalj]ise this jilace of final retribution is described as ' in the midst of the earth' and "full of fire' (OO^*"-*). And in express terms the Fourth Book of Ezra speaks of the 'gulf of torments' and the 'furnace of Gehenna' that shall be revealed (6'"" 7", Churton). ' Hell,' therefore, as exprcs-sed by ye^fi-a in the NT, is not the penal side of Hades (so, e.g., Grimm's \Vill;ii ClaiHs, etc.), but the final retributive scene and condition (see Meyer on Mt 5-'^).