Hell and the Devil from a Jewish Point of View

Commenting on the decision of the Dean of Arches (that the denial either of the eternity of punishment, or of the personality of the evil one, is sufficient to justify a clergyman in refusing the “Holy Communion” to a parishioner), the Jewish Chronicle says, “We Jews may congratulate ourselves upon the different reading of our own Scriptures. Our God is mercy itself. He inflicts punishment for the expiation of sin, not from revenge. With the expiation of the sin the punishment ceases. The object is attained, why continue the torture? Further, what else is the belief in God and Satan, but the belief of the ancient Persians in Ormunzd and Ahriman, the former the god of light and all that is good, and the more powerful of the two; the latter the god of darkness and evil. Surely the name does not make the difference. Yet the God of Israel declared, ‘I form the light and create the darkness; I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.’ Here we alight upon another of the errors of Christianity, which even as it personified the Spirit of Holiness, transforming this abstract noun into the Holy Ghost and the memra ( ארממ ) of the Targum; the logos of Philon into the Son of God, so it took a mere figure of speech—a poetic abstraction called the adversary—Satan—for a real being, converted him into a kind of rival god, always fighting with the second person of the Deity, just as Ahriman is constantly in antagonism with Ormunzd. Has a Jew not occasion to thank God for having been born in a community free from these darkening and mischievous errors?”