The Afterlife of the Wicked in Early Jewish Texts

The notion that at some point after death the wicked will be eternally tormented in hell does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. It is found for the first time in the Book of the Watchers, an Aramaic work composed in the third century BCE that constitutes the first thirty-six chapters of 1 Enoch. The angel Raphael shows Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, an “accursed valley,” where those who lash out against God’s glory will be cursed forever after the eschatological day of judgment.

In a later section of 1 Enoch, often referred to as the Animal Apocalypse, Enoch relates a dream-vision to his son Methuselah in which the history of the world, both past and future, is symbolically communicated in animal narratives. Depicted as “blind sheep” after the final day of judgment, sinful Jews are to be sent underground to burn in an “abyss of fire.”

The eschatology of 1 Enoch may not have been accepted by all Jews; in his various letters, Paul describes the wicked as simply being destroyed (and thus barred from entering the kingdom of God), with no mention of any kind of hell. But the first-century Jewish author of the Gospel of Mark indicates that Jesus proclaimed the reality of hell, or what he called Gehenna (Greek for the Hebrew word gehinnom), for sinners. This eternal punishment includes unquenchable fire and worms that never die—an allusion to Isaiah 66:24—and is reserved for those who “put a stumbling block before these little ones who believe in [Christ]” (Mark 9:42, NRSV).

Several ancient apocalyptic texts are rather gruesome in describing the eternal torments of the wicked. In 2 Enoch, for example, Enoch ascends to the third heaven, where he encounters merciless angels tormenting the wicked. Here, hell consists not only of fire but also of freezing ice. Other Second Temple–period texts, such as 4 Ezra, describe the psychological torments awaiting the sinful after death.

The Mishnah rejects the Enochic and Second Temple tradition that punishment after death lasts forever. R. Akiva maintains that gehinnom lasts for twelve months, whereas R. Yoḥanan ben Nuri avers that gehinnom lasts for only fifty days—equivalent to the period from Passover to Shavuot.

Whereas m. Eduyyot addresses the fate of the wicked alone, a Tosefta passage describes the fate of three different groups: the righteous, the wicked, and the morally average. In a subsequent addition to this tosefta, we encounter—for the first time in rabbinic literature—the notion of eternal hell for a select group of sinners.