HELL
1. geenna ^1067^ represents the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom
(the valley of Tophet) and a corresponding Aramaic
word; it is found twelve times in the NT, eleven of which are in the Synoptists, in every instance as uttered by the Lord
Himself. He who says to his brother, Thou fool (see under FOOL), will be in
danger of "the hell of fire," <Matt. 5:22>; it is better to
pluck out (a metaphorical description of irrevocable law) an eye that causes
its possessor to stumble, than that his "whole body be cast into hell,"
<v. 29>; similarly with the hand, <v. 30>; in <Matt. 18:8,9>,
the admonitions are repeated, with an additional mention of the foot; here,
too, the warning concerns the person himself (for which obviously the
"body" stands in <chapt. 5>); in
<v. 8>, "the eternal fire" is mentioned as the doom, the
character of the region standing for the region itself, the two being combined
in the phrase "the hell of fire," <v. 9>. To the passage in
<Matt. 18>, that in <Mark
That God,
"after He hath killed, hath power to cast into hell," is assigned as
a reason why He should be feared with the fear that keeps from evil doing,
<Luke 12:5>; the parallel passage to this in <Matt. 10:28>
declares, not the casting in, but the doom which follows, namely, the
destruction (not the loss of being, but of wellbeing) of "both soul and
body."
In <Matt.
23> the Lord denounces the scribes and Pharisees, who in proselytizing a
person "make him two-fold more a son of hell" than themselves <v.
15>, the phrase here being expressive of moral characteristics, and declares
the impossibility of their escaping "the judgment of hell," <v.
33>. In <Jas. 3:6> "hell" is described as the source of the
evil done by misuse of the tongue; here the word stands for the powers of
darkness, whose characteristics and destiny are those of "hell."#
For terms
descriptive of "hell," see e. g., <Matt.
Notes: (1) For
the rendering "hell" as a translation of hades,
corresponding to Sheol, wrongly rendered "the
grave" and "hell," see HADES. (2) The verb tartaroo,
translated "cast down to hell" in <2 Pet. 2:4>, signifies to
consign to Tartarus, which is neither Sheol nor hades nor hell, but the
place where those angels whose special sin is referred to in that passage are
confined "to be reserved unto judgment"; the region is described as
"pits of darkness." RV#
(from Vine's Expository
Dictionary of Biblical Words)
(Copyright (C) 1985, Thomas Nelson Publishers)