4.9 Hell and Gehenna

The popular conception of hell is of a place of punishment for wicked ‘immortal souls’ straight after death, or the place of torment for those who are rejected at the judgment. It is our conviction that the Bible teaches that hell is the grave, where all men go at death.

As a word, the original Hebrew word ‘sheol’, translated ‘hell’, means ‘a covered place’. ‘Hell’ is the anglicised version of ‘sheol’; thus when we read of ‘hell’ we are not reading a word which has been fully translated. A ‘helmet’ is literally a ‘hell-met’, meaning a covering for the head. In old English, especially in Scotland, there was the practice of "helling potatoes", burying them underground in Winter, covering them, in order to preserve them; putting a thatched roof on a building was to "hell a house", to cover it. Biblically, this ‘cover ...