536 ESCHATOLOGY Eternity of punishment is often assumed to be a truth of natural religion, an intuitive human belief. It would be truer to say that in all races the first vague guesses at im mortality include no thought of retribution at all. The continued existence was " something between being and not being." l Man survived only as a shadow of himself. Intel lectually and morally he ended at death. Homer speaks of life and form in Hades, but says there is no mind there at all. The movement, freedom, joy of existence, ended for the Greek at death. The best that could then happen to him was to know that his body had been buried. All else was featureless, lifeless, inane, an existence without even the excitement of the possibility of dying again. The bourne once reached, not only was there no return, but no further bourne remained to be aimed at. Thus the intense consciousness of the apparent finality of death determined the form of the earliest hopes of immortality when they began to dawn. Progress did not enter into them; there would be no discipline because nothing to exercise it on, no change of condition, for this implies power of adapta tion if not of choice. The primitive Hebrew conception was even less tolerable than the Greek. Sheol, translated by the LXX. Hades, and by the Authorized Version, with curious impartiality, thirty-one times " grave" and thirty one times "hell," 2 was, as originally conceived, a vast subterranean tomb, with the barred and bolted gates common to Hebrew tombs, in which the ghosts (Kephaim) did not even flit about, but lay like corpses in a sepulchre. No thought of retribution was connected with this deep and gloomy under-world. It was the common receptacle of all. The distinctions there were social or national, not moral. The only approach to a retri butive idea is found in the exile time, in an expression of Ezekiel s, who locates the uncircumcised heathen in the " sides of the pit," possibly the deepest and darkest part of Shsol. (See Ps. Ixiii. 9, Ixxxix. 19, cxliii. 3, cvii. 18; Job x. 20-22, xi. 8, iii. 14, xxx. 23; Is. viL 11, xviii. 18 ; 1 Kings xi. 2 ; Ezek. xxxii. 23.) This primitive idea had, by the time of Christ, developed under influences of a very different kind. In the first place, the horror with which an ancient Hebrew had contemplated death, because in Sheol he would be cut off from all com munion with the covenant God, was dissipated under the truer religious feeling struggling into life in the later Psalms and the book of Job. 3 At first it had been believed that Jehovah s control did not reach to the under-world. The King of Terrors was its only king. They who had been God s sheep when alive, in Sheol had a new shepherd, Death (Ps. xlix. 14, Perowne s translation). But truer views of God s nature dissipated this horror, and pious souls who despaired of redress in this life, began to look even in Sheol for a manifestation of divine justice and a proof of divine love. At length was grasped the hope of a deliverance from the prison house of the dead, and the doctrine of the resurrection crowned this hope, and gave a definite shape to the eschatology of the Jews. 4 The release from the under- world which the Jew contem plated in a bodily resurrection was found by Aryan thought in a metempsychosis. According to Josephus (Bell. Jud., ii. 8, 14), this was also a doctrine of the Pharisees and the 1 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
- Neither translation is altogether happy. It was more than "grave/ 1
and though etymologically equivalent to "hell " (the hollow), it did not gather ny of the associations of hell till after the close of the canon. 3 I. xxxviii. 18 ; Ps. cxv. 17, vi. 56, xxx. 9. See on the develop ment of ideas of immortality in the Old Testament a treatise, Ueber die Alttestamentlichcn Vorstellungen voni Zustande nach dem Tode, by Bernhard Stade, Leipsic, 1877. 4 Ps. xvi. 10, Ixxiii. 23-26, cxxxix. 7-10; Job xix. 25. The sym bolic u*e by Ezekiel of a resuscitation to express a national deliverance show** the line along which this doctrine was reached. Essenes, and the notion of pre-existence has even been traced in the New Testament. 5 The idea of retribution has now entered into eschatology, and there is a curious analogy between the Hebrew conception and Plato s. The Greek philosopher leaves incurables to suffer in the lower regions (Rep., x. 615, cf. PkcKclo, 114), when other men have choice of new lives. 6 So the Hebrews believed that the heathen and unjust would remain in the death-sleep of Sheol, while faithful Israel received back the soul in the resurrection (2 Mace. vii. 14, cf. Jos., Ant., xviii. T, 3). In different forms this thought reappears in Christian eschatology. Some find it in St Paul. It was the origin of the belief in a two-fold resurrection : the unjust, not being worthy to participate whon the saints awake at their Lord s second coming, remain below till the final judgment. But in the post-exile days that veritable middle age of Israel other influences appeared. Intolerable wrongs drove men to seek solace for themselves in visions of paradise, vengeance on their foes in visions of hell. Now appear the divisions of Sheol into receptacles for the good and bad. Their origin is seen in the apocalyptic book of Enoch. In chap. xxii. of that remarkable book, which, in the permanence of its influence as well as its form, re sembles the Inferno of Dante, 7 the seer is shown the "delightful places" where the souls of the good will be collected till judgment, and the " separations " existing between the just and unjust, "made by chasm, by water, by light above it. 8 And here first is express mention of " the castigation and the torment of those who eternally execrate and whose souls are punished and bound there for ever. 9 Analogies have been found between the Greek Tartarus 10 and the Hebrew hell, and the influence of the Western mythology traced in the latter; but in order to supply symbolism of torment of surpassing horror, no foreign influence was necessary. Gehenna (i.e., the valley of Hinnom or the sons of Hinnom) and its ghastly associations were ready to supply images terrible beyond any that the mind of heathen poet or philosopher had conceived. Already known as the perpetual abode of corruption and fire, " the place where lie the corpses of those who have transgressed against Jehovah and their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched," it had become the apt symbol of utter moral depravity and ruin. But it was the unknown author of the book of Enoch who first saw it as " the accursed of the accursed for ever," who first placed in the dark ravine one of the mouths of hell, and thus from an emblem of the moral ruin attending sin, made it the actual place of punishment for sinners. 11 Henceforth Gehenna hell becomes known as a part of Hades, or Sheol. There is yet another place of torment reserved for the final reception of fallen angels and wicked men. It is the lake of fire and brimstone of the Apocalypse. Its origin also appears in Enoch, though the descriptions are too confused to allow of certain identifica- 6 See Glanville s Lvx Orientalis, and Dr H. More s Divine Dialogues on John ix. 2. 6 Egypt appears to have been the common source of these ideas. See Herod, ii. 123. Their influence on the views of Origen is well known. 7 Cf. Stanley, Jcuish Church, iii. 372. 8 Cf. Luke xvi. 9 Lawrence s Translation. The expression in Daniel *xii. 2, "Some to shame and everlasting contempt," is much less explicit. 10 The participle Taprapcacras = having hurled into Tartarus, occurs in 2 Pet. ii. 4. This is the only instance of the use of the word either in the LXX. or N. T. It should be remembered that the Greek Tar tarus was properly the prison-house of defeated gods or demi-gods, and that its employment in the place cited as the dungeon for fallen angels is in strict analogy. 11 The precise topographical description of Gehenna in Enoch, which the Palestine Exploration Survey has confirmed in ""detail, is another likeness to Dante s mapped and measured hell. See Stanley, Jewish
Ch., iii. 373, note, ami Jerusalem Recovered, p. 307.