I think to understand ‘hell’ as it was meant you have to look long & hard at the context in which it occurs. I am not a very learned person when it comes to theology; but as I understand it, hell is only really very important in the context of ‘salvation’. That is; you have people who receive ‘salvation’ and you have those who don't and those who don't, they go to hell. So it is not really ‘hell’ that is so important. What is important is ‘salvation’, and that ‘good will triumph’, that keeping faith may not be easy at all times but that it is also faith which will at the end reward you. This is distinct from taking matters into your own hand and being an obstructive warrior of the faith (Maccabees); this is more the quiet enduring kind of faith (Ruth).

The problem I have with the idea of a wider message of the bible is that it is a body of somewhat awkard fitting theological views that clearly shifts a lot too. The closest analogy would be the repeated & doomed attempts of Mathematicians to find one basic set of axioms from which all of the known body of Math could be constructed by induction.