DESTRUCTION OF THE WICKED.
THE Bible does indeed reveal a hell, but not by any means such a one as will correspond with any of the preceding. We shall closely examine all those terms that have been supposed to mean hell, as a place of protracted suffering. The terms are:—Hell—Pit—Bottomless Pit—Prison—Grave—Nether or lower parts of the earth—Shevah—Kever—Sheol—Hades—Gehenna—Tophet—Tartarus—Lake of fire and brimstone—Unquenchable fire. 1. MEANING OF THE WORD HELL.
This word is now generally understood to mean a place in which the damned are perpetually tormented; the orthodox hell corresponds with the Tartarus of the ancient heathen. But originally hell had a mild and harmless signification. It is of Saxon origin, and is derived from the word helan, and was spelled, hele, helle, hell, heile, and helan. It meant to hele, or to hell, heal, hill, shell, hulk, shovel, shiel, shield, shawl, i. e., to cover up, to hide. The word in its primitive form is still retained in the eastern, and especially the western, counties of England; and means something hidden, or covered, the grave. To hele over a thing is to cover it. The word hell is still retained in the English liturgy, according to the old English translation of sheol, in Ps. xlix, 14; lv, 16; lxxxviii, 2; lxxxix, 47. It is now altered in these places to grave. Those who wish to trace this word hell to its origin may consult Lord King’s History of the Creed, ch. 4; Doddridge on Rev. i, 18; Leigh’s Crit. Sacr. in haides; Junius’ Etymolog. Anglican in Heile and Hele; and Dr. Clarke, Matt. xi, 23. The Dr. says, hell comes from the Saxon helan, to cover, or hide; hence the tiling or slating of a house is called in Cornwall, heling, to this day; and in Lancashire the covers of books are so called. The first translators of the Bible undoubtedly meant by hell, a covered or unseen place, the grave, and perhaps sometimes the state of death; making the word synonymous with the Hebrew sheol, and the Greek hades; and never designed it to represent a place of conscious suffering; that is a refinement of modern days. The word occurs fifty-two times in the common translation. It is translated from the words, sheol, hades, gehenna, and tartarus. But as we design to investigate the meaning of every original word bearing upon our subject, this account of the English word hell will suffice. The word Pit as a place of deposit for the dead, only means the grave. The word occurs more than seventy times in the O. T., and is translated from ten different Hebrew words. It will only be necessary to examine three, as having any allusion to death, sheol, the grave, as a general term, or the state of death; shokhath, destruction; and bour, pit. Eze. xxxii, 23, “Whose (kever) graves are set in the sides of the (bour) pit.” Ps. xxx, 9, “O Lord, . . . what profit is there in my blood, when I go down to (shokhath) destruction? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall I declare thy truth?” Shokhath is here translated pit. Ps. ix, 15, “The heathen are sunk into the (shokhath) [destruction] that they made: in the net which they hid is their own foot taken.” Ps. xxxv, 7, “For without cause have they hid for me their net (shokhath) [destruction]; without cause have digged for my soul.” Ps. xciv, 13, “That thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity, until (shokhath) destruction be cut out for the wicked.” Isa. xxxviii, 17: “Thou hast in love to my soul, delivered it from (shokhath) destruction.” Well might the translators translate shokhath, pit, in this place to conceal the fact that if the pious Hezekiah had died at that time, his soul would have been destroyed until the resurrection. Isa. li, 14, “The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, and that he should not die in (shokhath) destruction, (or should not be destroyed,) nor that his bread should fail.” Lam. iv, 20, “The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, was taken in their (shokhath) destruction, of whom we said, Under this shadow we shall live among the heathen.” This appears to be a prophecy relating to the destruction of the being of Christ, till God raised him from the dead. Eze. xxviii, 8, “They shall bring thee down to (shokhath) destruction, and thou shalt die the deaths of those that are slain in the midst of the seas.” Job xxxiii,
18, “He withdraweth his soul from (shokhath) destruction, and his life from perishing with a sword.
24, Then will he entreat his favor, and say, Deliver him from going down to (shokhath) destruction.
I have bound a ransom.
28, “He hath redeemed my soul from (shokhath) destruction and my life has appeared in the light.
29, Lo, all these things performeth God, time after time with man.
30, To bring back his soul from destruction, (shokhath); to enlighten him with the light of the living.” Here are twelve places, where a word that means destruction, has been improperly translated pit, and so far is it from implying a state of conscious torment, that it five times expressly points out the destruction of the soul, and in all places implies the destruction of being. See also Prov. xxviii, 10. Three times is the word sheol, which means grave, and a state of death, translated pit. Job xvii,
13, “When I would hope, (sheol), the mansion of the dead is my house; in darkness I spread my bed.
14, I say to corruption, Thou art my father! My mother! and my sister! to the worm.
15, Ah! where is that which I long for? Ay, that which I long for—Who can see it?
16, Into the depth of sheol shall I descend, when we are together in the dust.” Common Version.—“They shall go down to the bars of (sheol) the pit, when our rest together (i. e., with corruption and worms) is in the dust.
Num. xvi, 30, 33, “But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quickly into sheol; then shall ye understand that these men have provoked the Lord. . . . And they and all that appertained them, went down alive into sheol, and the earth closed upon them; and they perished from among the congregation.” In these three places where sheol is translated pit, we perceive that death, corruption and entire destruction are meant. The word sheol will receive further attention. Ps. xxx, 3, reads, “O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from (sheol) the grave; thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the (bour) pit.” Ps. lv, 23, “But thou, O God, shall bring them down into the (bour) deep place of (shokhath) destruction; bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days.” Zech. ix, 11, “As for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the (bour) pit wherein is no water.” In the word pit then, we find no indications of a place of conscious torment. The phrase, “bottomless pit,” is used in our version as a synonym for the Greek word abussos, which is from a, intensive, and bussos or bathos, deep; very deep; abyss; gulf; ocean; sea; and metaphorically, immense; profound; a wilderness. The corresponding word in Hebrew is tehoum, which occurs, Gen. i, 2; vii, 11; viii, 2; xlix, 25; Deut. xxxiii, 13; Job xxxviii, 30; xli, 32; Ps. xxxvi, 6; xlii, 7; civ, 6; Prov. viii, 48; Isa. ii, 10; lxiii, 13; Eze. xxvi, 13; xxxi, 4, 15; Amos vii, 4; Hab. iii, 10. We quote Gen. xlix, 25:—
“And by the Almighty, who shall bless thee
Blessings of heaven above.
Blessings of the [tehoum—abussos] shall we
Call it “bottomless pit,” or the sea!
Or, deep that lieth under.
Blessings of the breast and the womb:
The blessings of thy father have prevailed
Above the blessings of the perpetual mountains;
And the desirable things of the everlasting hills.” A prophecy relating to the descendants of Joseph, probably the Anglo-Saxon race, who should ultimately become masters of the sea. In none of the above places is there any idea presented that tehoum is a place of suffering; it was not the blessings of the “bottomless pit,” that the dying patriarch prophetically conferred upon his son Joseph; neither is the term ever used as being the receptacle of any one class of the dead. Ps. cxviii, 7, “Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps.” Here the word tehoum occurs in the plural form, and is translated deeps. There must then be more than one such place, and as they or their inhabitants are all called upon to praise God, so the word cannot mean a place of punishment. In Job xxxviii, 29, the word evidently means sea or ocean. “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoar frost of heaven, who gendered it? 30, That the waters should conceal themselves as a stone, and the face of the deep should become fixed!” Job xli, 31, Leviathan “maketh [metsoolah] the deep waters to boil like a pot . . . one would think the tehoum to be hoary.” It is here used as a synonym to deep waters. In the N. T. the word occurs without its intensive form, about fourteen times; it is usually translated deep; and with the intensive form it means very deep. We give a few examples. Luke v, 4, “Launch out into the deep.” Rom. xi, 33, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” John iv, 11, “The well is deep.” 2 Cor. xi, 25, “A night and a day I have been in the deep.” We give all the places where the emphatic form abussos occurs. Luke viii, 31, “They besought him that he would not command them to go out into the abussos.” Rom. x, 7, “Who shall descend into the abussos?” Here it seems used for the grave. To make abussos mean hades here, would be equal to, Who shall ascend to heaven? and who shall enter into a state of death? which would destroy the double antithesis. We need not descend to the grave, but only believe “that God hath raised him from the dead,” or from the grave. No sensible person supposes that Paul meant, we need not go down to “the bottomless pit,” or to hell, to find Christ!! Rev. ix, 1, “To him was given the key, ton phrastos tes abussos, of the very deep cavern. And he opened the very deep cavern; and there arose a smoke out of the cavern, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the cavern.” ix, 77, “And they had a king over them, ton aggelos tes abussos, the messenger of death, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Destruction; but in the Greek his name is the Destroyer.” We translate abussos here by death or hades. The prophecy seems to refer to the Buonapartean dynasty. Napoleon is said to96have sent fifteen millions to the grave. This is the only passage where abussos is joined with a word signifying pit or cavern. Rev. xi, 7, “And when they shall have finished their testimony, the wild beast that ascendeth out of the (abussos) abyss shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.” Rev. xvii, 8, “The wild beast that thou sawest, which was, but is not, will yet ascend out of the abyss (abussos) and go into destruction; and they that dwell upon the earth, (whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world,) will view with wonder and admiration, when they see, that the wild beast that was, but is not, will yet be present,” Rev. xx, 1, “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the abussos, . . . and he cast the dragon into the abussos . . . that he should deceive the nations no more.” We have now quoted all the places where abussos appears. In no place can it be found that wicked men are cast into the abussos, in any other sense than into the grave; neither does a pit without a bottom seem a suitable place for confinement, nor for tormenting the living souls of dead men; or as dead men and dead souls are synonymous expressions, we are justified in writing it so as to confute itself. Abussos is not a suitable place to torment the living souls of dead souls, or the dead living souls!! Revelation speaks of the rise of two great powers: the Dragon deceives the habitable earth, the Roman Empire; but the False Prophet, the propounder of false doctrines, [Rev. xix, 20,] “deceiveth my people,” tous emous: Vatican and Moscow. So the power that deceives the Roman Empire is different from those professed teachers of these latter days who “deceive mine, or my people,” by preaching peradventure the very fables we are opposing. Will the reader ponder and mark these popular preachers of false doctrines, and look for them around him.