When did Hell become a torture furnace?

by _Search_

Looking at Ancient Greek and Hebrew understandings of the afterlife, it was depicted as a bit of a "nothing place". Jesus' descriptions in the New Testament don't seem to depart much from this view, likening Hell to a landfill.

At what point did Hell become an inferno? When did torture enter the story?

akestral

In the Bible, there were a few different places with different names that were all often translated into Greek as "Hades", and thus into English as "hell", which implied a connection between them that wasn't there in the original writing.

One was "Sheol", commonly referred to in the Old Testament as the place souls went after death, without much specific about it besides being quiet and dark.

"Gehenna" was an actual place in Israel, near Jerusalem, the Valley of Hinnom, where non-Yahwist practices of other cults, including the cults of Baal and Moloch, were conducted. These practices were said to include child-sacrifice by burning, and Biblical writers (being Yahwists) describe it as a cursed place, and also called it by the euphemism "the burning place".

Finally, both these concepts were associated via the "Gehenna/Sheol>Hades>Hell" translation in the Book of Revelation with a "Lake of Fire".

Edit: Most modern translations of the Bible with include these distinctions in the text or in footnotes, explaining which word they translated. Use of "Hell" to refer to "Sheol/Gehenna/Hades/Tartarus" was done in the King James version of the Bible, the most influential Protestant English translation. Translations the descended from KJV were later corrected or edited to separate out Sheol and Gehenna as distinct concepts, but the confusion was already done.

Searocksandtrees

hi! there have been a few in-depth posts on Hell that may get you started; check these out

a few posts discussing later time periods