HELL by R. F. Cottrell

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 1, 1876

FromThe Review and Herald, Review and Herald, Vol. 47, No. 22.

HELL

By R. F. Cottrell

The term hell, in every instance of its occurrence in the common version of the Old Testament, is rendered from sheol in the Hebrew, to which the Greek hades corresponds. It is used to designate the place and state of all the dead, whether righteous or wicked, and is frequently translated grave, and properly too, as that is the usual receptacle of the silent sleepers who have gone down to the dust in fulfillment of the sentence, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” But the popular use of the word hell, as meaning the place of the punishment of the wicked, leads many of the common readers of the Bible astray in the reading of the Old Testament and all those instances in the New Testament where hades is the word in the original. Should we render sheol, in every instance of its occurrence in the Old Testament, by one uniform word, and let that word be hell, the reading of many a text would seem strange indeed. But there could be no reasonable objection to this. Sheol is used to convey one idea to the mind, and might be rendered uniformly by the same term. We will quote a few texts where this Hebrew word occurs, giving the word hell as its representative.

The language of the pious Jacob, who prevailed with God would be, “I will go down into hell unto my son mourning.” And David’s charge to Solomon concerning certain gray-headed sinners, such as had “shed the blood of war,” in time of peace, would be, “Let not his hoar head go down to hell in peace.” “But his hoar head bring thou down to hell with blood.” Again, we should read in Psalms, “For in death there is no remembrance of thee; in hell who shall give thee thanks?” And we would find the wise man exhorting all to the improvement of their time in good works, from the fact that “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in hell, whither thou goest.” According to this testimony all, the good and the bad, excepting those translated, are destined to one place, and that place is one in which no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, exists. This is positively affirmed; and as the Scriptures do not contradict themselves, it is certain that any representation of life, knowledge and activity among the inhabitants of that “land of darkness,” is a figure of speech by which unconscious and inanimate things are represented as living, acting, and speaking. The following are examples: “Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us. Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us?” Isa. 14: 8–10. “The strong and the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of hell,” &c. See Eze. 32: 18–32. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is another example. These things were never spoken or written to induce the belief that the dead in sheol or hades were conscious and capable of conversing and acting; for this would be a contradiction of the positive assertion that there is no knowledge or work there. The trees of the wood, the timbers in a house built by dishonest gain, the hire of the laborer kept back by fraud, and the blood of the martyrs, are made to speak in the same way that the dead are made to converse; Isa. 14: 8; Hab. 2: 12; Jas. 5: 4; Rev. 6: 10; and all this for the purpose only of bringing true thoughts of future retribution vividly before the mind. And it would be no more absurd to hold that all these are literal facts, than to hold that the dead in hades, sheol, hell, or the grave, are conscious, and capable of conversation and action. R. F. COTTRELL.