Hell Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about Hell

Hell Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is Hell?
A: Hell, in religion and folklore, is an afterlife location, sometimes a place of torment and punishment.

Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as what?
A: Eternal destinations while religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations.

Typically where do these traditions locate hell?
A: In another dimension or under the Earth's surface and often include entrances to Hell from the land of the living.

Other afterlife destinations include what?
A: Heaven, Purgatory, Paradise, and Limbo.

Other traditions, which do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward, merely describe Hell as what?
A: An abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place located under the surface of Earth (for example, see Sheol and Hades).

The modern English word hell is derived from what?
A: Old English hel, helle (first attested around 725 AD to refer to a nether world of the dead) reaching into the Anglo-Saxon pagan period.

Hell appears in several what?
A: Mythologies and religions.

It is commonly inhabited by whom?
A: Demons and the souls of dead people.

Hell is often depicted in art and literature, perhaps most famously in Dante's what?
A: Divine Comedy.

Punishment in Hell typically corresponds to what?
A: Sins committed during life.

Sometimes these distinctions are specific, with damned souls suffering for each sin committed (see for example Plato's myth of Er or Dante's The Divine Comedy), but sometimes they are what?
A: General, with condemned sinners relegated to one or more chamber of Hell or to a level of suffering.

In many religious cultures, including Christianity and Islam, Hell is often depicted as what?
A: Fiery, painful, and harsh, inflicting suffering on the guilty.

Despite these common depictions of Hell as a place of fire, some other traditions portray Hell as what?
A: Cold.

Buddhist - and particularly Tibetan Buddhist - descriptions of Hell feature what?
A: An equal number of hot and cold Hells.

Among Christian descriptions Dante's Inferno portrays the innermost (9th) circle of Hell as a what?
A: A frozen lake of blood and guilt.

The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located where?
A: Deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue "a shadowy version of life on earth".

This bleak domain was known as what?
A: Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal.

All souls went to the same afterlife and a person's actions during life had no effect on what?
A: How the person would be treated in the world to come.

The souls in Kur were believed to eat nothing but what?
A: Dry dust.

Family members of the deceased would ritually pour libations into the dead person's grave through what?
A: A clay pipe, thereby allowing the dead to drink.

Nonetheless, funerary evidence indicates that some people believed that the goddess Inanna, Ereshkigal's younger sister, had the power to do what?
A: To award her devotees with special favors in the afterlife.

During the Third Dynasty of Ur, it was believed that a person's treatment in the afterlife depended on what?
A: How he or she was buried.

Those that had been given sumptuous burials would be treated well, but those who had been given poor burials would what?
A: Fare poorly.

The entrance to Kur was believed to be located where?
A: In the Zagros Mountains in the Far East.

It had how many gates through which a soul needed to pass?
A: Seven.

The god Neti was the what?
A: The gatekeeper.

Ereshkigal's sukkal, or messenger, was what god?
A: The god Namtar.

Galla were a class of what that were believed to reside in the underworld?
A: Demons.

What was their primary purpose?
A: It appears to have been to drag unfortunate mortals back to Kur.

They are frequently referenced in what?
A: Magical texts, and some texts describe them as being seven in number.

Several extant poems describe the galla doing what?
A: Dragging the god Dumuzid into the underworld.

The later Mesopotamians knew this underworld by what name?
A: Its East Semitic name: Irkalla.

During the Akkadian Period, Ereshkigal's role as the ruler of the underworld was assigned to whom?
A: Nergal, the god of death.

The Akkadians attempted to harmonize this dual rulership of the underworld by making Nergal what?
A: Ereshkigal's husband.

With the rise of the cult of Osiris during the Middle Kingdom the "democratization of religion" offered to even his humblest followers the prospect of what?
A: Eternal life, with moral fitness becoming the dominant factor in determining a person's suitability.

At death a person faced what?
A: Judgment by a tribunal of forty-two divine judges.

If they had led a life in conformance with the precepts of the Goddess Maat, who represented truth and right living, the person was what?
A: Welcomed into the heavenly reed fields.

If found guilty, what was done to the person?
A: He was thrown to Ammit, the "devourer of the dead" and would be condemned to the lake of fire.

The person taken by the devourer is subject first to what?
A: Terrifying punishment and then annihilated.

These depictions of punishment may have influenced what?
A: Medieval perceptions of the inferno in hell via early Christian and Coptic texts.

Purification for those considered justified appears in the descriptions of "Flame Island", where humans experience what?
A: The triumph over evil and rebirth.

For the damned complete destruction into a state of non-being awaits but there is no suggestion of what?
A: Eternal torture.

The Tale of Khaemwese describes the torment of a rich man, who lacked charity, when he dies and compares it to what?
A: The blessed state of a poor man who has also died.

Divine pardon at judgment always remained a central concern for whom?
A: The Ancient Egyptians.

In classic Greek mythology, below Heaven, Earth, and Pontus is what?
A: Tartarus, or Tartaros (Greek Τάρταρος, deep place).

It is either a deep, gloomy place, a pit or abyss used as a what?
A: A dungeon of torment and suffering that resides within Hades (the entire underworld) with Tartarus being the hellish component.

In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were what?
A: Judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus.

As a place of punishment, it can be considered a what?
A: A hell.

The classic Hades, on the other hand, is more similar to what?
A: Old Testament Sheol.

Early Judaism had no concept of Hell, although the concept of an afterlife was introduced during what period?
A: The Hellenistic period, apparently from neighboring Hellenistic religions.

It occurs for example in what book?
A: The Book of Daniel.

Daniel 12:2 proclaims what?
A: "And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, Some to everlasting life, Some to shame and everlasting contempt."

Judaism does not have a specific doctrine about the afterlife, but it does have a mystical/Orthodox tradition of describing what?
A: Gehinnom.

Gehinnom is not Hell, but originally a what?
A: A grave and in later times a sort of Purgatory where one is judged based on one's life's deeds, or rather, where one becomes fully aware of one's own shortcomings and negative actions during one's life.

The Kabbalah explains it as a what?
A: A waiting room, (commonly translated as an "entry way") for all souls (not just the wicked).

The overwhelming majority of rabbinic thought maintains that people are not in Gehinnom forever; the longest that one can be there is said to be how long?
A: 12 months, however there has been the occasional noted exception.