

There's not a lot of description of Hades within the main canon - chiefly the parable in Luke 16 - but generally it is considered the holding place for the souls of the dead until the final judgement. In the Greek Septuagint, it replaces the Hebrew word "Sheol". "Hades" is the Greek word for the realm of the dead. In Revelation 20:14, what is Death, Hades, and the Lake of Fire? And if Hades and the lake of fire is the same thing, how can Hades be cast into itself? What's more confusing to me is, if the "lake of fire" is a physical place that those who are not written in the "Book of Life" will be sent for all eternity, how is it possible to send Death and Hades to that same place? What causes confusion, for me, is that I've always considered Hades and the lake of fire to be the same thing. With those scriptures in mind, the Revelation passage throws me for a loop. That he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. Saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.Īcts 2:27 For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your HolyĪcts 2:31 he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, Luke 16:23 and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and Luke 10:15 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You For if the mighty works done in you had beenĭone in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

Matt 11:23 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You willīe brought down to Hades. Likewise, the term Hades (other translations use the word Hell) is a word that is also used multiple times in the NT to refer to a place of judgment and torment. You cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his Matt 25:41 Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, Matt 13:40 Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so To the council and whoever says, "You fool!" will be liable to the Will be liable to judgment whoever insults his brother will be liable Matt 5:22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother The concept of "fire" is used multiple times in the New Testament to refer to a place of final judgment. The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture."Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
Hades meaning full#
And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech.
