We continue our series on immortality and heaven and hell. In Did I really hear you say that? and Count the Trees, we saw that the human soul is not created immortal, but that eternal life is a gift. And we asked why have we come to assume then, that unbelievers ‘will not perish, but receive eternal’ punishment, in hell?

Where is Abraham's Bosom?

Where does the idea of 'hell' come from? Where did your Jew expect to go after death, and where is 'Abraham’s Bosom?'

It’s an unusual phrase. In the story Jesus told of Lazarus and Dives (Luke 16: 19-31), Lazarus is described as being taken into Abraham’s bosom after he died. This sounds a bit odd but it is rather like the phrase gathered to his people used of many of the Old Testament characters. So where are ‘his people’?

The picture that emerges through the pages of the Old Testament is of a shadowy world called Sheol. We are told little about it because it was conceived of not as a place of continued existence so much as a state of no return.

We sometimes speak of people going ‘to the grave’. The term Sheol is used in the same way. We don’t think ‘the grave’ is an actual place, where the dead mill around discussing the finer points of undertaking. Nor did the Jews regard Sheol like this: it was just the place where the dead ended up; righteous and wicked alike. And it was not a place of eternal fire and endless conscious torment.

Literary Devices

You might be forgiven for thinking that it was viewed as a real place by passages such as Isaiah 14 where the King of Babylon is greeted in the ‘realm of the dead’ by other dead monarchs. This is reminiscent of Odysseus' decent into Hades where he meets the shades of dead heroes. These are seen as insubstantial forms, shadows of their former selves balanced on the cusp of nonentity and living a dreary life of monotony and sorrow.

Rather than taking biblical passages such as this and the Lazarus and Dives story as factual, we should see them for what they are: literary devices. Isaiah 14’s purpose is to dramatize that this great king has been brought to nothing by death, and all his pride and achievements are worthless. This emphasis comes through in passage after passage concerning the fate of Israel’s oppressors. Psalm 37 is a good example: They will wither like grass, they will be no more so they cannot be found, they will perish like the beauty of the fields and vanish like smoke, they will be cut off . The point is always the same: they will all come to nothing in the end.

So what of the righteous?

But there is a thread of hope running though the Old Testament: that God will redeem his people from the grave. In Psalm 16, David asserts confidently, You will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay. The hope is not to experience a disembodied existence after death but rather to be redeemed from death: body and soul. We’re talking about resurrection here, even before Christ had proved it could be done.

So Abraham’s bosom is ultimately going to be pretty much where it used to be: a little north of his stomach and just underneath his shaggy beard.

But what is Jesus getting at with this odd parable if he’s not talking about eternal conscious torment? And where did such a concept originate anyway, if it’s not in the Old Testament?

(Watch this space for Part Four if you want to know the answers.)

Do you think these passages should be seen as literary devices?

Or do you think they should be taken as factual?