Fire and brimstone

For other uses, see Fire and Brimstone (disambiguation).

Lot and his family flee from Sodom, one of Gustave Doré's illustrations for La Grande Bible de Tours.
Steam and gas rising from a volcano, which the phrase "fire and brimstone" is intended to evoke.

Fire and brimstone (Biblical Hebrew: גָּפְרִית וָאֵשׁ gofrīt wāʾēš; Ancient Greek: πῦρ καὶ θεῖον) is an idiomatic expression referring to God's wrath found in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Bible, it often appears in reference to the fate of the unfaithful. Brimstone, an archaic term synonymous with sulfur,[1] evokes the acrid odor of sulfur dioxide given off by lightning strikes.[2] The association of sulfur with divine retribution is common in the Bible.

The idiomatic English translation of "fire and brimstone" is found in the Christian King James Version translation of the Old Testament and was also later used in the 1917 translation of the Jewish Publication Society. The 1857 Leeser translation of the Tanakh inconsistently uses both "sulfur" and "brimstone" to translate גָּפְרִ֣ית וָאֵ֑שׁ. The translation used by the 1985 New JPS is "sulfurous fire" while the 1978 Christian New International Version translation uses "burning sulfur."

Used as an adjective, fire-and-brimstone often refers to a style of Christian preaching that uses vivid descriptions of judgment and eternal damnation to encourage repentance especially popular during historical periods of Great Awakening.[3]

  1. ^ The dictionary definition of brimstone at Wiktionary
  2. ^ Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications & Industry. ChemTec Publishing, 2007. pp. 5
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Oxford was invoked but never defined (see the help page).