The Bible Hell, J.W. Hanson, Kenroy Hunter [black female authors txt] 📗

in which the word Sheol-Hadees, occurs. It is translated Hell in the following passages: Ps. 86: 13: "Thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest Hell." Ps. 156: 3: "The pains of Hell got hold on me: I found trouble and sorrow." Prov. 15: 11, 24: "Hell and destruction are before the Lord. The way of life is above to the wise, that he may depart from Hell beneath." Prov. 23: 14: "Thou shalt beat him, and deliver his soul from Hell." Prov. 27: 20: "Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied." Isa. 28: 15, 18: "Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with Hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves. And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with Hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it." Isaiah 57: 9: "Thou didst debase thyself even unto hell." Ezek. 31: 16-17: "I made the nations to shake at the sound of his fall, when I cast him down to Hell with them that descend into the pit: and all the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water, shall be comforted in the nether parts of the earth. They also went down into Hell with him, unto them that be slain with the sword; and they that were his arm, that dwelt under his shadow in the midst of the heathen." Jonah says, "Out of the belly of Hell cried I, and thou heardest me."-Jon. 2: 2. Hab. 2: 5: "Yea, also because he transgresseth by wine, he is a proud man neither keepeth at home, who enlargeth his desire as Hell and is as death, and cannot be satisfied."

We believe we have recorded every passage in which the word Sheol-Hadees occurs. Suppose the original word stood, and we read Sheol or Hadees in all the passages instead of Hell, would any unbiassed reader regard the word as conveying the idea of a place or state of endless torment after death, such as the English word Hell is so generally supposed to denote? Such a doctrine was never held by the ancient Jews, until after the Babylonish captivity, during which they acquired it of the heathen. All scholars agree that Moses never taught it, and that it is not contained in the Old Testament.

Thus not one of the sixty-four passages containing the only word rendered Hell in the entire Old Testament, teaches any such thought as is commonly supposed to be contained in the English word Hell. It should have stood the proper name of the realm of death, Sheol.

Men in the Bible are said to be in hell, Sheol-Hadees, and in "The lowest hell," while on earth. Deut. 32: 22; Jon. 2: 2; Rev. 6: 8.

Men have been in Hell, Sheol-Hadees, and yet have escaped from it. Ps. 18: 5, 6; II Sam. ; Jon 2: 2; Ps. 116: 3; 86: 12-13. Ps. 30: 3; Rev. 20: 13.

God delivers men from Hell, Sheol-Hadees. I Sam. 2: 6.

All men are to go there. No one can escape the Bible Hell, Sheol-Hadees. Ps. 89: 48.

There can be no evil there for there is no kind of work there. Eccl. 9: 10.

Christ's soul was said to be in Hell, Sheol-Hadees. Acts 2: 27-28.

No one in the Bible ever speaks of Hell, Sheol-Hadees as a place of punishment after death.

It is a way of escape from punishment. Amos 9: 2.

The inhabitants of Hell, Sheol-Hadees are eaten of worms, vanish and are consumed away. Job 7: 9, 21; Ps. 49: 14.

Hell, Sheol-Hadees is a place of rest. Job 17: 16.

It is a realm of unconsciousness. Ps. 6: 5; Is. 38: 18; Eccl. 9: 10.

All men will be delivered from this Hell. Hos. 13: 14.

Hell, Sheol-Hadees, will be destroyed. Hos. 13: 14; I Cor. 15: 55; Rev. 20: 14.

At the time these declarations were made, and universally accepted by the Hebrews, the surrounding nations all held entirely different doctrines. Egypt, Greece, Rome, taught that after death there is a fate in store for the wicked that exactly resembles that taught by so-called orthodox Christians. But the entire Old testament is utterly silent on the subject, teaching nothing of the sort as the sixty-four passages we have quoted show and as the critics of all churches admit. And yet "Moses was learned in all the wisdom in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7: 22) who believed in a world of torment after death. If Moses knew all about this Egyptian doctrine, and did not teach it to his followers, what is the unavoidable inference?

TESTIMONY OF SCHOLARS

Dr. Strong says, that not only Moses, but "every Israelite who came out of Egypt, must have been fully acquainted with the universally recognized doctrine of future rewards and punishments." And yet Moses is utterly silent on the subject.

Dr. Thayer remarks: "Is it possible to imagine a more conclusive proof against the divine origin of the doctrine? If he had believed it to be of God, if he had believed in endless torments as the doom of the wicked after death, and had received this as a revelation from heaven, could he have passed it over in silence? Would he have dared to conceal it, or treat so terrible a subject with such marked contempt? And what motive could he have had for doing this? I cannot conceive of a more striking evidence of the fact that the doctrine is not of God. He knew whence the monstrous dogma came, and he had seen enough of Egypt already, and would have no more of her cruel superstitions; and so he casts this out, with her abominable idolatries, as false and unclean things."

So that while the Old Testament talks of ten thousand things of small importance, it has not a syllable nor a whisper of what ought to have been told first of all and most of all and continually. No one is said to have gone to such a place as is now denoted by the word Hell, or to be going to it, or saved from it, or exposed to it. To say that the Hell taught by partialist Christians existed before Christ, is to accuse God of having permitted his children for four thousand years to tumble into it by millions, without a word of warning from him. Earth was a flowery path, concealing pitfalls into infinite burnings, and God never told one of his children a word about it. For four thousand years then the race got on with no knowledge of a place of torment after death. When was the fact first made known? And if it was not necessary to the wickedest people the world ever knew, when did it become necessary?

The future world as revealed in the Old Testament is a conscious existence never described as a place or state of punishment. Prof. Stuart well calls it "the region of umbra or ghosts. It was considered as a vast and wide domain or region of which the grave was only a part or a kind of entrance-way. It appears to have been regarded as extending deep down into the earth, even to the lowest abysses. In this boundless region lived and moved at times the manes (or ghosts) of departed friends."

Bishop Lowth: "In the under-world of the Hebrews there is something peculiarly grand and awful. It was an immense region, a vast subterranean kingdom, involved in thick darkness filled with deep valleys, and shut up with strong gates; and from it there was no possibility of escape. Thither whole hosts of men went down at once; heroes and armies with their trophies of victory; kings and their people were found there where they had a shadowy sort of existence as manes or ghosts neither entirely spiritual nor entirely material, engaged in the employments of their earthly life though destitute of strength and physical substance." All was shadowy and unreal beyond death until Christ came and brought immortality to light through his Gospel.

Whitby on Acts 2: 27: "That Sheol throughout the Old Testament, and Hadees in the Septuagint, answering to it, signify not the place of punishment, or of the souls of bad men only, but the grave only, or the place of death appears, first, from the root of it, Sheol, which signifies to ask, to crave and require. Second, because it is the place to which the good as well as the bad go, etc."

HEATHEN IDEAS OF HELL

During all the time that generations following generations of Jews were entertaining the ideas taught in these sixty-four passages, the surrounding heathen believed in future, endless torment. The literature is full of it. Says Good in his "Book of Nature": "It was believed in most countries 'that this Hell, Hadees, or invisible world, is divided into two very distinct and opposite regions, by a broad and impassable gulf; that the one is a seat of happiness, a paradise or elysium, and the other a seat of misery, a Gehenna or Tartarus; and that there is a supreme magistrate and an impartial tribunal belonging to the infernal shades, before which the ghosts must appear, and by which they are sentenced to the one or the other, according to the deeds done in the body. Egypt is said to have been the inventress of this important and valuable part of the tradition; and undoubtedly it is to be found in the earliest records of Egyptian history.' [It should be observed that Gehenna was not used before Christ, or until 150 A. D. to denote a place of future punishment."]

Homer sings:

Virgil says:

Dr. Anthon says, "As regards the analogy between the term Hadees and our English word Hell, it may be remarked that the latter, in its primitive signification, perfectly corre-sponded to the former. For, at first, it denoted only what was secret or concealed; and it is found, moreover, with little variation of form and precisely with the same meaning in all the Teutonic dialects. The dead without distinction of good or evil, age or rank, wander there conversing about their former state on earth; they are unhappy and they feel their wretched state acutely. They have no strength or power of body or mind. . . Nothing can be more gloomy and comfortless than the whole aspect of the realm of Hadees, as pictured by Homer."

The heathen sages admit that they invented the doctrine. Says Polybius: "Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by the fear and terror of the invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions." B. vi. 56.

Strabo says: "The multitude are restrained from vice by the punishments the gods are said to inflict upon offenders, and by those terrors and threatenings which certain dreadful words and monstrous forms imprint upon their minds.