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statement that the dead can neither intercede nor pray in any other way (Pseudo-Philo 33:5).
10
Both texts approved of intercession for those who were still living.
These words were attributed to Deborah:
Only direct your heart to the LORD your God during the time of your life, because after
your death you cannot repent of those things in which you live. . . even hell will not
restore what has been received and deposited to it unless it be demanded by him who has
made the deposit to it. Now therefore, my sons, obey my voice; while you have the time
of life and the light of the law, make straight your ways (Pseudo Philo 33:2-3).
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As far as I can determine, this was the earliest exhortation to straighten up ones life in order to
avoid permanent residence in Hell.
The genre, Tours of Hell, originated in intertestamental Judaism. The Jewish Tours of
Hell in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha started slowly with few specific connections between
individual sins and the punishments for them. Yet it is clear that this material strongly influenced
both earlier and later Christian Tours of Hell.
12
Some writings in the Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha are either heavily Christian in themselves or originally Jewish compositions
which were later reworked by Christian editors who inserted interpolations expressing Christian
ideas. I shall include some of these writings in my survey of Christian Tours.
The Christian Tours of Hell in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament
Apocrypha, and later Christian writings greatly expanded the number of sins connected with the
depictions of the punishments applied for them. These descriptions were often vivid and
sometimes repugnant. These Tours were produced throughout church history from perhaps the
first century through the medieval period and less often afterward.
It is important to observe that these Tours of Hell could hardly have been produced apart
from the perspective of the conscious endless punishment of the damned.

III. OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA: CHRISTIAN TEXTS

A. 2 Enoch
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The author of 2 Enoch described Enoch (Genesis 5:21-23), while on a tour of Hell, as
seeing
a very frightful place: and all kinds of torture and torment are in that place, cruel darkness
and lightless gloom. And there is no light there, and a black fire blazes up perpetually,
with a river of fire that come out over the whole place, fire here, freezing ice there, and it
dries up and it freezes; and very cruel places of detention and dark and merciless angels,
carrying instruments of atrocities torturing without pity. (10:1-3 J)
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Enoch was informed that those suffering in these ways had been guilty of many sins including
involvement with demons, stealing, coveting, fornication and murder (10:4-6 J). Later Enoch
described the condemned prisoners as "in pain, looking forward to endless punishment" (40:13
J).
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These punishments were pictured in vivid imagery (fire, pain, instruments of atrocities)