Somewhere in Alexandria, more than two centuries before Christ, a group of Jewish scholars sat down with the Hebrew Scriptures and a problem.
Somewhere in the thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis they came to an old man refusing to be comforted, saying he would go down to his dead son in Sheol.
And they had to pick a word.
That decision, made by careful and pious men doing honest work, is the reason we are starting here. The word they chose came with furniture. And almost everything that has gone wrong in the popular Christian picture of the afterlife can be traced, in one way or another, to what later readers did with that furniture.
Kevin, quite good! Your deep dive explains exactly why I recommend to most readers without specialized training the KJV-NKJV (mostly) more than modern translations + a good unabridged dictionary. Those translators were simply much better equipped in original languages and history. They, in most cases, knew what you are talking about.
For readers who have some background but not as much as you, my advice is: anything you read in NT, find equivalent in OT, then port that meaning back into what is said in NT + whatever the NT author is, under inspiration of Spirit, saying about said topic and you have pretty much their intent.
The KJV followed the practice of its day is collapsing Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna into the single word, "hell" (with a few exceptions, such as translating them as "pit" or "grave" which still undermines the intent of the original authors).
In the way hell was used at the time, maybe that wasn't terrible. But with it's modern connotations it creates interpretive problems for those who don't know that there are 4 distinct concepts being collapsed into that single word.
I'm much more likely to recommend a translation like the NASB or NRSVUE (though understanding that even it translates Gehenna as hell, though that does, after a fashion, still maintain the distinction) for exactly this reason.
The place your argument gets loudest is Revelation 1, where John stops disciplining the furniture and starts taking it.
Hecate held the keys of Hades in the Greco-Roman world. That was her job title. She is invoked all over the magical papyri and the curse tablets, and the art puts the key in her hand. Then Revelation 1:18 has Jesus say he holds the keys of death and Hades. The office is not described, it is taken, and it is taken in the language of the people who knew whose office it was. That is not a word crossing the border quietly. That is somebody walking into the house and changing the locks in front of the owner.
And then the realm itself does not survive. Revelation 20 has death and Hades give up their dead and then get thrown into the lake of fire. Not reformed, not annexed, ended. That is a long way from a god who drew the underworld in a three-way split and keeps it.
Kevin, quite good! Your deep dive explains exactly why I recommend to most readers without specialized training the KJV-NKJV (mostly) more than modern translations + a good unabridged dictionary. Those translators were simply much better equipped in original languages and history. They, in most cases, knew what you are talking about.
For readers who have some background but not as much as you, my advice is: anything you read in NT, find equivalent in OT, then port that meaning back into what is said in NT + whatever the NT author is, under inspiration of Spirit, saying about said topic and you have pretty much their intent.
I agree with most of what you've said.
The KJV followed the practice of its day is collapsing Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna into the single word, "hell" (with a few exceptions, such as translating them as "pit" or "grave" which still undermines the intent of the original authors).
In the way hell was used at the time, maybe that wasn't terrible. But with it's modern connotations it creates interpretive problems for those who don't know that there are 4 distinct concepts being collapsed into that single word.
I'm much more likely to recommend a translation like the NASB or NRSVUE (though understanding that even it translates Gehenna as hell, though that does, after a fashion, still maintain the distinction) for exactly this reason.
The place your argument gets loudest is Revelation 1, where John stops disciplining the furniture and starts taking it.
Hecate held the keys of Hades in the Greco-Roman world. That was her job title. She is invoked all over the magical papyri and the curse tablets, and the art puts the key in her hand. Then Revelation 1:18 has Jesus say he holds the keys of death and Hades. The office is not described, it is taken, and it is taken in the language of the people who knew whose office it was. That is not a word crossing the border quietly. That is somebody walking into the house and changing the locks in front of the owner.
And then the realm itself does not survive. Revelation 20 has death and Hades give up their dead and then get thrown into the lake of fire. Not reformed, not annexed, ended. That is a long way from a god who drew the underworld in a three-way split and keeps it.