Hell is, according to many religious beliefs about the afterlife, a place of torment, of great weeping and gnashing of teeth. The English word 'hell' comes from the Norse ' Hel', which originally referred to the goddess of the Norse underworld.
In most religions' conception of Hell, evildoers will suffer eternally in Hell after their death or they will pay for their bad deeds in hell before reincarnations. In monotheistic religions, hell is simply ruled by demons. In polytheistic religions, the politics of hell could be as complicated as human politics.
1 Origins
Hell, as it exists in the Western popular imagination, has its origins in hellenized Christianity. Judaism, at least initially, believed in Sheol, a shadowy existence to which all were sent indiscriminately. Sheol may have been little more than a poetic metaphor for death, not really an afterlife at all: see for example Sirach. In any case, the afterlife was much less important in ancient Judaism than it is for many Christian groups today; indeed, the same can be said for modern Judaism as well.
The Hebrew Sheol was translated in the Septuagint as ' HadesHades ( Greek: ‘ Haides or ‘δης Hades ("unseen") means both the ancient Greek abode of the dead and the god of that Underworld. Haidou was the genitive form of the word, meaning "the house of Hades"; its nominative form, Haides was origin', the name for the underworld in Greek mythologyGreek mythology comprises the collected legends of Greek gods and goddesses and ancient heroes and heroines, originally created and spread within an oral-poetic tradition. Our surviving sources of mythology are either transcriptions of this spoken word, o and is still considered to be distinct from "Hell" by Eastern OrthodoxEastern Orthodox Christianity (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox) is the modern name primarily applied to the Christian church that claims to be the original historical church started by Christ Jesus and his Apostles 2000 years ago. They claim unbroken apo Christians. The New TestamentThe New Testament sometimes called the Greek Scriptures is the name given to the part of the Christian Bible that was written after the birth of Jesus Christ. The term is a translation of the Latin Novum Testamentum which translates the Greek Η &Kappa uses this word, but it also uses the word ' GehennaNote: Tanach quotes are from the. New Testament quotes from the Bible in this article are from the King James Version. Gehenna is a word tracing to Greek, ultimately from Hebrew Gai-Ben-Hinnom meaning Valley of the Son of Hinnom and is still called Gai Be', from the valley of Ge-Hinnom , a valley near Jerusalem used as a landfill. Hebrew landfills were very unsanitary and unpleasant when compared to modern landfills; these places were filled with rotting garbage and the Hebrews would periodically burn them down. However, by that point they were generally so large that they would burn for weeks or even months. In other words they were fiery mountains of garbage. The early Christian teaching was that the damned would be burnt in the valley just as the garbage was. (It is ironic to note that the valley of Ge-Hinnom is today, far from being a garbage dump, a public park.) Punishment for the damned and reward for the saved is a constant theme of early Christianity.
2 Religious accounts
2.1 Rabbinic Judaism
Gehenna is fairly well defined in rabbinic literature. It is sometimes translated as "Hell", but this doesn't effectively convey its meaning. In Judaism, Gehenna—while certainly a terribly unpleasant place — is not hell. The overwhelming majority of rabbinic thought maintains that people are not tortured in hell forever; the longest that one can be there is said to be 12 months. Some consider it a spiritual forge where the soul is purified for its eventual ascent to Gan Eden ( Heaven), where all imperfections are purged.
