Oh, interesting! Can you give any more detail?
Why certainly good sir prepare to understand why the vast majority of christian religions(over 44,000 denominations) don't know what they believe.
To start off I like the way the
Encyclopedia Americana sums it up -
“Much confusion and misunderstanding has been caused through the early translators of the Bible persistently rendering the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades and Gehenna by the word
hell. The simple transliteration of these words by the translators of the revised editions of the Bible has not sufficed to appreciably clear up this confusion and misconception.”—The Encyclopedia Americana (1942), Vol. XIV, p. 81.
Translators have allowed their personal beliefs to color their work instead of being consistent in their rendering of the original-language words. For example:
(1) The King James Version rendered she’ohl′ as “
hell,” “the grave,” and “the pit”;
hai′des is therein rendered both “
hell” and “grave”;
ge′en·na is also translated “
hell.”
The word
hell as found in the KJV is read as "the-grave" most commonly in other translations.
Why you ask?
Well other bibles simply transliterate the original-language words that are sometimes rendered "
hell" - In other words transliterate means they express the letters of our alphabet but leave the words untranslated. Make sense?
So the original Hebrew word that KJV renders
hell is '
She'ohl' and the Greek Equivalent is '
hai'des'. Which in both instances refer not to a individual burial place but to a common grave of the dead. So basically bible writers when saying "hey I am going to the grave" would say I am going to "
She'ohl" in the Hebrew scriptures and "
hai'des" in the greek. They both mean the same thing. Job said he was going down into
She'ohl as did many of the prophets they just meant "Hey I am going to the grave"
Now there is one other greek word used in the bible considering death that is 'Ge'en-na'. Jesus used the word to describe people that would die and have no chance at resurrection.
Jesus used that term because it would be immediately familiar to the Jews since 'Ge'en-na' was a actual physical place that god told the isrealites to throw the bodies of those not deserving of a proper burial. The pagan kings were thrown there for child sacrifice. It represented being cut off from god, dishonor as not having a proper burial today in many lands constitutes. Now this is where it gets interesting through time 'Ge'en-na' became a basically a garbage dump that was continually kept on fire to break down trash.
So we have 3 words:
She'ohl and
hai'des which mean common grave and Ge'en-na which was a garbage dump where unclean and dishonored people were thrown. The King James takes all 3 of these renderings and calls them "
hell" and takes jesus allusion to Ge'en-na as a litteral place of unending fire and torture.
With just one word the majority of christianity believe something that doesn't exist. There was actually a NPR on it where this Protestant church leader is branded a heretic for basically trying to correct this belief system from his pulpit.
Here are some other sources:
Concerning this use of “
hell” to translate these original words from the Hebrew and Greek, Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (1981, Vol. 2, p. 187) says: “HADES . . . It corresponds to ‘Sheol’ in the O.T. [Old Testament]. In the A.V. of the O.T. [Old Testament] and N.T. [New Testament], it has been unhappily rendered ‘
hell.’”
Collier’s Encyclopedia (1986, Vol. 12, p. 28) says concerning “
hell”: “First it stands for the Hebrew Sheol of the Old Testament and the Greek Hades of the Septuagint and New Testament. Since Sheol in Old Testament times referred simply to the abode of the dead and suggested no moral distinctions, the word ‘
hell,’ as understood today, is not a happy translation.”
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, under “
hell” says: “fr[om] . . . helan to conceal.” The word “
hell” thus originally conveyed no thought of heat or torment but simply of a ‘covered over or concealed place.’ In the old English dialect the expression “
helling potatoes” meant, not to roast them, but simply to place the potatoes in the ground or in a cellar.
The meaning given today to the word “
hell” is that portrayed in Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which meaning is completely foreign to the original definition of the word. The idea of a “
hell” of fiery torment, however, dates back long before Dante or Milton. The Grolier Universal Encyclopedia (1971, Vol. 9, p. 205) under “
hell” says: “Hindus and Buddhists regard
hell as a place of spiritual cleansing and final restoration. Islamic tradition considers it as a place of everlasting punishment.” The idea of suffering after death is found among the pagan religious teachings of ancient peoples in Babylon and Egypt. Babylonian and Assyrian beliefs depicted the “nether world . . . as a place full of horrors, . . . presided over by gods and demons of great strength and fierceness.” Although ancient Egyptian religious texts do not teach that the burning of any individual victim would go on forever, they do portray the “Other World” as featuring “pits of fire” for “the damned.”—The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, by Morris Jastrow, Jr., 1898, p. 581; The Book of the Dead, with introduction by E. Wallis Budge, 1960, pp. 135, 144, 149, 151, 153, 161, 200.
