What the Hell? Trying to explain Hades' origin

Recently, someone raised a question at Bible study: When was hell created? The majority of the flock could not locate a time. When the apostle of the house took a turn, he said the answer was in Genesis 1:6-9. However, as he explained the passage, I didn't see it. Can you answer the question? - D., via e-mail

Thanks for your hellishly difficult question. In fact, Genesis 1:6-9 is not about the creation of hell, nor the story of the creation of heaven, which is the incorrect English translation of the Hebrew word (raqia) for sky, which was conceived of as a transparent dome holding back the waters that fall as rain. I, too, don't see where your apostle is coming from, but if he brings the doughnuts, I'd leave him alone.

Let me try to help you understand hell. First, there's no reference to hell in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). That's because there's also no reference to a soul, as opposed to a body, and since hell is the destination of evil souls, it requires a belief in souls. (The Hebrew word in the Bible most often translated as "soul" - nefesh - is not "soul" at all but is best translated as "life." The idea of the soul as distinct from the body emerged after the Pharisees (later called rabbis) encountered Greek philosophy after the conquests of Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, believed that everything was made of matter and form. Simply put, matter was formless stuff, and form was what made matter into, well, stuff. Form was an idea. God, of course, was pure form (immaterial).

The Jewish thinkers who were enraptured by Greek thought could not endorse Aristotle's idea of a God who had nothing to do with the world. After all, they still had the biblical text of God walking through the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8). But the idea of matter and form was very appealing to them. So what they did was to equate matter with the human body (guf in Hebrew) and form with the human soul (neshama). That is how the idea of the duality of body and soul replaced the old biblical idea of nefesh as our life, which ends when we die.

The idea of body and soul was the most important idea taken into Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam, from Greek philosophy. It was the major revolution in Judaism that separated and distinguished biblical Judaism from rabbinic Judaism. The heart of this theological revolution was that it paved the way for belief in the existence of the soul after death. This was easy, since the soul was, like God, immaterial and thus could not die.

Now, if the soul is real, the natural question is, "Where does the soul go after death?" This question produced the belief in The World To Come (olam ha'bah), which in Christianity is called heaven.

Heaven gives people hope that they won't be separated forever from their loved ones. Heaven also gave God a chance to reward righteous people who'd suffered unjustly during their lives. Now, obviously, if heaven was the reward for righteous souls, there had to be someplace for evil souls. Enter hell. Hell became the place of punishment for the souls of evil people who'd somehow managed to escape punishment for their sins on Earth. Heaven and hell thus rebalanced the scales of justice that life on Earth had skewed. Thank you, Aristotle! Jewish, Christian, and Muslim concepts of heaven and hell are similar but not identical. Both Judaism and Islam teach that the souls of all righteous people of every faith (and no faith) will go to heaven. Christianity is more conflicted. It does have strains of belief that echo Jewish and Muslim universalism but it also has within it a theological exclusivism (John 14:6 and elsewhere), which teaches that the only way into heaven is through belief in Jesus as the Christ.

Judaism and Christianity also have a belief in purgatory, essentially a gateway to heaven where the souls of the imperfectly righteous are punished for their sins as an act of spiritual cleansing prior to their entry into heaven.

To answer your question directly, the creation of hell is not included in the Hebrew Bible because it does not embrace a belief in life after death. The closest the text comes to speculation about this concept are references to a place of the dead called Sheol (Hades in Greek). The Book of Daniel also vaguely refers to some kind of hell and resurrection of the dead in 12:2: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt." The origins of many other things mentioned in the Bible also are not described. In the creation account in Genesis, the text is intended to describe the origins of everything, but not the origins of every thing.