Hell: Jewish or Christian?
It is common to hear from modern Jews and Christians alike that “Christianity’s view of ‘hell’ is a post-Jewish development” and that “Judaism doesn’t believe in hell.” While these supposed disagreements over the idea of hell provide a superficial differentiation between Judaism and Christianity, the truth is that the foundational texts of both religious systems refer to the post-resurrection location of hell.
The Aramaic word for “hell” is Gehinnam (גיהנום), which ends up as Gehenna (γέεννα, gēenna) in the Greek of the New Testament. The term originates with the Valley of Ben Hinnom is listed among Canaan’s locales in Joshua (cf. 15:8; 18:16), and it became a place of child sacrifice and foreign worship. The ancient Israelites “built the high places of Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom (גאי בן הנם; gei ben hinnom), to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech” (Jer 32:35; cf. 7:31-32; 19:6; 2 Kgs 23:10; 2 Chron 28:3; 33:6). This valley is the earthly template for the post-mortem place known as Gehenna, or “hell.”
Jews of the first century and beyond looked back their biblical texts to inform their understanding of hell. For instance, the end of Isaiah states, “All flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord, and they will go out and look on the corpses of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (Isaiah 66:23-24). This eschatological picture includes the kingdom of God on a renewed earth with a burning area outside the eternal city. It is this picture that Jesus and his contemporaries drew upon in their conceptions of hell.
In fact, Yeshua cites this same passage from Isaiah when he declares, “If your right eye causes you to sin, cast it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna (or “hell”; γέεννα, gēenna), ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’” (Mark 9:47-48). Similarly, the rabbis who lived in the centuries after Jesus—and on whose writings modern Judaism is based—quoted from this same verse in their own descriptions of hell. The fifth-century midrash on Leviticus states, “The righteous will emerge from the Garden of Eden and see the wicked being judged in Gehenna (גיהנם; gehinnom)…. That is what is written: ‘They will go out and look on the corpses of the men who have rebelled against me’” (Leviticus Rabbah 32:1). Thus, the existence of hell is not a point that divides Judaism and Christianity; rather, as one of several expressions of first-century Judaism, the early Jesus movement utilized the same religious texts and imagery as did the later authors of rabbinic Judaism.
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