Death appears in many guises within Judaism. The Hebrew Bible, which forms the basis for all subsequent thinking, treats death as a punishment for sin and source of ritual impurity. While it acknowledges the virtue of a timely death, the emphasis remains on embodied life and the present moment.
In contemporary English, ‘hell’ is almost always used to refer either literally or metaphorically to a place of post-mortem punishment. However, in a longer perspective, the term was once commonly used to allude to the underworld more generally. In the latter sense in the Catholic West it b...
Purgatory is a place, state, or stage in the Christian afterlife where, after death, the soul is purged of minor, unexpiated sin so that it can be fit for heaven. ‘Purgatory’ derives from the Latin purgare (to purge) and hence as the noun purgatorium it is a place of purgation and purific...