What is Hell?

Gregory Cook’s Speculation on Nahum and Assyrian Underworld Imagery

And this is a thought by Gregory Cook. He's the only commentator, out of all the commentators that I read putting this together, that comes to this conclusion. So I would say this is a speculation, but I think it's a speculation worth looking at, because I think it holds true.

Gregory Cook says, I believe that Nahum used these verses to portray Nineveh as a city of the dead. He alluded to both biblical and Assyrian concepts of the underworld. Assyria shared a common culture with Babylon.

Many of the mythic stories of Mesopotamia pertain to gods and goddesses common to both nations. One uniquely Assyrian myth may perhaps help to explain why Nahum 3 -3 tells us about so many dead bodies.

Here's what it says. The netherworld vision of an Assyrian crown prince, that's the name of the scroll, tells the oldest known visionary journey to hell by a human being. It recounts the story of an Assyrian crown prince who voluntary visits the underworld after a period of personal crisis.

The myth does not name this crown prince, but Ashurbanipal is the best candidate. Negril, the chief god of the Mesopotamian underworld, does not appreciate the intrusion and is about to smash Ashurbanipal's skull with a scepter.

The prince is understandably terrified. Then Negril's wise advisor counsels him to let the prince go in order to help Negril's public relations on earth. The god concurs and lets the prince go after the prince vows to do so.

So the prince and Negril, who represents a demonic force, kind of like are in covenant, and now he's gonna go back and declare him. If this myth stemmed from Ashurbanipal, then Nineveh's emperor had a special association with the god of the dead.

Okay, again, this is speculation, but this is what was taught in Assyria. They had similar gods in this respect. So let's see what this looks like. The doctrine of hell finds much clearer expression because when he went down to the underworld, that would be considered hell, and we're gonna learn what that means.

It's not literally hell. But the doctrine of hell finds much clearer expression in the New Testament than in the Old. Much of what we do know about hell came directly from the lips of Jesus. The Old Testament does speak about the grave and Sheol.

One such passage from Isaiah helps us to understand Nahum's multiple references to Nineveh's voracious appetite for plunder, torn flesh, and dead bodies. According to Isaiah, Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opens its mouth beyond measure.

Nineveh keeps, consumes, and keeps. It lets nothing leave. So Nineveh's constantly just taking on new nations and destroying them, not allowing them to leave. The reference to God's pursuing his enemies into darkness in Nahum earlier, in Nahum 1 .8, also uses the imagery of Sheol.

Several biblical passages use darkness as a description of Sheol. For example, are not my days few? Then cease and leave me alone that I may find a little cheer before I go, and I shall not return to the land of darkness and deep shadow, the land of gloom like thick darkness, like deep shadow without any order, where light is as thick as darkness.

Okay, so the underworld, Sheol, is considered a place of darkness. Psalm 88 speaks many times of the land of the dead. The psalmist seems to despair from beginning to end. In verse six he says, you have put me in the depths, in the depths of the pit, in the regions of the dark and deep.

So in Sheol, like the realm of the dead, are gonna be many dead bodies. That's why Cook is making this association. Nineveh's gates and bars also suggest Sheol, as Hezekiah's lament reveals. I said in the middle of my days I must depart.

I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years. I said I shall not see the Lord, the Lord in the land of the living. I shall look on man no more among the inhabitants of the world. So you have the land of the living that we're in, and then the place of Sheol where people are dead, they're disembodied.

Jonah also described his impending death in such a way. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.

Yet you brought my life up from the pit, oh Lord, my God. Once a human descends to the land of the dead, gates and bars lock behind him. Once you're dead, you can't come back until the last day at the resurrection.

Later in Nahum 3 .15, we're gonna read, their fire will consume you. The sword will cut you down. It will consume you as the locust does. Multiply yourself like the creeping locust. Multiply yourself like the swarming locust, right?

So when we hear about hell, what do you think of? We think of fire. We think of being consumed by the fire. Now, depending on your position, you may think we're eventually gonna die out or you hold to eternity in hell, eternal conscious torment.

Either way, it will be tormentuous, right? I saw something on Facebook where he was accusing a God of torturing people in hell. And I responded back. I said, there's no verse in the scriptures that says that God tortures people.

People are in torment because they're cut off from the grace and the blessing of God and they're in the presence of God receiving his justice. So it's not God torturing somebody. It's the righteous result of their sin.

God is giving them what they deserve. The words of Nahum 3 .15 fit even better with Jesus' description of hell in Mark 9 .48. In this verse, Jesus quotes Isaiah 66 and teaches that where their worm does not die and the fire is not crunched, referring to hell.

Nineveh experienced literal fire and sword when the Babylonians took the city. It experienced the onslaught of figurative locust as the meads removed everything of value. Jesus applies these words to a more horrific end.

He warns us to take any step necessary to avoid eternity in hell. The doctrine of hell has fallen into disfavor, right? It doesn't, many evangelical churches don't talk about hell or don't tell anybody about hell, but it's loving to tell somebody or warn somebody not to go to that place and how to escape judgment from God.

Many preachers, churches, and denominations have chosen either to openly deny God's eternal judgment or to just ignore it. We do not have the option to change God's message to suit our culture. However, he has charged us to speak plainly.

We may make people angry, we may lose friends, we may lose church members, yet we do not have the option of dancing around or ignoring the issue of hell. We have been charged with a message to deliver.

We must deliver it. That message includes eternal punishment for all who will not submit to Christ as Lord. We do the world no favors by shirking this duty. They may hate us, but they desperately need to know the truth, right?

Hell is not an easy thing to talk about. It's not something that we want people to go to. We shouldn't want people to go there. It's a place of eternal conscious torment, right? So we have the solution to their problem.

It's called the gospel. Jesus is Lord. You will stand before him and give an account of your life one day, but he also provides the solution. This one whom you will make an account to had died on a cross, was buried, rose from the dead to pay the penalty for the consequences of sinners.

If you repent, change the way you think about your sin and trust in the Savior, he will save you from your sins. So the very one whom you're gonna stand before to give an account of your life is the very one who also made provision to bring you so that you could escape the judgment.

He will take the judgment upon himself. That's the good news. So what about hell? So this is something that, his name was Jesse Justin from the Cripplegate. I used his article to go through because he summarized it so succinctly.

Sheol as the Realm of the Dead in the Old Testament

So what is hell? And we have a couple of words in the New Testament that describe it. We have Sheol, Hades, Gehenna. They're all terms the Bible uses for the location people go to when they die. Do these terms all describe the same place?

Are they all hell? Well, if so, why use different words for them? Oh, there is Jesse Johnson, okay, from the Cripplegate. Sheol, let's define what this is. Sheol is the Old Testament word for the realm of the dead.

And this includes both the saved and the lost. Consider the patriarch Jacob, who thought of himself as going to Sheol when he died. And here's the verse. All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, no, I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning.

So in the Old Testament, the term Sheol represented the realm of the dead. And everybody who died went to Sheol, righteous and unrighteous, people who had faith in God and people who rejected God. Sheol is not only where the patriarchs go, those who led Israel, but it is clearly spoken of as the realm to which those who die absent of saving faith also descend.

Moses declared that when people die who despised Yahweh, they descended into Sheol, and that's in Numbers. Sheol is also known as the realm of the fire of God's judgment. Number 1630 reads, but if the Lord creates something new and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all their belongings to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.

So believers and unbelievers all went to the realm of the dead. It's best to understand Sheol as a term for the realm of the dead, where both the righteous and unrighteous went when they died, okay? So you both went to the realm of the dead.

You'll notice that we said went, right? It's past tense because for the righteous, Sheol was an Old Testament concept. It changes from the new covenant. Jesus is truly human, and under the old covenant, he experienced death like all humans do.

He too descended to Sheol and proclaimed victory over the grave by liberating the souls of the righteous and bringing them to heaven. Now, when church-age believers die, they do not go to Sheol, but rather to heaven to be with the Lord forever, and that's Philippians 1 .23.

I am hard-pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account, okay? Again, I spilled the beans. That extra piece wasn't supposed to be in there, but anyway, so Sheol is still a place of the dead, but because Jesus fulfilled the old covenant, died on the cross, he's now seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling and reigning till his enemies are made afoot to his first feet.

He went in to Sheol, and when we recite the Apostles' Creed, we say he descended into hell, and there's that word hell, right? Translators use hell to describe Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and we have to discern what that word actually means.

We were watching a video in the mentoring group, and the interlocutor brought up the subject of hell, and if we don't know how to answer them correctly, we're not gonna represent our worldview correctly.

So I've had other people who oppose Christianity say, well, Jesus went to hell, and then I had to look it up and understand that it wasn't hell the way we understand the second death. It was the realm of the dead, because Jesus did die, right?

And we see in Acts and the Psalms that he will not let his body see corruption. So he went to hell and then brought the saints who died before into heaven. So what is Hades? Hades is a New Testament Greek term that is used to refer to Sheol.

That's the Hebrew word. Sheol is the Hebrew word, Hades is the Greek word for that. Hades, Sheol refers to the same place, but there's a noticeable difference in the way the Old Testament and the New Testament speak of Sheol and Hades.

The Old Testament speaks of Sheol inclusively, where even the righteous dead descend to, so just and unjust both go to Sheol, but in the New Testament, because of Jesus' victory over death and the liberty he brings to the righteous in Sheol, Jesus does not teach that believers go to Hades, but rather that believers will be with him in heaven, John 14, three.

Hades is still a place for the dead, but not for the believers in the new covenant. Jesus says, and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself that where I am, you may be also.

What does Jesus tell the thief on the cross? Today, you will be with me in paradise. Now, within the realm of the dead, if you go to Luke chapter 16, there's the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man is in torment.

He's dying for just a drop of water, and then he sees Abraham across a great gulf, which no one can span. So Abraham is in the, it's called the bosom of Abraham. Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham. He's safe.

He's in a place of peace, whereas the rich man is in torment. Okay, so even in Sheol, there was a separation between the righteous and unrighteous, but it was still a place of the dead. For that reason, the New Testament emphasis on Hades is a place of suffering and judgment.

It's still the same location as Sheol, and the same place where Old Testament saints went at their death. Peter says that Jesus descended into Hades. That's where we get it in the Apostles' Creed. He descended into hell.

He descended into Hades when he died. While the Old Testament speaks of him descending to Sheol and not being left there, right? Matthew 11, 23, and you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades.

Luke 10, and you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you shall be brought down to Hades. Luke 16, the rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes.

Okay, so you understand that Sheol and Hades are a place of the dead. Two different words, one Hebrew, one Greek, talking about the same place. Ultimately, Jesus has authority over Sheol and Hades. He has the keys to death in Hades, Revelation 1, 18, which is another way of saying he can bind or loose people from there as he pleases.

Of course, he frees all the saints there at his resurrection and then he uses the keys again to empty Sheol by casting the damned souls into the lake of fire. That's to come on the last day of the Lord.

When he comes back and everybody's standing in front of him, he separates the sheep from the goats. The goats are cast into the lake of fire and that's the second death, final death. Gehenna, this is the last term that people use to refer to hell, is the New Testament name for a valley outside of Jerusalem.

In the Old Testament, that valley was called the Valley of Hinnom and it is where the Israelites sacrificed their children to Molech. By the time of Christ, that name was pronounced Gehenna and it is said to be the place where trash and dead animals were burned.

It was perpetually on fire and thus Jesus uses it as an image of hell. So when he looked down at the Valley of Hinnom and Gehenna, it was a place, it was like a dump where the trash was on fire and he pointed to that and said, that's what hell is like.

Many English translations recognize the place as obviously referring to hell and thus if you look in your ESV translation, you'll even see it translated as hell. In fact, James 3 .6 uses Gehenna as an obvious idiom for hell and the tongue is said among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life and setting it on fire by hell.

That word in Greek is Gehenna, right? So you have to be careful when you're reading the translation to know, you look behind it if you have an interlinear to see what word he's using. To summarize, in the Old Testament, both the righteous and unrighteous went to Sheol which contained realms of suffering for the unrighteous and rest or worship for the righteous.

The New Testament refers to this as Hades. However, when Jesus rose from the grave, he emptied Sheol and Hades of the righteous and now when Christians die, they do not go down to Sheol or Hades, but up to heaven.

Meanwhile, the unrighteous are left in Hades until the final judgment when they are then resurrected, given new bodies and cast into the fires of hell or Gehenna forever, Revelation 20. That is the second death.

Gregory Cook’s Assyrian Parallel and the Pile of Dead Bodies

Okay, so now what Gregory Cook was trying to say is where the dead bodies are piled up, that's a picture similar to hell of what Assyria and Nineveh looked like after God had the Babylonians come in and destroy them.

Speculation, but I think there's a lot of parallels there that we could look at. So any final questions? We're coming to the end. Yes. I would say that all of the warnings, even in the book of Hebrews and Romans, throughout the New Testament, those who are born of God's seed, it's an imperishable seed, right?

You're gonna hear that warning and you're going to heed it. Part of the new covenant in Ezekiel 36, God writes his laws on our hearts and compels us to follow them. When the Holy Spirit takes up residence in you, it's a deposit, a seal guaranteeing your final outcome.

So when we who are spirit-filled believers hear a warning, we don't say, that doesn't apply to me, I'm saved. I don't have to do that. We hear that and we say, oh my goodness, I need to change the way I think about my sin.

I need to be conformed to the image of Jesus and be a co-laborer with Jesus, right? To put to death the misdeeds of the flesh, right? So that I'm actively working towards being sanctified. We co-labor with the spirit in our sanctification, right?

And our rewards are gonna be reflective of that. So we don't look at, a true believer doesn't look at those things and say, that doesn't apply to me. You know who says that doesn't apply to me? Professing believers who don't possess faith.

Look at what the world is, look at what the church is doing with regards to fornication, with regards to homosexuality, with regards to all this. Oh no, you could be a Christian and homosexual. Oh no, you can live with your girlfriend.

You can cohabitate, that's not a problem. It's grace, we're not under the law, we're under grace. That is a false convert. That's the one who's gonna be cut off. Aside from God being against you, what's another one of the most scariest verses in the scriptures?

Matthew 7, 21. There will be many who come to me who say, Lord, Lord. They got their doctrine right. They recognize he's Lord, Lord, Lord. And they actually did something. Didn't we prophesy in your name?

Didn't we cast out demons, perform miracles? What does Jesus say? Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. In other words, you abandon the law. You don't need the law. You workers of iniquity. I never knew you.

He doesn't say, I knew you for a while, and then you ran away. He says, I never knew you. John says, they went out from us, but they were not of us. So we're called to test ourselves to see if we're in the faith.

Constantly going back to the scriptures to see, am I conforming? Am I being sanctified? If you're not being sanctified, you have to question, were you ever justified? Because if you were justified and you recognize the penalty for your sin and you recognize the mercy and the grace of God in your life, you are going to pursue God, right?

You're going to read your Bible. You're going to obey what you read because that's the fruit of the spirit. Does that help? Yes, Mike. No, Sheol and Hades are just the place of the dead. Now, it was a place of torment for unbelievers where believers were not punished for their sin, okay?

So although the place of torment is not the second death, which would be the fires of hell, it is still a place of torment, right? So Sheol and Hades are where everyone goes prior to Jesus after you die, all right?

But there was a gulf separating Abraham's bosom and Lazarus and the rich man. And what's interesting is this is the only parable that doesn't name the rich man. He's labeled the rich man. He's not given a name, right?

And why is that? Because for all eternity, he's going to be known as the rich man, suffering, suffering the torments of hell. Whereas Lazarus is going to be known as Lazarus. This is who you are. I trusted in the future Messiah.

No, it's not purgatory because in purgatory, your sins are purged from you and you eventually get to heaven. Unbelievers don't go to purgatory, according to Roman Catholicism. Unbelievers go to hell. Believers go to purgatory where the remaining stain of sin that hasn't been purged while you were on earth would be purged away and make you fit to go to heaven.

That's why Roman Catholics pray for the dead. They pray that the continual purging would happen until it's finally complete, and then they'll go to heaven. That's why they have indulgences, right? You can pay to get one of your dead relatives out of purgatory into heaven, right?

So Sheol is not purgatory. Sheol and Hades is a place of the dead. Now it's only for unbelievers, whereas believers now enter into the blessing and the presence of God, Jesus. They're in the presence of Jesus, who's seated at the right hand of God the Father.

Yes, sure. It was Jewish tradition and still is Jewish tradition because I went into a temple and I was witnessing to them. They believe that everybody will eventually get to heaven. You have a 12-month period in which your sins will be purged and then everyone will get to heaven.

It's actually universalism. And I heard this with my own ears from a rabbi in the temple that I was debating. So it's not something that he made up. This is what he told me. Maria? It could be Maria. I'm not exactly sure.

If it's Jewish tradition, it had to happen before origin, right? And like Pastor Chris said, in the book of Maccabees, it talks about ongoing punishment after death and purging. Yes, Calista? Because there's a resurrection of the just and the unjust, John chapter five, okay?

The resurrection of the just and the unjust. Now, there are people who say that unbelievers won't get a new body. I don't see the scripture saying that. I think the just and the unjust will get new bodies and then they'll be assembled before the Lord, before the throne, and then he's gonna separate the sheep from the goats.

The goats are gonna be cast into the lake of fire in their bodies, their physical bodies. The just are going to now stand before God and receive the rewards that they've earned in the body on earth, okay?

And how that all works out, I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I don't think we're gonna be getting money. I don't know how it works, but you know.