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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Francis Chan
Read between
July 8 - August 7, 2023
none of the passages we’ll look at here are in the New Testament; rather, they were written by Jews right around the same time (200 BC—AD 100).
the Old Testament doesn’t say much about hell.
The doctrine of hell is progressively developed throughout Scripture, much like heaven, the Holy Spirit, and even Jesus. This definitely does not mean that these things changed over time; God simply reveals more and more about them as Scripture unfolds.
vague references to punishment in the afterlife; Daniel 12:2 is the most relevant: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame ...
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infrequent in the Old Testament. It’s not until the New Testament that these i...
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Many first-century Jews, while studying the Old Testament (Daniel 12 in particular), developed...
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describing the common beliefs about hell that Jesus and other New Testament writers would have grown up with.
Hell Is a Place of Punishment after Judgment The typical afterlife scenario among Jews in Jesus’ day was that after the wicked die, they go to a place called hades, sometimes called sheol. This is not the same thing as “hell.” Hades is not usually depicted as a place of punishment, though the wicked may suffer there. It is a place where the wicked wait until judgment day. After they are judged, the wicked are then thrown into hell as punishment for their sins. It’s important to note that for the first-century Jew, this punishment is not corrective or remedial (think “remedy”); in other words
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These are the typical images used by first-century Jews to describe hell, and, as we’ll see, they are the same images used by Jesus and other New Testament writers.
Some believed that the wicked would be annihilated in hell (their personal existence would cease), while others believed the wicked would be punished forever in an ongoing state of torment.
from the passages cited above, one thing is clear: First-century Jews believed in hell.
its existence as a place of punishment that awaits the wicked was nearly unanimously held.21
This is undeniable. This is the first-century Jewis...
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Bell rightly says that to “grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.”23
Bell suggests that when Jesus used the word hell (gehenna), He referred to a garbage dump outside Jerusalem, where the Jews used to throw their trash. Bell argues that “Gehenna, in Jesus’s day, was the city dump” and that this is what Jesus meant by hell:
But if Jesus was really referring to the literal city dump when He spoke of gehenna, then many of His statements are awkward to say the least: “Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the garbage dump of fire.” (Matt. 5:22) “It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into the garbage dump.” (Matt. 5:29) “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in the garbage dump.” (Matt. 10:28) “It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the garbage dump of fire.” (Matt. 18:9)
While I applaud Bell’s attempt to understand Jesus in His first-century Jewish context, his “gehenna is a garbage dump” theory is both misleading and inaccurate. Here’s why.
First, it’s misleading because it confuses the source of an idea for the idea itself.26
Just because Jesus’ description of hell may have been inspired by the image of a burning garbage dump (if it was) doesn’t mean that He is referring to the actual...
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That’s just the way imagery works.
to say that Jesus was referring to an actual dump is to misunderstand the way language functions.
there’s no evidence from the time of Jesus that the Hinnom Valley (gehenna literally means “Valley of Hinnom”) was the town dump.
the first reference we have to the Hinnom Valley, or gehenna, as a town dump is made by a rabbi named David Kimhi in a commentary, which was written in AD 1200.
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Kimhi, writing in the late Middle Ages—from Europe, by the way, not Israel—is the first one to make this suggestion.
What are the chances that Jesus is thinking of this town dump in using the term gehenna when we have no evidence that there was such a place unt...
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Much of what Bell says about hell relies upon a legend from the Middle Ages.
the Hinnom Valley was the place where some Israelites engaged in idolatrous worship of the Canaanite gods Molech and Baal. It was here, in fact, where they sacrificed their children to these gods (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6) making them “pass through the fire” (Ezek. 16:20–21 NASB). When Jeremiah began to preach, the Hinnom Valley started to take on a metaphorical reference for the place where the bodies of the wicked would be cast (Jer. 7:29–34; 19:6–9; 32:35): “Behold, the days are coming … when it will no more be called … the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter” (Jer. 7:32).
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For first-century Jews, the violent image of evildoers being punished in the Hinnom Valley provided a fitting analogy for God punishing the wicked in hell.
Did Jesus affirm or reject this widespread first-century belief in hell?
For Rob Bell, hell is primarily the various hells on earth;
in passing, Bell does say “there is hell later” along with a hell now (p. 79). And when he wrestles with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), he mentions that the rich man is in “profound torment” (p. 77)—though he defines this torment as “living with the realities of not dying to” the unjust socioeconomic system in his previous life. But other than these two side comments, virtually everything Bell says about hell refers to the various hells on earth, the evil of this world: rape, addictions, child abuse, poverty, violence, and so on. A similar view is taken by Andrew Perriman,
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Second Temple Judaism.
the Apocrypha, I’m using the New Revised Standard Version; and for the Dead Sea Scrolls, Florentino Garcia-Martinez and Eibert Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997). There is a ton of secondary literature on the subject of early Jewish views of hell and the afterlife. Among the most helpful are Duane F. Watson, “Gehenna,” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992): 2.296–298, and Richard Bauckham, “Early Jewish Visions of Hell,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990): 355–85.
4 Ezra 7:32–36.
4 Ezra 7:38, 80, 82.
2 En. 10:2 [J]:
there is no light there,
a river o...
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!!!!!!!!!!!!
worms and fire together, much as Jesus and Isaiah did (Isa. 66:24; Mark 9:48): “Woe to the nations that rise up against my people! The Lord Almighty will take vengeance on them in the day of judgment; he will send fire and worms into their flesh; they shall weep in pain forever” (Judith 16:17; first century BC).
While some believed that upon death the wicked awaited punishment (as stated above), others believed that the wicked would enter fiery punishment immediately upon death. It seems that the Pharisees believed this. They said that the righteous receive rewards and the wicked receive punishment immediately after they die (Ant. 18.14). This also seems to be reflected in Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31, which Richard Bauckham says is the only place in the New Testament that mentions punishment immediately upon death (“Early Jewish Visions of Hell,” 376).
Some scholars still refer to this myth, but cite no evidence
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Several bloggers also pointed this out shortly after Love Wins came out
without a doubt, first-century Jews believed in hell.
if He didn’t—if Jesus rejected the widespread Jewish belief in hell—then He would certainly need to be clear about this.
we can be sure that if Jesus didn’t challenge the Jewish view of hell, it wasn’t because He was afraid to.
Jesus uses the word gehenna (translated as “hell”) twelve times in the Gospels.
Jesus is alluding to Isaiah 66:24 with this imagery (undying worm, unquenchable fire), and Isaiah was probably not thinking of everlasting punishment.6 Another passage that is sometimes cited to prove never-ending punishment is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. But this passage doesn’t refer to the final state of the wicked—only to a temporary state where the wicked await judgment.7
it’s been argued that they don’t actually mean what the translations say. For instance, some people who say that hell won’t last forever argue that the Greek words translated “everlasting punishment”—aionios kolasis—do not mean that the punishment is never ending. Instead, some have argued that aionios means “a period of time” while kolasis is a term from horticulture that means “pruning” or “trimming.” For example: An aionios of kolasis. Depending on how you translate aionios and kolasis, then, the phrase can mean “a period of pruning” or “a time of trimming,” or an intense experience of
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