It is the somewhat tentative conclusion of this article that there are three different, though related, notions of hell in Christian tradition. A first might be called Hell as Sheol (since this was what the Hebrews called it) or Hell as Hades (which was the Greek tran-lation). Another is Hell as Gehenna, the hellfire of the New Testament. And a third is something I shall call Hell as Tartarus for reasons which will later appear.

Sheol

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. These phrases account for over a third of all the Old Testament references to Sheol. Well over half of the remaining references explicitly couple Sheol with death as parallel concepts.

Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’. But at one period of his life, when he had lost both Joseph and Benjamin,