Throughout the Classical (c. 500–323 bce) and Hellenistic (323–30 bce) periods and during the long span of the Roman Empire, Mediterranean societies played host to a profusion of eschatological teachings in which the underworld was increasingly “infernalized,” its hellish dimensions explored, and its moral implications exploited. While Odysseus travels no farther than the entrance to the underworld, Virgil, the Roman author of the Aeneid, sends Aeneas through Sibyl’s cave by the shores of the foul-smelling Lake of Averno, across the River Styx on Charon’s ferry, past the three-headed dog Cerberus, and from there down the labyrinthine path as it forks right to the torture fields of Tartarus and left to the Elysian fields of the blessed. Virgil’s hell includes special compartments for infants and suicides and specific punishments for specific crimes, but the ordinary dead, who merit neither a hero’s reward nor a scoundrel’s punishment, remain unaccounted for. Further attention to the structure of hell came during the first centuries of the Common Era, as a rising tide of eschatological thinking, fed by currents of thought from western Asia, swept through the Roman world. Iranian and Zoroastrian eschatology
Among the Aryan peoples who migrated to the Iranian plateau in the middle of the 2nd millennium bce, a priestly sacrificial religion arose which held that the world is the field of incessant struggle between the ahuras (gods of light, purity, and order) and the daevas (demons of darkness, pollution, and disorder). This dualist cosmology provided the foundation for Zoroastrianism, the prophetic religion of Zoroaster (before the 6th century bce), which proclaimed the coming triumph of Ahura Mazdā (“Wise Lord”) and his angelic retinue over Ahriman (“Destructive Spirit”), prince of the powers of evil. Zoroastrian end-time accounts describe the coming of one or more cosmic saviours, the resurrection of the dead, a final passage through purgatorial rivers of molten metal, and a resounding defeat of all the demonic powers. The Zoroastrian hell is presided over by Yima, the first victim of death, and is home to all that is evil, dark, corrupt, cold, and hostile to life. The demons who dwell there take delight in torturing sinners; but since evil is destined to be utterly vanquished, hell itself will be destroyed with the restoration of Ahura Mazdā’s good creation.
During the interval between death and resurrection, there is a preliminary judgment in which the dead have their deeds weighed in a balance. At the time of judgment, the dead confront their conscience in personified form on a symbolic bridge, from which they fall into hell to be tortured, pass to heaven for blissful reward, or enter the limbolike realm of the “mixed,” which is reserved for those of neutral merit. In the influential 9th-century apocalypse, Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, an Iranian priest takes a visionary tour of these otherworldly realms and returns with a harrowing report; the torments of hell, even if not eternal, are dreadful enough to have a powerful deterrent effect. Judaism
In the Hebrew Bible, Sheol (Sheʾōl) is a place of darkness, silence, and dust to which the spirit, or vital principle, descends at death. It is likened to a vast house whose entrance is guarded, like family burial sites, by gates and iron bolts; to a prison in which the dead are held captive by strong cords; to an insatiable beast with spreading jaws; and also to a watery abyss. Once in Sheol, the dead are cut off from their living kin and from cultic relationship to God. Yet God retains his sovereignty over Sheol, searching out the evildoers who hide in its depths, preserving or delivering the just from Sheol’s grasp, and, ultimately, as later apocalyptic and rabbinic texts make explicit, restoring the dead to life.
“The Jaws of Hell,” illumination from the Psalter of Henry of Blois (MS. Cotton Nero CIV, folio 39); in the British LibraryCourtesy of the trustees of the British Library
At least in the postexilic portions of the Hebrew Bible (those written after the Babylonian captivity), death does not hold the same fate for all. The unjust, the improperly buried, and the untimely dead endure the misery of Sheol, but, for those who die in God’s favour, the natural bitterness of death is mitigated by reunion with their ancestors. Late prophetic books, concerned with the vindication of God’s justice, warn of a coming “Day of the Lord” in which the wicked will be burned up like stubble (Malachi 4:1), the corpses of God’s enemies will suffer endless corruption (Isaiah 66:24), and evildoers who have died will be resurrected to “shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2) while the just enjoy the fulfillment of God’s promises. In some postbiblical Jewish writings, Gehenna, the incineration ground where children had once been sacrificed to the god Moloch, emerges as a realm of postmortem punishment more like hell than Sheol. In Gehenna the unjust dead would suffer a fiery torment of duration and severity proportionate to their crimes.
During the period from the Maccabee wars (168–164 bce) to the compilation of the Mishnah (early 3rd century ce), writers increasingly speculated about the afterlife, producing apocalypses that featured dramatic visionary journeys through heaven and hell. The First Book of Enoch, an important collection of pseudepigraphic revelations, describes in vivid detail both the eternal abyss of fire where fallen angels will be imprisoned after the final battle and the “plague and pain” to be visited upon wretched souls. At the same time, Jewish philosophers and mystics emphasized the spiritual character of the future life, interpreting Gehenna as a redemptive fire which burns away the soul’s impurities in order to restore its original perfection. A spiritualized conception of the soul’s journey after death flourished alongside the rabbinic doctrine of resurrection and judgment at the end of time, and the two models were often combined. The focus of traditional Jewish eschatology, now as in the past, is on the messianic age, when the world will be remade into a dwelling place fit for the Divine Presence. To forfeit one’s share in the world to come is the greatest of all calamities, to which hellfire, whether physical or spiritual, pales in comparison. Christianity
The early Christians proclaimed that Christ had conquered death, opening the door to resurrection and heavenly immortality. The defeat of death does not necessarily mean the immediate abolition of hell, however. Gehenna appears in the New Testament 12 times, where its terrors for the wicked, as a place “where the worm never dies, and their fire is never quenched” (Mark 9:48, quoting Isaiah 66:24), are stressed. In the great eschatological discourse of Matthew 25, Jesus announces that the Son of Man will come in glory to judge the nations, to separate the sheep from the goats, and to consign sinners to everlasting fire. This separation is stark, with no explicit provision made for fine gradations of merit or guilt. While the poor man Lazarus enjoys a blissful repose in the bosom of Abraham, the rich man who failed to help him in life is tormented in eternal fire without hope of respite, the two realms being separated by a great chasm (Luke 16:26). The standard of judgment is right relationship to Christ, as expressed by deeds of mercy. Jesus himself set this standard when he declares: