Twelfth of Year B - Heaven & Hell
June 2009
In the Bible there are certain traditional ways of describing certain events. For instance the presence of God was heralded by fire or bright light, a cloud, wind, loud noise, an earthquake, a ‘voice’ from heaven etc. as we see on Mt. Sinai or the birth, baptism and transfiguration of Jesus. This is not a factual description of what actually happened, only a form of speech signalling the action of God in some particular way.
Another example: Up to quite recently rulers survived by rewarding those loyal to them and killing those they did not trust. The same is true today but in a less dramatic way. The same qualities were wrongly attributed to God. Many of us do the very same today. Therefore God rewarded those loyal to Him and punished the disloyal - sinners. The latter were said to be punished by God by being sent into the fires of Gehenna or Hell. As we know this is a totally wrong understanding of God.
Where did this name Gehenna or Hell come from.
The ‘valley of the son of Hinnon,’ lies just to the south and west of Jerusalem. It was a place where, in ancient times, human sacrifice was offered. For the Israelites it was an accursed place where the bodies of the executed were dumped and burned along with the rubbish from Jerusalem. It was, like any city dump, a place of bad smells, fire and smoke where the very poor (who for the Israelites were ungodly people) rooted around in the smoky haze searching for something of use.
In Hebrew this ‘valley of the son of Hinnon’ was called ‘Ge-Hinnom’ which became Gehenna which became our Hell.
Hence the Bible description of Hell or Gehenna as a place of fire where the ungodly go.
Lawless people were said to end up in Gehenna or Hell, just as today we say that lawbreakers will end up ‘going down’ or ‘banged up.’
So it became the tradition to describe the fate of evildoers as being the fires of Hell.
In fact we know nothing about what Heaven or Hell is like. All literature, whether in the Bible or not, concerning the joys of heaven and the punishments of Hell is fiction.
You could say that descriptions of heaven and hell are the carrot and the stick.
So if love of, and gratitude to God did not keep you on the straight and narrow then concern about having your posterior roasted might do the trick.
So whenever Hell or Gehenna or the fate of sinners arose the authors of the Bible, both Old and New testaments, had to add on all the stuff about fire and suffering just as when God was acting in a particular way they had to add on the stuff about cloud, voices from heaven, light etc.
Next week I will continue our investigation of Heaven and Hell.