Why the Blurring Happened

The compression of five terms into one English word was not malicious. It was inevitable given the history of Bible translation. The Latin Vulgate, which dominated Western Christianity for over a thousand years, used the word infernus to translate Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus in various places, and the English word hell absorbed the same broad assignment.

The result is that a modern English reader sees one word where the original text saw five, and brings to that one word a cultural picture assembled from Dante, medieval art, Hollywood imagery, and whatever the preacher in their childhood said about it. Almost none of that cultural picture was assembled by reading the original terms in their original contexts.

This book is asking you to set down the blurred picture and pick up the specific one. Not because the specific one is less serious — it is, if anything, more serious. But because a map that matches the territory is the only map that can actually guide you home.

In the next chapter we go back to the garden. Back to the day Adam ate. Back to the question that started this book. Now that you have the five terms, you can read what Genesis 2:17 is actually saying — and what it is not.