Best of all, you can “go to hell” and visit the five so-called portals beyond purgatory yourself. Gehenna Few places seem as synonymous with the netherworld than Gehenna, which is the Greek ...

In the earliest version of the text, the word that Jesus uses is not 'hell' but 'Gehenna'. Rather than referring to a place of eternal torment, Gehenna is a real location just outside the walls ...

I will attempt to do that now. But I stress that my aim is limited to trying to understand how a belief in Gehenna can be moral—making it palatable is beyond my power or intention. My goal in ...

Sheol came to be thought of as a place of waiting, where a person’s soul could either be purified and sent on to Gan Eden or sent for punishment in Gehenna. Jews understand this to mean that ...

Gehenna developed as an idea of a place of punishment for those who had lived immoral lives. It is the Jewish equivalent of the Christian Hell. As these concepts developed, Sheol came to be ...