HELL, a place of torments where the wicked will undergo after this life the punishment due their crimes.

In this sense the word hell is opposed to the word heaven or paradise . See Heaven and Paradise.

The pagans had given hell the names tartarus or tartara , hades , infernus , inferna , inferi , orcus , etc.

The Jews, having no specific term to express hell exactly in the sense we have just defined (for the Hebrew scheol is taken just as well for the place of sepulture and for the place of punishment reserved for reprobates), they have given it the name Gehenna or Gehinnon , a valley near Jerusalem in which was a tophet or square where a perpetual flame was maintained, lit by fanaticism to immolate the children of Moloch. [1] That is why hell in the New Testament is often designated by these words: Gehenna ignis .

The principal questions that can be framed about hell come down to these three points: its existence, its location, and the eternity of punishment which reprobates suffer there. Let us examine them separately.

I. While the ancient Hebrews had no specific term for designating hell , they nevertheless recognized its reality. The inspired authors painted its torments in the most frightening colors: Moses, in Deuteronomy chap. xxxii, verse 22 , threatens unfaithful Israelites and tells them in the Lord’s name: For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn into the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains . [2] Job, chap. xxiv, verse 19 , combines on the head of the reproved the most extreme sufferings: Let the wicked , it says, go from the cold of snow to the most excessive heat; may his crime descend even into hell ; [3] and in chap. xxvi, verse 6 : hell is uncovered to God’s eyes, and the place of perdition cannot hide itself from his light . [4] Finally, not to lose ourselves in endless quotations, Isaiah, chap. lxvi, verse 24 expresses as follows the inner and outer torments which the reproved will undergo: Videbunt cadavera virorum qui prevaricati sunt in me, vermis eorum non morietur, et ignis eorum non extinguetur, et erunt usque ad satietatem visionis omni carni : in other words, as the Hebrew puts it, they will be a subject of revolt to all flesh, so greatly will their bodies be disfigured by the torments. [5]

These authorities are enough to silence the tongue of any who maintain that the ancient Hebrews had no knowledge of the punishments of the afterlife because Moses ordinarily threatens them only with temporal punishments. The texts which we have just cited clearly refer to punishments which are to be inflicted only after death. Another objection, namely that the holy writers have borrowed these ideas from Greek poets, is wholly baseless: Moses came several centuries before Homer. Whether Job was a contemporary of Moses, or his book was written by Solomon, as some critics maintain, he would have lived about the time of the siege of Troy, which Homer did not describe until four hundred years later. Isaiah, in truth, was about contemporary with Hesiod and Homer; but what knowledge did he have of their writings, the last of which especially were collected only by the efforts of Peisistratus, in other words long after the death of the Greek poet and that of the prophet who is supposed to have been copying Homer?

It is true that the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the other sects that arose among the Jews after the return from captivity, and which since the conquests of Alexander had had relations with the Greeks, mixed their particular opinions with the simple ideas that the ancient Hebrews had had on the punishments of hell . “The Essenes,” says Josephus in his History of the Jewish War, book II, chap. xii , “hold that the soul is immortal, and that as soon as it has left the body, it rises full of joy toward heaven, as if freed from a long servitude and delivered from the bonds of flesh. The souls of the just go beyond the ocean to a place of repose and delights where they are troubled by no inconvenience or derangement of the seasons. The souls of the wicked on the contrary are relegated to places exposed to weathering, where they suffer eternal torments. The Essenes have much the same ideas about these torments as the poets give us of Tartarus and the realm of Pluto.” [6] See Essenes.

The same author, in his Jewish Antiquities, book XVIII, chap. ii , says “that the Pharisees also believe souls immortal, and after the death of the body the souls of the just enjoy happiness, and can easily return into the world and animate other bodies; but the souls of the wicked are condemned to sufferings that will never end.” [7] See Pharisees.

Philo, in the opuscule entitled De congressu quærendæ eruditionis causa , [8] recognizes, as do the other Jews, punishments for the wicked and recompenses for the just; but he is far from the opinions of the pagans and even of the Essenes on the subject of hell . Everything that is told about Cerberus, the Furies, Tantalus, Ixion, etc., everything you read about them in the poets, he treats as fables and fantasies. He maintains that hell is nothing other than an impure and criminal life, but even that is allegorical. That writer does not explain himself distinctly on the place where the wicked are punished nor on the kind and quality of their punishment; he even seems to limit it to the passage which the souls make from one body to another, in which they often have many woes to endure, privations to suffer, and embarrassment to bear: which is very similar to the metempsychosis of Pythagoras. See Metempsychosis.

The Sadducees, who denied the immortality of the soul, consequently did not recognize either rewards or punishments in the afterlife. See Sadducees.

The existence of hell and eternal punishments is attested at almost every page of the New Testament. The sentence that Jesus will pronounce against the reproved at the Last Judgment is couched in these terms, Matthew XXV, v. 34: Ite maledicti in ignem æternum qui paratus est diabolo et angelis ejus . [9] He perpetually represents hell as a dark place where suffering, sadness, spite, and rage reign, and as a horrible abode that echoes with gnashing of teeth and cries of despair. Saint John, in the Apocalypse, depicts it in the image of an immense lake of fire and sulfur into which the wicked will be plunged body and soul and tormented for all eternity.

Consequently, theologians distinguish two sorts of sufferings in hell , which are the penalty of damnation: pœna damni seu damnationis : this is the loss or privation of the beatific vision of God, the vision that is to constitute the eternal happiness of the saints; and the penalty of sense, pœna sensus , in other words, everything that can afflict the body, and especially the terrible and continual pains caused in all its parts by an inextinguishable fire.

The false religions also have their hell . The hell of the pagans, well enough known from the descriptions of it by Homer, Ovid, and Vergil, is quite capable of inspiring fright with the depictions of the torments they make Ixion, Prometheus, the Danaïdes, the Lapythes, Phlegyas, etc. suffer there; but among the pagans, either out of corruption of the heart or from a penchant for incredulity, the people and even children treated these excellent descriptions as tales and dreams; at least that is one of the vices for which Juvenal reproaches the Romans of his time:

See Hell (Mythology).

The Talmudists, whose belief is just a ridiculous collection of superstitions, distinguish three orders of persons who will appear at the Last Judgment. The first, the just; the second, the wicked; and the third, those who are in an intermediate state, who are, in other words, neither quite just nor quite impious. The just will be immediately destined for eternal life, and the wicked for the misfortune of torture or hell . The intermediates, Jews as well as Gentiles, will descend into hell with their bodies, and they will weep for twelve months, rising and descending, going to their bodies and returning to hell . After that time, their bodies will be consumed and their souls burned, and the wind will disperse them under the feet of the just. But heretics, atheists, tyrants who have desolated the earth, those who lead peoples into sin, will be punished in hell for time without end. The rabbis add that every year on the first day of Tirsi, which is the first day of the Judaic year, God makes a sort of revision of his registers, or an examination of the number and state of the souls that are in hell . Talmud in Gemar. Tract. Rosch. haschana c. j. fol. 16. [11]

The Muslims have borrowed from the Jews and the Christians the name of gehennem or gehim to signify hell . Genehem, in Arabic, means a very deep pit , and gehim an ugly, deformed man ; ben gehennem a son of hell , a reprobate . They give the name of thabeck to the angel who presides over hell . D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale , at the word Gehennem . [12]

According to the Qur’an, in the chapter on prayer , the Mohammedans recognize seven gates to hell , or seven levels of punishments; that is also the sentiment of several commentators of the Qur’an, who place in the first level of punishment, called gehennem , the Muslims who have deserved to fall there; the second level, called ladha , is for the Christians; the third, called hothama , for the Jews; the fourth, called saïr , is destined for the Sabians; [13] the fifth, named sacar , is for the magi or Guebres, [14] fire-worshippers; the sixth, called gehim , for pagans and idolaters; the seventh, which is the bottom of the abyss, carries the name haoviath : it is reserved for hypocrites who disguise their religion, and conceal one in their heart that is different from the one they profess outwardly.

Other Mohammedan interpreters explain these seven gates of hell differently. Some believe they indicate the seven capital sins. Others take them from the seven principal parts of the body which men use to offend God, and which are the principal instruments of their crimes. It is in this sense that a Persian poet said: “You have the seven gates of hell in your body, but the soul can put seven locks on those gates; the key to those locks is your free will, which you may use to close these doors so firmly that they will no longer open to your damnation.” In addition to the penalty of fire or sense, the Muslims also recognize, like us, the penalty of damnation.

They say that the Kaffirs admit thirteen hell s and twenty-seven paradises, where everyone finds the place he has merited according to his good or bad deeds.

This persuasion of punishments in an afterlife, universally found in all religions, even the most false, and among the most barbaric peoples, has always been used by legislators as the most powerful restraint to check license and crime and to contain men within the bounds of duty.

II. Writers are extremely divided on the second question, which is whether there is indeed a local hell , or some particular and specific place where the reproved suffer the torments of fire. Prophets and other holy writers speak in general of hell as a subterranean place located under the waters and beneath the foot of mountains, in the center of the earth, and they designate it by the words for pits and chasms; but all these expressions do not determine the place fixed for hell . Profane writers both ancient and modern have given free rein to their imagination on this matter, and here is what we have gathered about them based on Chambers. [15]

The Greeks, after Homer, Hesiod, etc., conceived of hell as a vast, dark place under the earth, divided into various regions: an awful one with lakes whose muddy and putrid water exuded fatal vapors, a river of fire, towers of iron and bronze, fiery furnaces, monsters and furies pursuing and tormenting villains ( See Lucian, De luctu , and Eustathius, On Homer );  [16] the other one pleasant, destined for the righteous and for heroes. See Elysium.

Of the Latin poets, some placed hell in the subterranean regions directly under the lake Avernus, in Campania, because of the poisonous vapors emitted by that lake. Aeneid, book VI. See Avernus.

Calypso, in Homer, speaking to Ulysses, situates the gate to hell at the extremities of the ocean. Xenophon has Hercules enter there by the Acherusian peninsula, near Heraclea Pontica.

Others have imagined that hell was under the Tenarus, a promontory of Laconia, because this was a dark, frightful place, beset with thick woods, out of which it was more difficult to find a passage than from a labyrinth. This way, Ovid says, Orpheus descended into hell . Others believed that the river or swamp of the Styx, in Arcadia, was the gate of hell , because its vapors were deadly. See Tenarus and Styx.

But these opinions are all to be considered only as fables of poets who, according to the genius of their art, exaggerating everything, represented these places as so many gates or entries into hell , due to their horrible appearance, or the certain death with which all those who had the misfortune or the imprudence to get too close to them were struck. See Hell (Mythology).

The primitive Christians, conceiving the earth as a large extended plain, and the heavens an arch or pavilion drawn over the same, took hell to be a place in the earth, the farthest distant from the heavens, so that their hell was our antipodes. See Antipodes.

Vergil had earlier had a more or less similar idea:

Tertullian, in his book De anima , represents the Christians of his time as believing hell to be an abyss at the center of the earth; which opinion was chiefly founded on the belief in Christ’s descent into Limbo, Matthew XII, v. 40 . [18] See Limbo, and the following article Hell.

Whiston has advanced, on the location of hell , a new opinion. [19] According to him, comets ought to be thought of as so many hell s, appointed in the course of their trajectories or orbits alternately to convey the damned into the confines of the Sun, there to be scorched by its flames, and then to return them to the cold, dreary, dark regions beyond the orbit of Saturn. See Comet.

Swinden, in his research on the nature and emplacement of hell , does not adopt any of the places mentioned above; and he assigns it a new one.  [20] According to his ideas, the Sun is the local hell . But he is not the first author of this opinion; beyond the fact that one could find some traces of it in this passage in the Apocalypse, chap. xvi, v. 8–9 : Et quartus angelus effudit phialam suam in Solem, et datum est illi æstu affligere homines et igni, et æstuaverunt homines æstu magno . [21] Pythagoras seems to have had the same idea as Swinden, placing hell in the sphere of fire, and that sphere in the middle of the universe. Add that Aristotle De cœlo, book II , mentions some philosophers of the Italic or Pythagorean school who placed the sphere of fire in the Sun, and even called it Jupiter’s prison . See Pythagoreans.

To support his system, Swinden undertakes to remove hell from the center of the earth. The first reason he puts forward, is that that place cannot contain a fund or provision of sulfur or other igneous material large enough to maintain so furious and constant a fire as that of hell ; and the second, that the center of the earth must lack the nitrous particles found in the air, and which are necessary to prevent this fire from being extinguished. “And how,” he adds, “could such a fire be eternal and be preserved without end in the bowels of the earth, when by successively and by degrees the whole substance of the earth must be consumed thereby?”

It must not be forgotten here, however, that Tertullian had anticipated the first of these difficulties by making a distinction between the hidden or internal fire and the public or outer fire. The nature of the first, according to him, is such as that it not only consumes but repairs what it consumes. The second difficulty has been removed by Saint Augustin, who claims that God supplies the central fire with air by a miracle. But the authority of these fathers, so respectable in matters of doctrine, is not irrefragable with respect to physics. Swinden, however, proceeds to show that the central parts of the earth are filled with water rather than fire, which he confirms with what Moses says about subterranean water, Exodus, chap. XX, v. 4 , and by Psalms XXIII. v. 2 : Quia super maria fundavit eum (orbem), et super flumina præparavit eum . [22] As a further proof, he alleges that there would not be enough room at the center of the earth to contain the infinite number of inhabitants as the fallen angels and wicked men. See Abyss.

We know that Drexelius, De damnatorum carcere et rogo , [23] has confined hell in the space of one German cubic mile, and that he has fixed the number of the damned at one hundred thousand million; but Swinden thinks Drexelius has been too sparing in the terrain; that it could hold a hundred times more of the damned; and that no matter how vast the space one might assign them, they could not but be infinitely pressed together at the center of the earth. He concludes that it is impossible to stow such a multitude of spirits in such a tight space without a penetration of dimensions; which is absurd in good philosophy, even with respect to spirits. For if that were the case, he says he does not see why God should have prepared such a vast prison for the damned, since they might have been all crowded together into a space as tight as a baker’s oven. We could add that since the number of the reproved must be very extensive, and since the reproved must someday burn in body and soul, one must necessarily allow a more spacious hell than the one imagined by Drexelius, unless we suppose that at the last judgment God will create a new one vast enough to contain the bodies and souls. We are only historians here. However that may be, the arguments alleged by Swinden to prove that the Sun is the local hell are drawn:

1. From capacity of this star. Nobody will deny that the Sun is spacious enough to receive all the damned of all the ages, since astronomers commonly give it a million leagues’ circumference: thus it is not room that will be wanting in this system. Nor will fire be wanting, if we accept Swinden’s argument against Aristotle that the Sun is hot, pages 208 and ff. “The average fellow,” he says, “is astonished at the sight of Pyrenees of sulfur and Atlantic oceans of burning bitumen required to maintain the immensity of the Sun’s flames. Our Ætnas and Vesuviuses are but glow worms.” There is a sentence more worthy of a Gascon than of a scholar from the North.

2. From the distance of the sun, and its opposition to the empyreum, which has usually been looked upon as a local heaven. Such opposition corresponds perfectly to that which is found naturally between two places, one destined for the abode of angels and the elect, the other for the abode of demons and the reprobate, one being a place of glory and hallelujahs, and the other of horror and blasphemies. And the distance squares well with the words of the evil rich man, who in Saint Luke chap. XVI, v. 23 sees Abraham from afar, and with Abraham’s reply in this same chapter, verse 26 and in his omnibus inter nos et vos chaos magnum firmatum est, ut hi qui volunt hinc transire ad vos non possint, neque inde huc transmeare . [24] Swinden takes this chaos or chasm to be the solar vortex. See Vortex.

3. From the fact that the empyreum is the highest, and the Sun the lowest place in the universe, considering this planet as the center of our system; and as the first part of the visible and created world: which agrees with this notion, that the Sun was originally intended not only to illuminate the earth, but also to serve as prison and punishment for the fallen angels, whose fall, our author supposes, immediately preceded the creation of the world inhabited by men.

4. From the idolatry which almost all men have paid the Sun, which reconciles well with the malicious subtlety of the spirits that inhabit the sun and have enticed mankind to worship their throne, or rather the instrument of their punishment.

We leave to the reader the appreciation of all these systems, and remain content to say that it is most singular to try to fix the place of hell when Scripture, by its silence, indicates clearly enough to us the silence we should maintain on that matter.

III. It would be ill-suited to remain undecided on a question that involves faith essentially, which is the eternity of the punishments which the damned will suffer in hell . It appears expressly decided by the Scriptures, both as to the nature of the pains of the senses and to their duration, which is to be interminable. Nevertheless, besides the modern unbelievers who reject both points, both because they imagine the soul mortal like the body, and because eternity of punishment seems to them incompatible with the idea of a God who is essentially and sovereignly good and merciful, Origen, in his treatise entitled περὶ ἀρκ ν or De principiis , giving the words of Scripture a metaphorical interpretation, has the torments of hell consist not in outward or corporal punishments, but in the remorse of sinners’ conscience, in the horror they have of their crimes, and in the memory they preserve of the emptiness of their past pleasures. Saint Augustine mentions several of his contemporaries who made the same error. Calvin and several of his followers supported it in our time, and it is the general sentiment of the Socinians, who maintain that the idea of hell , accepted by the Catholics, is borrowed from the fictions of paganism.  [25] We again find Origen at the head of those who deny the eternity of punishment in the future life. This author, as reported by several fathers, but especially by Saint Augustine in his treatise On the City of God, book XXI, chap. xvii , teaches that men, and even demons, after having endured torments proportional to their crimes, but always limited in duration, shall be pardoned and restored to heaven. M. Huet, in his remarks on Origen , [26] conjectures that the reading of Plato had spoiled Origen in this regard.

The chief principle upon which Origen based himself, is that all punishments are ordered only for correction, and applied like painful medicines for the recovery of the afflicted patient’s health. Other objections insisted on by modern authors are the disproportion found between temporary crimes and eternal punishments, etc.

The Scripture’s phrases for eternity , as observed by several interpreters and critics, among them Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, do not always signify an infinite duration .

Thus, in the Old Testament, forever often signifies only a long time , in particular till the end of the Judaic law. For example, in the Epistle of Saint Jude , v. 7, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are said to serve as examples, and to have been exposed to the vengeance of eternal fire, ignis æterni pœnam sustinentes , that is, of a fire that could not be extinguished until those cities were entirely reduced to ashes. It is also said in Scripture that the generations succeed each other but the earth endures forever or eternally: terra autem in æternum stat . Indeed M. le Clerc notes that there is no Hebrew word which properly expresses eternity: the term holam only imports a time whose beginning or end is not known , and is accordingly used in a more or less extensive sense, according to the thing treated.  [27] Thus when God says, concerning the Jewish laws, that they must be observed laholam , forever, we are to understand as long a space as he should think fit, or a space whose end was unknown to the Jews before the coming of the Messiah. All general laws, and such as do not regard particular occasions, are made in perpetuity, whether it be expressed in those laws or not, which yet is not to be understood in such a manner as if the sovereign power could in no way change or abrogate them.

Tillotson, however, argues with as much force as foundation that where Scripture speaks of the torments of hell , the words are to be understood in the strict sense of infinite duration; and what he regards as a decisive reason is that in the very same passage (in Saint Matthew, chap. xxv ), the duration of the punishment of the wicked is expressed in the same terms used for the duration of the happiness of the just, which as everyone agrees, must be eternal. In speaking of the reproved, it is said there that they will go to eternal punishment or that they will be delivered to eternal torments; and speaking of the just, it is said that they will enter into possession of eternal life: et ibunt hi in supplicium æternum, justi autem in vitam æternam.

The same author attempts to reconcile the dogma of the eternity of punishment with that of divine justice and mercy, and he does so in much more satisfactory manner than those who had attempted before him to save the apparent contradictions that result from these objects of our faith.

Indeed, some theologians, to resolve these difficulties, had argued that all sin is infinite with respect to the object against which it is committed, which is to say in relation to God; but it is absurd to claim that all crimes are aggrieved to that point with respect to the offended object, since in that case the harm and demerit of every sin would necessarily be equal, in that there can be nothing above the infinite which the sin offends. This would be to renew one of the paradoxes of the Socinians, and consequently there would be no basis for the degrees of punishment for the next life; for although it is to be eternal in its duration, it is not beyond credibility that it will not be equal in its violence, and may be more or less intense in proportion to the character or degree of malice that particular sins include. Add that for the same reason the slightest sin against God being infinite in relation to its object, one can say that the least punishment that God inflicts is infinite in relation to its author, and consequently that all the punishments that God would inflict would be equal, as all the sins committed against God would be equal; which is repellent.

Others have claimed that if the wicked could live forever they would never cease to sin. “But that,” says Tillotson, “is pure speculation, and not an argument: it is a gratuitous supposition and devoid of foundation. Who can assure,” he adds, “that if a man lives so long he would never repent?” Besides, God’s avenging justice punishes only sins committed by men, and not those they could have committed, as his remunerative justice crowns only the good deeds they really have done, and not those they might have done, as the Semi-Pelagians maintained. See Semi-Pelagians.

That is why others have maintained that God leaves to man the choice of eternal happiness or eternal misery, and that the reward promised to those who obey him is equal to the punishment with which he threatens those who refuse to obey him. To this it is responded that while it is not contrary to justice to take the reward too far, since this is a matter of pure favor, it can be contrary to justice to carry punishment to excess. It is added that in that case man has no subject of complaint, since he has only his own choice to blame. But although this reason suffices to impose silence on the sinner, and force him to this avowal, that he is the cause of his misfortune, perditio tua ex te, Israel ; [28] one senses that it does not fully resolve the objection drawn from the disproportion between the crime and the punishment.

Let us see how Tillotson, unhappy with all these systems, has undertaken to resolve this difficulty.

He first observes that the measure of punishments with relation to crimes is not determined solely nor always on the quality and the degree of the offense, and still less on the duration and the continuation of the offense, but on the reasons of economy or government which require punishments capable of impelling men to observe the laws and turning them away from breaching them. Among men it is not reckoned injustice to punish murder, and many other crimes which perhaps are committed in an instant, with perpetual loss or privation of estate, citizenship, or liberty, or even the life of the perpetrator; so the objection of temporary crimes being punished with such long sufferings cannot have any force here.

Indeed, what proportion crimes and penalties are to bear to each other is not so properly a consideration of justice as of wisdom and prudence in the lawgiver, who may enforce his laws by the threat of the penalties he pleases without any impeachment of his justice. This maxim is indubitable.

The primary end of all threats is not punishment, but to prevent or avoid it. God does not threaten that men may sin and be punished, but that they may abstain from sinning, and avoid the punishment attached to the infraction of the law; such that the more terrible and imposing the threat, the more goodness there is in the author of the threat.

After all, it is to be considered, adds the same author, that he who threatens has still the power of execution in his own hands. There is this difference between promises and threats, that he who promises passes over a right to another, and obliges him to make good his word, which justice and fidelity do not allow him to violate. But it is otherwise with regard to threats: he that threatens always reserves the right to punish, and is not obliged to carry out the full rigor of his threats, nor to carry them further than economy, reasons, and the ends of government require. Thus God threatened the total destruction of Nineveh if it did not repent in a limited time; but as he knew the extent of his own right, he did what he wished: he pardoned the city in consideration of its penitence, relinquishing the right to punish it.

Such are Tillotson’s arguments, to which we shall add only one reflection to anticipate this false consequence that could be drawn from it: namely, that what we read in Scripture on the punishments of hell is merely comminatory, as the Socinians hold. No doubt as long as man is in this life he can avoid those punishments; but after death, when the iniquity is consummate, and merit is no longer able to bend the anger of an angry and justly irritated God, can the sinner accuse him of injustice, for inflicting on him eternal punishments? For during his life, it was his choice to avoid them and attain eternal happiness. Besides, it is equally revealed that these threats have already really been carried out on the rebel angels, and will really be carried out on the reproved at the end of days: which proves that reason alone does not enable us to decide this question, and we must necessarily have recourse to revelation to prove the eternity and justice of the punishments of the afterlife.

1. A Canaanite god mentioned frequently in the Hebrew Bible.

2. The King James version, which the translator is following throughout this article, does not correspond exactly to the French version, presumably translated by the author directly from the Vulgate.

3. The King James reads: “Drought and heat consume the snow waters: so doth the grave those which have sinned.”

4. King James: “hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.”

5. Here Mallet translates only part of the Vulgate passage; in the King James: “And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched: and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.”

6. History of the Jewish War can be found in Flavius Josephus, Works (London, 1737).

7. This text is also found in his Works.

8. “On mating with the preliminary studies,” written in Greek but cited, as Greek classics usually were in this period, in Latin translation.

9. In fact, verse 41: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

10. “That there are such things as Manes, and kingdoms below ground, and punt-poles, and Stygian pools black with frogs, and all those thousands crossing over in a single bark – these things not even boys believe, except such as have not yet had their penny bath. But just imagine them to be true” (Juvenal, Satire II , trans. G. G. Ramsay).

11. The references are to Talmudic texts, the Gemara (commentary on the Mishnah) and the Rosh Hashanah, one of the tractates in the Mishnah.

12. Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville (1625–1695), Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l’Orient (Paris, 1697).

13. The Qur’an has three references to Jews, Sabians, and Christians; but little is known specifically about their characteristics.

14. One of the three references mentioned in the previous note also includes the Magi, or Zoroastrians or (in Persian) Guebres.

15. Much of the wording in what follows is indeed borrowed directly from Chambers, whom the translation follows sometimes closely and sometimes loosely. See Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (1728), s.v., “Hell.”

16. Lucian of Samosata (c. 125- after 180), De luctu (‘On mourning’); Eustathius of Thessalonica (1115-1195/6), wrote commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey .

17. “Then Tartarus itself lies open and stretches beneath the shades twice the depth as the height of the sky reaches up to heavenly Olympus” ( Aeneid VI, 577–79, trans. Darcy Krasne).

18. “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

19. William Whiston (1667-1752), Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge who lost this position due to his unorthodox anti-Trinitarian religious views.

20. Tobias Swinden (1659-1719), An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell (London, 1714).

21. “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire, and men were scorched with great heat.”

22. “For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods” (Psalms 24[23]:2, King James version). Exodus 20:4 reads, in part: “[...] that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

23. Jeremias Drexel or Drexelius (1581-1638), was a Bavarian Jesuit and the author of Infernus damnatorum carcer et rogus (The infernal prison and pyre of the damned), 1623; the link is to a 1632 edition.

24. “Beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot, nor can they pass to us that would come from thence.”

25. Socinians rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus and were deemed heretics by the Catholic Church.

26. Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721) published Origen’s commentary on Matthew in 1668.

27. Jean Leclerc (1657–1736), a prolific Protestant Biblical scholar from Geneva.

28. “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself” (Hosea 13:9).