The fiery Hell familiar from Hollywood films, medieval paintings and television comedies has far less to do with the Hebrew Bible than many modern audiences assume, according to a new academic essay examining how Western culture reshaped the afterlife.
In What’s the Afterlife Got to Do with It? A Comparison between Biblical and Contemporary Depictions of Heaven and Hell, Eden Woodward argues that the popular images of pearly gates above and eternal punishment below developed through centuries of biblical interpretation, medieval literature and pop culture, rather than emerging fully formed from the Bible itself.
At the center of the argument is Sheol (the biblical realm of the dead), the shadowy place repeatedly mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. According to Woodward, the Hebrew Bible does not present Heaven and Hell as later Christian afterlife categories. It focuses instead on Sheol, a place associated with death, silence and descent. Britannica similarly defines Sheol as the “abode of the dead” in the Hebrew Bible, connected either to the grave or to an ancient idea of a subterranean realm.
That distinction matters because Sheol was not presented as a moral sorting station in the way Hell is often imagined today. Woodward notes that Jacob, mourning Joseph, refers to going down to the grave, identified in the Norton Critical Edition as Sheol. She also points to the righteous King Hezekiah, who is described as expecting to go to the “gates of the grave,” again connected to Sheol. The implication is striking: in this older biblical framework, the righteous and wicked share the same destination.
Dante’s role in creating Hell
The study identifies Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as one of the defining works in shaping modern ideas of Hell. Dante’s 14th-century poem turned the afterlife into a highly organized moral landscape, with nine circles of Hell arranged according to sin and punishment. Britannica describes Dante’s Hell as a descent through circles representing sins including lust, gluttony, wrath and treachery, with punishments corresponding to earthly conduct.
Woodward argues that this literary structure helped fill gaps left by biblical texts. The Hebrew Bible’s Sheol is vague and underdescribed. The New Testament includes references to Gehenna (Gehinnom, a term associated with the Valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem) and to fiery judgment, but Woodward writes that it still does not offer the fully mapped Hell familiar to contemporary audiences. Britannica notes that Gehenna became associated in Jewish and Christian eschatology with punishment and hellfire imagery.
The result, according to the essay, is that much of what modern audiences picture as “biblical Hell” is a later cultural construction. Flames, demons, levels, categories of sinners, and individualized punishments owe as much to Dante and later artists as to scripture.
From Sheol to streaming television
The essay then turns from medieval Italy to modern television, arguing that pop culture continues to rewrite Heaven and Hell for each generation.
Woodward examines shows and works including Supernatural, South Park, Good Omens, The Good Place, Adventure Time, Talking Heads’ song “Heaven”, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Each uses the afterlife less as fixed theology and more as a flexible cultural symbol.
In The Good Place, Heaven and Hell become an ethical bureaucracy. In Good Omens, they resemble departments in the same celestial office building. In South Park, Hell is often comic and satirical. These portrayals, Woodward argues, show that contemporary culture uses Heaven and Hell to debate justice, morality, boredom, bureaucracy, identity and the meaning of death.
The argument carries a pointed twist. The Hebrew Bible is often treated in Christian and secular culture as the original source for a fiery Hell. Woodward’s study suggests that the text offers a far more muted and less cinematic picture.
Later Jewish thought developed more complex ideas about the afterlife, including Gehinnom, resurrection, and Olam HaBa (the World to Come). The study’s focus, however, is the earlier biblical layer, where Sheol dominates, and the stark Heaven-versus-Hell system is absent.
That older view may be less dramatic, but it is also more unsettling in its simplicity. The Hebrew Bible’s afterlife is not a Hollywood set, a Dantean map, or a streaming-era joke about moral accounting. It is a dim, shared destination, one that reflects mortality more than reward and punishment.
Woodward’s essay ultimately argues that Heaven and Hell have become “plastic concepts,” changing shape as human societies change. For modern audiences, that may be the real revelation: the Hell they fear, parody, or recognize on screen was not simply inherited from the Bible. It was built over time by translators, theologians, poets, painters, writers, and television producers.