Before Christianity: The Real Origins of the Lake of Fire

Before Christianity: The Real Origins of the Lake of Fire

When most people hear the phrase “lake of fire,” they immediately think of the Book of Revelation. But the idea of divine fire used for judgment or purification didn’t start with Christianity—and it didn’t even start with Judaism. Long before Revelation was written, ancient cultures across Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Greece had already developed their own fiery afterlives, burning rivers, and infernal lakes.

If anything, Revelation’s imagery is a late arrival in a very old tradition.

This blog will walk through the exact ancient texts—not generalizations—that show how widespread the “lake of fire” concept was before Christianity.

Egypt: The Oldest Literal “Lakes of Fire”

Ancient Egypt contains the earliest known references to actual lakes of fire in the afterlife—centuries before the Hebrew Bible was fully formed and more than a thousand years before Christianity existed.

In the Book of the Dead, two passages stand out:

Spell 17 speaks of a “Lake of Fire” (šꜣ n sṯt) where the wicked are destroyed but the righteous can pass unharmed.

Spell 126 mentions guardians standing watch over a “Lake of Flames.”

The theme continues in other funerary texts:

Book of Gates (5th & 6th divisions): Enemies of the sun-god Ra are burned in literal fiery lakes.

Amduat, Hour 4 and Hour 7: Apophis, the chaotic serpent, is consumed in a lake of burning fire.

Egypt didn’t just influence Israel culturally—it shared a border for millennia. Egyptian fire-imagery was part of the air the ancient Levant breathed.

Persia (Zoroastrianism): The Most Direct Parallel

If you want the closest possible match to Revelation, you don’t start in Judea—you start in ancient Persia.

Zoroastrianism contains a vivid vision of the end of the world where all humanity must pass through a river of molten metal:

Greater Bundahishn 30.18–32

“All men will pass through the river of molten metal… For the righteous it will be as warm milk; for the wicked, it will be burning.”

Other Zoroastrian texts echo the same theme:

Zamyad Yasht 19.89–92

Dēnkard 9.18–19

This is the oldest surviving example of a final, fiery judgment where the righteous and wicked experience the same fire differently—exactly the logic Revelation uses.

Given that Judaism was under Persian rule for two centuries, the influence is unsurprising.

Mesopotamia: Fiery Pits of the Underworld

Mesopotamia—the cultural giant that shaped the entire Ancient Near East—did not use the phrase “lake of fire,” but its underworld texts contain fiery pits, infernal flames, and burning punishments.

Key sources include:

The Maqlû series (Tablets I & VII): Sorcerers’ enemies are cast into pits of fire.

Erra Epic I.38–40: The god Erra vows to engulf the world in destructive heat.

Descent of Ishtar, line 124: The underworld includes regions of burning and destruction.

Underworld Vision of Kummay (Neo-Assyrian): Describes zones of fiery torment for the wicked.

This is the earliest environment where “burning as judgment” is fully developed.

Canaanite/Ugaritic Religion: Fire as the Power of Death

From Ugarit (modern Syria), we have the religion closest to early Israelite belief. While there isn’t a literal lake of fire, the god Motu (Death) uses fire as a consuming force:

KTU 1.6 VI.51–53: Mot boasts that he consumes gods and humans with fire and burning dust.

KTU 1.5 II: Mot’s domain includes fire and desolation.

KTU 1.22: Underworld rituals involved imagery of burning.

Gehenna and Sheol in the Hebrew Bible develop directly from this cultural matrix.

Greece: Rivers of Fire and the Torments of Tartarus

By the time Judaism entered the Hellenistic world, Greek ideas of the fiery afterlife were everywhere.

The Greeks had:

Tartarus — a fiery pit

Hesiod, Theogony 717–819 describes Tartarus with blazing torment.

Rivers of fire in the afterlife

Plato, Phaedo 113e–114c: Souls are punished in the Pyriphlegethon, “the flaming river.”

Virgil, Aeneid 6.550–627: The underworld contains a burning river flowing around the place of the damned.

Cosmic purification by fire

Stoic philosophers like Chrysippus (summarized in Diogenes Laertius 7.134–138) believed in an ekpyrosis, a world-ending fire that renews the cosmos.

These ideas circulated widely in the Mediterranean just before Christianity emerged.

Conclusion 

So where did Christianity get the Lake of Fire ? It didn’t invent it. It inherited a powerful symbol that had been growing across cultures for 2,000 years:

From Egypt, the literal image of a lake of fire.

From Persia, the idea of fiery final judgment and purification.

From Mesopotamia, the concept of fire as divine punishment.

From Canaan, the symbolism of fire associated with death and the underworld.

From Greece, the rivers of fire and philosophical fire-purification.

By the time Revelation was written, the whole ancient world already imagined divine fire flowing at the end of history.

John wasn’t revealing something new;

he was remixing the greatest hits of ancient apocalyptic imagery.