The Development of Hell

The concept of hell—a realm of postmortem punishment where the wicked suffer for eternity—is so deeply embedded in Western religious consciousness that many assume it has always been a central feature of biblical theology. It has not. The doctrine developed gradually over more than a millennium, shaped by changing political circumstances, cross-cultural contact, literary innovation, and theological debate. Tracing that development reveals not a single, stable teaching but a layered accretion of ideas, each generation building upon and transforming what came before.

Sheol in the Hebrew Bible

The earliest Israelite understanding of the afterlife centered on Sheol, a term that appears sixty-five times in the Hebrew Bible.² Sheol was not hell. It was the common destination of all the dead—righteous and wicked, kings and commoners—a subterranean realm of shadows, silence, and forgetfulness. The dead in Sheol were called rephaim, “shades,” and their existence was described as one of diminished consciousness, cut off from God and from the praise of the living.¹

Several passages illustrate this vision. In Isaiah 14:9–11, NRSV, Sheol is “stirred up” to greet the king of Babylon, where maggots are his bed and worms his covering—but this is the fate of a king, not a sinner per se. Ecclesiastes 9:10, NRSV states plainly: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” The emphasis is on universal destination, not moral sorting. Psalm 88:3–6, NRSV describes Sheol as a pit of darkness where God’s “wrath lies heavy,” yet the psalmist is a righteous sufferer, not a condemned sinner. Psalm 6:5, NRSV laments: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?”¹

Crucially, Sheol was not a place of punishment. It was simply the place of the dead. The Hebrew Bible’s primary concern was with life in this world—with covenant faithfulness, communal justice, and the land—not with postmortem reward or retribution.³ Divine justice was understood to operate within history: the righteous would prosper and the wicked would be cut off, but both ended up in Sheol. When Job wished for death, he wished for Sheol as a place of rest from suffering, not as a threat (Job 3:13–19, NRSV). The entire book of Job wrestles with the problem of divine justice precisely because there is no afterlife compensation to resolve the dilemma.⁵

This absence of postmortem judgment is not a minor footnote. It means that for roughly the first eight centuries of Israelite religion—from the patriarchal narratives through the monarchy and into the early prophets—there was no hell, no heaven in the later Christian sense, and no expectation that the dead would face moral accounting after death.³

Persian Influence and Dualistic Eschatology

The Babylonian exile (586–539 BCE) was a theological watershed. Judeans were forcibly relocated into the heart of the Persian Empire, where they encountered Zoroastrianism—a religion built on a sharp dualism between Ahura Mazda (the good deity) and Angra Mainyu (the destructive spirit). Zoroastrian eschatology included a final judgment, the separation of the righteous from the wicked, a bridge of judgment (the Chinvat Bridge) over which souls must pass, and a renovation of the world by fire.⁷

Scholars have long debated the extent of Persian influence on Jewish theology, and direct literary dependence is difficult to prove. However, the broad pattern is striking: before the exile, Israelite religion had no developed afterlife theology, no cosmic dualism between good and evil supernatural beings, and no expectation of postmortem judgment. After the exile, all three ideas began to appear in Jewish texts.²¹ The development of Satan as a cosmic adversary follows a similar trajectory, moving from a member of the divine council in Job 1–2, NRSV to a rebellious figure opposed to God in later literature.⁶

James Barr and other scholars argue that while direct borrowing cannot be conclusively demonstrated, the Persian cultural environment provided a “catalyst” that accelerated developments already latent within Israelite thought.²¹ The crisis of the exile itself demanded new theological resources: if God was just, and if the nation had been destroyed despite the presence of righteous individuals, then justice must extend beyond this life. The seeds of afterlife judgment were sown in the soil of theodicy.³

Gehenna: From Valley to Metaphor

The word most commonly translated as “hell” in the New Testament is Gehenna (Greek geenna), derived from the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom—the Valley of Hinnom, a real geographical location on the south and southwest side of Jerusalem.¹⁰ The transformation of this valley into a symbol of divine punishment is one of the most instructive case studies in the development of the doctrine.

In the Hebrew Bible, the Valley of Hinnom was associated with the worship of the Ammonite deity Molech, where children were reportedly passed through fire as sacrifices. 2 Kings 23:10, NRSV records that King Josiah “defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of Ben-hinnom, so that no one would make a son or a daughter pass through fire as an offering to Molech.” The prophet Jeremiah denounced the valley as a place of abomination: “they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire” (Jeremiah 7:31, NRSV). Jeremiah prophesied that the valley would become a “valley of Slaughter” where the corpses of the wicked would be cast (Jeremiah 7:32–33, NRSV).¹⁰

The crucial shift occurred in the intertestamental period. By the second and first centuries BCE, Gehenna had been transformed from a literal valley associated with past idolatry into a metaphorical designation for a place of eschatological punishment. The fire that once burned in the valley became the fire of divine judgment. The association with child sacrifice lent the location an aura of horror that made it an apt metaphor for the worst imaginable fate.³

A popular tradition, first attested in medieval rabbinic literature but sometimes projected backward, holds that the Valley of Hinnom served as Jerusalem’s garbage dump, where fires burned continuously. Lloyd Bailey and other scholars have noted that there is no archaeological or literary evidence from the Second Temple period to support this claim.¹⁰ The metaphorical transformation of Gehenna was driven by theological reflection on Jeremiah’s oracles and the broader development of eschatological thinking, not by the valley’s use as a refuse site.

Intertestamental Elaborations

The most dramatic developments in the concept of hell occurred during the intertestamental period—roughly 200 BCE to 100 CE—when Jewish apocalyptic literature flourished. These texts, though never included in the Hebrew Bible, were widely read and profoundly influential on both later Judaism and early Christianity.⁹

The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), composed in the third century BCE, contains some of the earliest detailed visions of postmortem punishment. In chapters 21–22, Enoch is shown hollows in the earth where the spirits of the dead are kept, separated into compartments for the righteous and the wicked. The wicked suffer in a “deep darkness” and face a “great torment” until the final judgment. Chapter 27 explicitly identifies a “cursed valley”—likely Gehenna—as the place where the accursed will be gathered for judgment.⁸

The Book of Parables (1 Enoch 37–71), probably composed in the first century BCE, develops the concept further. The wicked are cast into a “burning furnace” and a “valley of fire.” The punishments are increasingly graphic and specific: angels of punishment torment the condemned, chains are prepared for the hosts of Azazel, and the kings and the mighty are subjected to fiery retribution.⁸

4 Ezra (2 Esdras 3–14), written in the late first century CE in response to the destruction of the Second Temple, presents a vision in which the righteous enter a seven-stage ascent to glory while the wicked descend through seven stages of torment. The furnace of Gehenna is contrasted with the “paradise of delight.” The text wrestles agonizingly with the scope of salvation, with the angel Uriel insisting that “many have been created, but few shall be saved” (4 Ezra 8:3).²²

These texts introduced several ideas that would become central to later Christian doctrine: the separation of the dead into distinct compartments for the righteous and the wicked; the idea that punishment begins immediately after death rather than only at a final judgment; the use of fire as the primary instrument of punishment; and the involvement of angelic beings in administering torment.⁹ None of these ideas are present in the Hebrew Bible. They represent genuinely new theological developments, shaped by the apocalyptic imagination and the pressures of foreign domination, persecution, and the felt need for divine justice to vindicate the suffering righteous.⁵

Jesus and Gehenna

Jesus of Nazareth used the term Gehenna twelve times in the Synoptic Gospels (eleven in Matthew and Mark, once in Luke), making him the most prominent user of the term in the New Testament. The interpretation of these sayings, however, is more contested than popular Christianity typically acknowledges.¹¹

In Mark 9:43–48, NRSV, Jesus warns: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to Gehenna, to the unquenchable fire, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” The language of “unquenchable fire” and the undying worm echoes Isaiah 66:24, NRSV, which describes the corpses of those who rebelled against God—notably, dead bodies being consumed, not living souls being tormented.¹²

In Matthew 10:28, NRSV, Jesus says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” The verb is apolesai—“destroy,” not “torment.” Annihilationists have long pointed to this passage as evidence that Jesus envisioned the final destruction of the wicked, not their eternal conscious torment.¹²

N. T. Wright and other scholars have argued that Jesus’s Gehenna language should be understood primarily within its first-century Jewish context as a warning about the historical destruction of Jerusalem, not as a description of the postmortem fate of individual souls. In this reading, “Gehenna” evokes Jeremiah’s prophecy of the Valley of Slaughter and functions as a prophetic warning that the path of violent revolution would lead to national catastrophe—a catastrophe that did indeed occur in 70 CE when Rome destroyed the Temple and laid waste to the city.¹¹

What is clear is that Jesus did not deliver a systematic doctrine of hell. His Gehenna sayings are brief, metaphorical, embedded in larger discourses about discipleship and the kingdom of God, and amenable to multiple interpretations. The elaborate doctrine of eternal conscious torment that later developed in Christian theology required considerably more theological construction than what is present in the Gospels alone.⁵

Paul’s Notable Silence

A striking feature of the Pauline epistles—the earliest Christian writings in the New Testament, predating the Gospels—is that Paul never uses the word Gehenna. He speaks of “wrath” (orgē), “destruction” (olethros), and “death” (thanatos) as the consequences of sin, but he does not describe a place of postmortem torment.⁵

In Romans 6:23, NRSV, Paul writes: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The contrast is between death and life, not between torment and bliss. In 1 Thessalonians 5:3, NRSV, he warns of “sudden destruction” for those not prepared. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, NRSV, he speaks of those who “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord.” The phrase “eternal destruction” has been read both as destruction that is permanent in its effects (annihilationism) and as an ongoing process of being destroyed (eternal torment), but the natural reading of “destruction” suggests an end, not an unending process.¹²

Paul’s eschatological framework centers on resurrection, not on the geography of the afterlife. His concern is with the transformation of believers into the likeness of Christ and the ultimate defeat of death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26, NRSV). Several passages in Paul have also been read as supporting universal salvation: “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22, NRSV) and “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend … and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10–11, NRSV).¹⁸ Whether Paul intended these as statements of universal restoration or as expressions of Christ’s sovereignty over the unwilling remains debated, but the absence of Gehenna language in the earliest Christian writings is a significant datum in the history of the doctrine.

Revelation and the Lake of Fire

The Book of Revelation, composed in the late first century CE, introduced the image that would become the dominant visual metaphor for hell in Western Christianity: the “lake of fire.”⁹

In Revelation 19:20, NRSV, the beast and the false prophet are thrown alive into “the lake of fire that burns with sulfur.” In Revelation 20:10, NRSV, the devil joins them, and “they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” Following the final judgment in Revelation 20:14–15, NRSV, “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”

Several features of Revelation’s imagery are worth noting. First, the lake of fire is explicitly identified as “the second death”—language that annihilationists interpret as final destruction rather than unending torment.¹² Second, the “forever and ever” torment is explicitly applied to the devil, the beast, and the false prophet—symbolic or supernatural figures—and whether this extends to ordinary human beings is a matter of interpretation. Third, even Death and Hades themselves are cast into the lake, suggesting that the lake of fire represents the abolition of death itself, not simply a new location for suffering.⁵

Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery draws heavily on the literary conventions of Jewish apocalypticism and should be read within that genre. The text is saturated with symbolism—a seven-headed beast, a woman clothed with the sun, a city descending from heaven—and treating the lake of fire as a literal geographical description while reading the rest of the text symbolically requires a hermeneutical inconsistency that scholars have long noted.⁹

Patristic Debates: Origen, Gregory, and Augustine

The first several centuries of Christianity did not produce a unified doctrine of hell. Instead, the patristic period was marked by vigorous and genuine disagreement among major theologians about the nature, duration, and purpose of postmortem punishment.³

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254 CE), one of the most influential theologians of the early church, taught apokatastasis—the universal restoration of all rational beings to God, including the devil and the demons. In On First Principles, Origen argued that God’s punishments are always remedial, never retributive, and that a God of infinite love could not eternally torment finite creatures. The “fire” of judgment was, for Origen, a purifying fire that would ultimately cleanse all souls and return them to union with God.¹⁴ Origen’s universalism was not a marginal position in the early church; it was the dominant view in the Greek-speaking East for several centuries.¹⁸

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395 CE), one of the Cappadocian Fathers and a figure of unquestioned orthodoxy, also taught universal restoration. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory argued that evil is parasitic on good and therefore finite; it must eventually be exhausted, leaving only the good. Punishment in the afterlife is real but therapeutic, like a physician lancing a wound. Gregory was never condemned for this teaching, and he was later declared a saint by both Eastern and Western churches.³

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) took a sharply different position. In City of God, Books 20–21, Augustine argued at length against the “merciful ones” (misericordes) who denied eternal punishment. He insisted that the fire of hell is literal, that its torments are physical as well as spiritual, and that they are everlasting. Augustine was well aware that he was arguing against a significant body of Christian opinion; his extensive refutations of universalism and annihilationism reveal the strength of these positions in his own day.¹³

Augustine’s view prevailed in the Latin West for several reasons: his enormous theological authority, the institutional needs of a church that found eternal punishment a powerful tool for social control, and the condemnation of Origen’s teachings at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 CE (though the precise scope and legitimacy of that condemnation remain disputed).³ What is clear is that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment was not the universal teaching of the early church. It was one position among several, and it won out through a combination of theological argument, institutional authority, and political circumstance.⁵

Medieval Elaboration

The medieval period saw the concept of hell elaborated with a specificity and vividness that far exceeded anything in the biblical or patristic sources. This was the era of hell’s maximum cultural influence in Western civilization.⁴

The development of the doctrine of purgatory, formally defined at the Councils of Lyon (1274) and Florence (1439), introduced a third postmortem destination between heaven and hell. Purgatory was a place of temporary, purifying punishment for the saved, distinct from the eternal punishment of the damned. Its development reflected the pastoral reality that most Christians did not seem obviously destined for either eternal bliss or eternal torment, and it created a more graduated moral geography of the afterlife.⁴

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (c. 1314) was the culminating literary expression of medieval hell. Dante’s hell is meticulously organized into nine concentric circles, each assigned to a specific category of sin, with punishments that mirror the sin in a principle of contrapasso (retributive suffering). The lustful are blown about by endless winds; the gluttons lie in filth; the wrathful fight each other in a swamp; the heretics burn in open tombs; traitors are frozen in a lake of ice at the center, where Satan himself is trapped.¹⁷

Dante’s vision, though presented as poetry rather than theology, became the dominant popular image of hell for centuries. Many features of “hell” that modern people take to be biblical—circles of punishment, Satan reigning over hell, specific torments for specific sins—are Dantean rather than scriptural.⁴ The Bible contains no description of Satan ruling hell; in Revelation, Satan is a prisoner of the lake of fire, not its warden.

The medieval period also produced a rich tradition of “vision literature”—accounts of individuals who claimed to have visited hell and returned. The Vision of Tundale (1149), the Vision of the Knight Owen (c. 1180), and similar texts provided detailed tours of the afterlife that shaped popular piety far more than the biblical texts themselves. These visions featured increasingly elaborate torments, demons with specific physical forms, and a spatial organization of the underworld that owed far more to contemporary imagination than to any scriptural source.⁴

Reformation and Early Modern Period

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century challenged many medieval doctrines but largely retained the Augustinian framework of eternal conscious torment. Martin Luther rejected purgatory as unbiblical but affirmed the reality of hell. John Calvin likewise taught eternal punishment, arguing that the biblical imagery of fire and worm should be understood as metaphors for the spiritual anguish of separation from God, but that the suffering itself was real and unending.¹⁶

However, the Reformation’s emphasis on sola scriptura—scripture alone as the basis of doctrine—created a hermeneutical framework that would eventually be turned against the traditional doctrine. If only scripture is authoritative, and if scripture does not unambiguously teach eternal conscious torment (as the annihilationist and universalist readings contend), then the doctrine stands on less firm ground than the tradition suggests.¹²

The early modern period saw scattered but significant challenges. The Socinians (precursors to Unitarianism) taught annihilationism in the sixteenth century. Various Anabaptist groups questioned eternal torment. By the eighteenth century, universalism had re-emerged as a distinct theological position, with figures like George de Benneville and later Hosea Ballou arguing that a God of love could not condemn any creature to eternal suffering.¹⁵

The Modern Evangelical Debate

Contemporary Christian theology features three major positions on the fate of the unrighteous, and the debate among them is more active than at any point since the patristic period.¹⁶

Eternal conscious torment (ECT) is the traditional view, affirmed by Augustine, Aquinas, the major Protestant Reformers, and most evangelical confessions. It holds that the unsaved are conscious and suffering in hell forever. Its defenders argue that the biblical language of “eternal fire,” “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46, NRSV), and “tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10, NRSV) must be taken at face value, and that the infinite gravity of sin against an infinite God warrants infinite punishment.¹⁶

Annihilationism (also called conditionalism or conditional immortality) holds that the unsaved are ultimately destroyed—they cease to exist. Its proponents argue that “eternal punishment” refers to a punishment that is eternal in its effects (permanent destruction), not in its duration (unending torment); that the biblical imagery of fire suggests consumption, not preservation; and that the soul is not inherently immortal but receives immortality only as God’s gift to the redeemed. Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes provided the foundational modern case for this position, and it has gained significant support among evangelical scholars, including John Stott, who called the traditional view “intolerable” and incompatible with God’s justice.¹²¹⁹

Universal restoration (universalism or apokatastasis) holds that all human beings—and perhaps all rational creatures—will ultimately be reconciled to God. Its proponents stand in the tradition of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and argue that God’s love is indefatigable, that the New Testament passages about “all” being reconciled and “every knee” bowing must be taken as seriously as the passages about judgment, and that the concept of eternal torment renders the problem of hell philosophically insoluble. David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (2019) renewed this argument with philosophical rigor, contending that the traditional doctrine of hell is not merely wrong but logically incoherent—that a God who created beings foreknowing their eternal torment would be indistinguishable from a cosmic sadist.¹⁸

The debate is not merely academic. Surveys consistently show declining belief in hell among Western Christians, and the rise of annihilationism and universalism among evangelical scholars and pastors represents a significant shift in a tradition that long treated eternal conscious torment as non-negotiable.¹⁹

A Doctrine That Evolved

The history traced in this article reveals a concept that developed through identifiable stages, each driven by specific historical, cultural, and theological pressures:

In the earliest Israelite religion, Sheol was the universal destination of the dead, a place of shadow and silence, not of punishment.¹ Following the Babylonian exile and contact with Persian dualism, ideas of postmortem judgment and moral sorting began to appear.²¹ During the intertestamental period, apocalyptic literature elaborated these ideas into vivid visions of fiery punishment, introducing the imagery and conceptual framework that the New Testament authors inherited.⁹ Jesus used the language of Gehenna in ways that are amenable to multiple interpretations, and Paul never used the term at all.¹¹⁵ The early church debated the nature of postmortem punishment vigorously, with universalism, annihilationism, and eternal torment all represented among major theologians.³ Augustine’s position on eternal conscious torment prevailed in the Latin West through a combination of theological argument and institutional authority.¹³ The medieval period elaborated hell with a literary and artistic vividness that far exceeded the biblical sources, creating the cultural image of hell that persists today.⁴ And in the modern period, all three patristic positions have re-emerged with scholarly sophistication, revealing that the debate was never truly settled.¹⁶¹⁸¹⁹

This is not the history of a doctrine revealed complete from the beginning and faithfully transmitted. It is the history of an idea that was constructed, contested, and transformed across more than a millennium of human religious thought. Understanding this history does not, by itself, determine whether any version of the doctrine is true. But it does mean that any honest engagement with the concept of hell must reckon with its development—and with the possibility that the version of the doctrine one inherited is only one chapter in a much longer and more complicated story.