Theopedia

Hades

“I have the keys of Death and Hades.”

— Revelation 1:18 (ESV)

Definition

Hades is the New Testament Greek term for the realm of the dead in general, righteous and wicked alike, not a name for the wicked’s punishment alone.1 The Septuagint translators used it to render the Hebrew Sheol, and it occurs ten times in the New Testament.2 Scripture associates Hades itself with torment only in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where the suffering belongs to the rich man’s own state, not to Hades as such, since Lazarus occupies “the same general abode” in blessing.1 Hades is distinct from Gehenna, the wicked’s final punishment after judgment.3

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession uses the word “Hades”; both describe the twofold destiny it names in their own seventeenth-century vocabulary, holding that “the souls of the wicked are cast into hell; where they remain in torment and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day,” while the righteous are “received into paradise,” the same intermediate state Scripture’s own idiom calls Hades.4

Biblical Basis

Hades occurs in ten New Testament verses.2 Bavinck traces their sense in a single connected account:

“According to the New Testament, all the dead will be in hades, the realm of the dead, until the resurrection. In Matthew 11:23 and Luke 10:15 the expression ‘be brought down to hades’ signifies that haughty Capernaum will be profoundly humbled. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus promises his church that ‘the gates of hades’ will have no power over it, that death will not triumph over it. According to Luke 16:23, the wretched Lazarus will be carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom, and the rich man, upon his death and burial, immediately arrives in hades, where hades is not yet the same as a place of torment since this is indicated only by the addition of ‘being in torment.’ Jesus, too, as long as he was in the state of death, dwelt in hades, even though it could not hold him there (Acts 2:27, 31).”5

Peter’s Pentecost sermon reads Psalm 16:10, “you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,” as a prophecy that Christ’s soul would not be “abandoned to Hades” nor his flesh “see corruption” (Acts 2:27, 31), proof that he was raised bodily rather than merely surviving as a disembodied spirit.6 Revelation pictures Hades three more times: the risen Christ holds “the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18); Death and Hades together follow the pale horse of the fourth seal (Rev. 6:8); and at the last judgment “Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them,” after which “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:13-14). Hades, on this last text, is temporary and is itself abolished at the resurrection; the lake of fire, Gehenna, is not.3

Charles Hodge draws the same conclusion as Boyce and Bavinck from the rich man and Lazarus: “there is no great difference between this Jewish doctrine in its essential features, and the true doctrine as presented by our Lord in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Both are represented as going into Sheol or Hades. The one was comforted, the other tormented.”7 Hades holds both destinies at once; what differs is the condition of the soul within it, not which realm it occupies.

Historical Development

The Septuagint’s translators, rendering the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, adopted the term Hades, already familiar from Greek religious thought as the invisible world of the dead, to translate Sheol.2 Among the Greeks themselves, Hades was pictured as divided into two regions, Elysium for the blessed and Tartarus for the wicked, a background against which the New Testament writers use the same Greek word for a single realm holding both.2

The Apostles’ Creed’s clause “he descended into hell” translates the same underlying idea: that Christ’s soul, at his death, entered Hades, “the unseen world,” before his resurrection.6 What that descent accomplished divides the Apostles’ Creed’s own Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran readings, a dispute over the creed’s article rather than over the word Hades itself.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XLII. The Final States of the Righteous and the Wicked,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 479. ↩ ↩2

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 37, “Death, and the State of the Soul after Death,” 553. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩2

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩

  6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 733. ↩ ↩2

  7. Hodge, 3:731. ↩