I Wish I Understood More about Hell

Last night I watched Paradise Lost at a theater. It was a adaptation (in about 100 minutes) of John Milton's 10 volume epic poem of Lucifer's fall from Heaven AND Adam and Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden. (So I am not really interested in trashing religion here, I am trying to understand.)

What is hard to understand is what the Bible really has to say about Hell. There are minimal references to Hell in the bible, and most seem to be tied back to a translation of the name for a ravine near Jerusalem. Translating this place name, Valley of Hinnom (in Hebrew, gē-hinnom); the Greeks called it Gehenna, into the word "Hell".

If that is true (as it seems to be) then where does our idea of Hell come from? Mainly, one finds, from Dante's Inferno and John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.

Now the show was well acted, and well paced. AND, it is my issue that I totally hated it.

Lucifer was a great actor, and I enjoyed him for a while, but his hellish cohorts were just odd. Beelzebub (his assistant in making hell more organized) had a bizarre old Jewish man accent and wore no pants. His wife / daughter (Sin who sprang, fully formed, out of his forehead) was played as a wizened beauty with syphilitic sores and the temperament of a Fish Wife.

But the biggest problem, plot-wise, is Eve. And I mean in the whole religion thing, not just the show I saw last night. Eve is created from Adam's rib and Adam loves her. They are souls completed by each other. He teaches her things, how the Garden works, the names of things and he explains God says don't eat of the Tree of Knowledge. In the play, and Milton's poem - at least, God never talks to Eve himself. And then the first Angle she meets, Lucifer, isn't at all like how he is described by Gabriel, she just has to take it on faith that God doesn't want her to eat the fruit, and God wants her to hate an Angel that is nice to her.

She dies eat the fruit, and then convinces Adam to do so as well, introducing pain and guilt into the world.

Okay, bear with me here, wouldn't an Omnipotent God already know she was going to do this? Why does God only talk to men? Yes, the Angelic cohort is supposedly neither male nor female, but Lucifer and Gabriel are always portrayed as men.

Doesn't it seem like God was setting up Eve for the fall even before he made her. Since God only speaks to Adam, Eve is consigned to be something that Adam as dominion over. In fact, Adam's fall is made all the more heroic by choosing to bite the fruit to stay with Eve.

It isn't a grand start to the human experiment.

Now, since the Bible has been translated a ton AND maybe some of this has been lost in the retelling. But it seems like God has the same affinity for women that he does for birds, creatures of the sea and insects. They are there to please Adam.

It kind of confuses me.