The Historical Roots of Hell
The Case Against Hell - Part 2
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NOTE: This article is a continuation of the examination of the notion of hell which we began in Part 1
Gehenna
Christians erroneously take their hell concept to be signified by the biblical word Gehenna (a Greek term). Whence Gehenna? As mentioned, there was evidently a Persian/Zoroastrian influence that gradually crept into Jewish thought: hell became associated with the Biblical word Gehinnom or Gei Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom—Hinnom’s son, specifically.
Eventually this concept of hell appears to have supplanted the earlier concept of Sheol (grave), mentioned in Isaiah 38:18, Psalms 6:5, and Job 7:7-101. In Islam, Gehenna is known as Jahannam.
What do we know about the valley of Hinnom, then? Gehenna,
derives from the Hebrew: Gêhinnôm (also Guy ben-Hinnom) meaning the Valley of Hinnom’s son. The valley forms the southwest border of ancient Jerusalem that stretches from the foot of Mt. Zion to the Kidron Valley…Originally it referred to a garbage dump in a deep narrow valley right outside the walls of Jerusalem where fires were kept burning to consume the refuse and keep down the stench. It is also the location where bodies of executed criminals, or individuals denied a proper burial, would be dumped.2
Within the valley of Hinnom/Gehenna was Tophet (Topheth/Topheph), a place where there was kept a perpetually burning fire used for sanitary purposes—hence the association of fire with “hell.”
The roots of Tophet are not known with certainty, though, “the most probable is its connection with a root meaning ‘burning’-the ‘place of burning.’”3
Because Gehenna was such an unpleasant locale with such a sordid history, the authors of the Gospels obviously had “Jesus” (Izas/Iesous/Yeshua) use it as a metaphor for spiritual perdition and desolation—the results of a misguided life. Knowing all this, who would want to go to the living hell of Gehenna?
The “eternally” burning sanitary fires of the Valley of Hinnom’s son (Gehenna) are clearly used as a metaphor by “Jesus” for spiritual purification and cleansing. You may be reminded of the concept of “burning off karma,” as David Wilcock notes4.
The much misunderstood Helena Blavatsky pointed out that when the Jesus character is made to say in Matthew xvi. 18, “…and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it,” in the original text it reads as “the gates of death.”
The word hell, referring to any state of eternal punitive “damnation,” appears in zero passages of the original Old Testament.
Tophet/the valley of Hinnom also held no such denotation. Additionally, Gehenna is equivalent to Homer’s Tartarus—the apostle Peter in the original text of his second Epistle, wrote that God cast the sinning angels “down into Tartarus.” Later, in the King James Version it was altered to read “down to hell.”5
We might well lament alongside Blavatsky the centuries of human credulity and ignorance.6
Clearly Christians have been misled, just as with the concept of a final judgement day and the “resurrection” it was to bring—an idea that apparently emanated from the Jews some two centuries before Izas/Iesous/Yehoshua. The good souls would be rewarded with heaven while the “evil” souls would simply be annihilated—a belief we have already seen apparently stems from the Egyptians—and probably earlier cultures—and which was apparently held by the Jews and early Christians.
The simple yet misguided idea of a physical body resurrection connects back to the Egyptian practice of embalming the dead—the physical body needed to be intact for the soul (“ka”) to recognise it, ensuring the deceased could be resurrected to live eternally in the afterlife.
And yet Funda-Christians have the gall to denounce Egypt as a land of devil-worshipping pagans!
It was the Jewish Pharisees (circa 515 BCE to 70 CE), evidently, who passed the Zoroastrian vision of heaven and hell into Christianity and Islam (Jahannam), while the more traditional Sadducees—representing the Jewish “mainstream” religion stuck with sheol.7
Tartarus held a place in both Greek and Roman mythology: it constituted part of Hades, but Hades also included Elysium, a sun-filled land where virtuous souls were rewarded for lives well lived.8 Tartarus was the part of Hades where you didn’t want to end up. It was where the morally dubious and the irredeemably criminal were sent after judgment; where souls of the dead awaited reincarnation where the river Acheron fed into the Acherusian lake.9
The pre-Christian Hadean underworld—ruled over by Hades, Lord of the Dead—was not the fictive fiery abyss of damnation Christians were ultimately brow-beaten with. Sheol and Hades also had nothing to do with the later-invented Satan. In Islamic thought, your stay in Jahannam/Gehenna/Hell is not seen as permanent, but a temporary period undergone for spiritual rectification10, a view that, speaking generally, is much more consonant with available evidence.
Rehabilitation and purification is the idea. It seems possible that, since the collective consciousness “control system” is continuously evolving, these Hades/Jahannam hellscapes may have been part of the etheric-astral imaginal structure during these previous eras—but it is more likely it is simply something that religious control structures have adopted.11
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In contrast to the Islamic Jahannam there is not a shred of credible evidence—either philological or empirical—that, when seen in a larger context, can be used to build a credible case in the literal existence of a “Biblical” hell as a place an external all-potent and “loving” deity (“Yahweh” or otherwise) casts us into so we may suffer eternal torment for the earthly “sins” of but one puny lifetime.
Sin merely means “to err of the mark”; misguided thought or deed. It stems from the Greek hamartia, “tragic flaw,” literally, “fault, failure, guilt, sin” from hamartanein, “to fail of one’s purpose; to err, sin,” originally “to miss the mark12.”
“Original sin” was an idea manufactured by early church leaders to serve the salvationist agenda of social control. The formula is old as the hills: scare people with a manufactured “problem” (original sin) and then sell them your “solution” (belief in the “elite’s” manufactured theology and solar saviour-god).
When you understand the linguistic and conceptual origins of “hell,” it can be seen that this is not a Bible-based doctrine at all, and “true Christians” (if that term even means anything) should scorn it.
Mercy Aiken—a devout Christian—informs us:
“The King James Bible erroneously translates the word ‘Sheol’ as Hell a total of 31 times in the Old Testament, thus setting a foundation for that doctrine in the New Testament as well as the majority of Bible translations to follow the KJV.13”
Either an “omniscient” yet oddly linguistically-challenged God made those thirty-one translational errors…or fallible men with their own agendas did.
Which seems more plausible?
Aiken asks her fellow Christians to use their “God-given” critical faculties:
“Since the concept of Hell doesn’t exist in the Old Testament, how could Jesus and his disciples teach that salvation was deliverance from a place that is not even found in their Scriptures?14”
Without a hell for “sinners” to go to, there is no need to be “saved” from it by the Piscean solar messiah. Hence, salvationism is revealed as a monumental spiritual fraud—likely the biggest of the past 2,000 years.
A more nuanced reading of these “Biblical” or scriptural ideas is certainly warranted at this point, particularly if our Christian or Catholic friends would like to stop missing the mark and living in “sin” by continuing to embrace outdated and untenable theological concepts that are overwhelmingly unsupported not only by the texts they think such concepts derive from, but more importantly by the actual lived experience of many thousands of people from all walks of life around the world (as evidenced in Book 2 of THE GRAND ILLUSION).
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Brendan D. Murphy is the “consciousness guy” and author of the critically acclaimed epic, “The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — Book 1”
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Find Part 1 of THE CASE AGAINST HELL above
1 Gehenna, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gehenna
2 Ibid., https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gehenna
3 https://bibleatlas.org/topheth.htm
4 Wilcock, The Synchronicity Key.
5 The King James Version of the Bible speaks of “hellfire” and of being “cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.”
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gehenna
6 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 506-7.
7 https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gehenna
8 Ibid.
9 See Plato, Phaedo.
10 Hell, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hell
11 Nick Sambrook suggested this in a personal communication and I happen to agree.
12 https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=hamartia
13 Mercy Aiken, If Hell is Real..., https://ocog.thischurch.org/n/if_hell_is_real.html
14 Ibid.