History and culture February 4, 2022 Updated: September 15, 2026 12 min read THY-REALITY

Hell in the Bible: Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus

When a translation renders several different terms with the single word “hell,” the Bible can appear to describe one uniform place. The source texts distinguish Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus—and Revelation's lake of fire is not even identical with Hades.

Open an older Bible translation and search for “hell,” and it can appear that biblical writers from Genesis to Revelation are describing one and the same place: an underground realm of fire, punishment, and conscious suffering. But that impression is partly a product of translation. The Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and the New Testament use several different terms with different histories and functions.

Four are especially important: Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures, Hades in the Greek world and the New Testament, Gehenna, derived from the Valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem, and Tartarus, which appears in the New Testament only through a single verbal form in 2 Peter. Revelation also speaks of the lake of fire—and explicitly distinguishes it from Hades.

That does not mean later Christian doctrine of hell is simply “invented,” or that the Bible lacks postmortem judgment. Biblical texts genuinely contain images of punishment, fire, destruction, exclusion, darkness, and final judgment. It means something narrower: one later theological word is not a perfect dictionary equivalent for every source term.

This article therefore performs a focused lexical audit: what each term means in its own textual setting, where the terms overlap, where they do not, how translation brought them closer together, and which questions—such as the duration of punishment or the precise nature of the afterlife—cannot be settled by vocabulary alone.

The first problem: “hell” is a translation, not one source word

Biblical languages do not contain one word that simply covers everything many people today mean by “hell.” Hebrew Sheol belongs to the world of the Hebrew Bible; Greek Hades is a classical term for the realm of the dead and in the Septuagint frequently renders Sheol; Gehenna has a different etymology and symbolic development; Tartarus comes from Greek mythological vocabulary and is used only exceptionally in the New Testament.

These distinctions are not academic pedantry. When one translation renders several of these terms as “hell,” readers naturally begin interpreting one passage through another. Properties of Gehenna—fire and eschatological judgment—can quietly be transferred to every occurrence of Sheol or Hades even when those passages do not contain them.

The opposite error would be to say that different terms therefore have no relationship at all. Jewish and Christian ideas of death developed historically, vocabulary moved toward new semantic overlaps, and later theology could synthesize multiple images into a broader doctrine. A lexical audit must therefore distinguish without artificially fragmenting the whole tradition.

Sheol: first a realm of death, not a fiery penal chamber

In older layers of the Hebrew Bible, Sheol primarily belongs to the language of death, the grave, and the underworld of the dead. In Genesis 37:35 Jacob expects to “go down to Sheol” mourning for Joseph. Because Jacob is a patriarch of the covenant rather than a model of wickedness, the verse by itself blocks the equation of every Sheol passage with a place of punishment for the damned.

Poetic texts often portray Sheol as depth, pit, gates, or the power of death. Psalm 89 asks who can escape its power; Psalm 6 connects death with the cessation of praise; Ecclesiastes 9:10 describes Sheol as a place without work, knowledge, or wisdom. These are not a fully systematic map of the afterlife, but their basic emphasis is not Dante's inferno.

Judicial dimensions can also appear: the wicked may be sent to Sheol prematurely, and later biblical and Second Temple literature develops more differentiated ideas of resurrection and postmortem destiny. So “Sheol means only the grave” is also too blunt. More accurately, it occupies a semantic field of death, burial, and underworld imagery that could acquire additional judicial associations over time.

Hades: the Greek bridge from Sheol into the New Testament

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, Hades became one of the principal renderings of Sheol. This does not mean Jewish translators thereby adopted every detail of Greek mythology about the god Hades and his realm. It means the Greek term for the realm of the dead became a natural translation bridge for Hebrew language about death and the underworld.

The link remains visible in the New Testament. In Acts 2, Psalm 16 is quoted with the word Hades: the Messiah is not abandoned to Hades. Here the term is closely tied to death and resurrection, not to a description of the final place of punishment. Revelation similarly pairs Death and Hades as powers or realms associated with the dead.

For that reason, Hades in the New Testament cannot automatically be translated as “the final hell.” Yet individual texts can give it a more judicial character, as the next example shows.

Luke 16: Hades can contain torment, yet is still not the lake of fire

In the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, the rich man suffers in Hades after death and sees Lazarus with Abraham. Whatever afterlife geography one thinks can be reconstructed from a parable, one point is clear: New Testament Hades is not always merely a neutral synonym for death. In this text it can carry experienced punishment and conscious distress.

Even this passage, however, does not allow Hades to be equated with every later image of hell. Revelation 20:13–14 describes Hades as something that gives up the dead at the final judgment and is then thrown, together with Death, into the lake of fire. If Hades is thrown into the lake of fire, the two are clearly not identical terms within the same vision.

This is one of the clearest examples of how a single translation word can obscure the text's structure. The King James Version uses “hell” in Revelation 20 where the Greek has Hades, while many modern translations retain Hades and make the relationship easier to see.

Gehenna: from a real valley to an image of judgment

Gehenna has a different origin. The word derives from the Hebrew name of the Valley of the Son of Hinnom near Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible associates this area with Topheth and the passing or burning of children in sacrifice; 2 Kings 23:10 describes Josiah's defilement of Topheth, while Jeremiah 7 predicts that the valley will become a future “Valley of Slaughter” because of the violence practiced there.

That combination of place, fire, blood, and prophetic judgment matters more for the history of the term than the modern tourist image of a fiery crack in the ground. In Jewish literature, Gehinnom/Gehenna gradually develops from a geographical place into a term for divine judgment, and in the New Testament geenna appears chiefly in severe warnings attributed to Jesus.

So a real shift does occur with Gehenna: a toponym develops into a powerful eschatological image. But that development does not happen because the valley was simply another word for the older Sheol. Their lexical histories and primary symbolic associations are different.

Gehenna is not demonstrably Jesus' continuously burning city dump

One of the most widespread modern explanations says that the Valley of Hinnom in Jesus' day was Jerusalem's garbage dump, where fire burned continuously, so Jesus was merely drawing on an everyday municipal scene as a moral metaphor. The problem is that we lack convincing historical evidence for such a perpetually burning first-century garbage dump. Both Bible Odyssey and Lloyd Bailey's classic topographical study caution against treating this popular story as established fact.

That does not mean refuse or fire never existed in the valley. Cities obviously generate waste, and Jeremiah already associates the area with fire, corpses, and judgment. The methodological point is narrower: the explanatory story of a continuously burning municipal dump should not replace the ancient sources we actually possess.

Removing that later folkloric detail does not make Gehenna less severe. Its biblical force instead comes from the older history of Topheth, prophetic condemnation, and later eschatological use.

Jesus' Gehenna: fire, destruction, and Isaiah's worm

In the New Testament, Gehenna appears twelve times: seven in Matthew, three in Mark, one in Luke, and one in James. Jesus' warnings associate it with fire, judgment, and loss. Matthew 10:28 speaks of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna; Mark 9 associates it with “unquenchable fire” and the statement that the worm does not die.

Mark's language is not isolated. Mark 9:48 echoes Isaiah 66:24, where people look upon the corpses of rebels whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched. The New Testament therefore reworks older prophetic judgment language into an eschatological warning. The intertext itself cautions against turning every image too quickly into a literal geographical photograph of the afterlife.

Vocabulary alone also cannot settle later debates among eternal conscious torment, final destruction, and other theological models of judgment. The texts provide severe images of fire, ruin, and exclusion; questions of duration and ontology require a wider exegetical argument, not merely a dictionary entry for Gehenna.

Tartarus: one New Testament use—and it concerns angels

The fourth term is the most limited. In 2 Peter 2:4 the verb tartaroō is used: God did not spare sinning angels but cast them into Tartarus, committing them to darkness until judgment. Some translations simply render this as “hell,” while footnotes reveal the underlying Greek term.

Context matters. The passage is not describing ordinary human death and does not speak of Gehenna. It concerns angels who sinned and their confinement until a future judgment. The parallel in Jude 6 similarly speaks of angels who abandoned their proper dwelling and are kept in chains until the day of judgment, without using the word Tartarus.

Scholars commonly connect this motif with Jewish Watcher traditions, especially 1 Enoch, which expands Genesis 6 into a story of rebellious angels and their imprisonment. Greek Tartarus therefore functions here as a culturally intelligible term for a deep prison of superhuman transgressors, not as a generic name for the final destiny of all condemned humans.

The lake of fire: a fifth image that warns against premature equation

Revelation further complicates every attempt to construct a dictionary in which “one word equals one place.” Chapters 19 and 20 introduce the lake of fire: the beast, false prophet, devil, and finally those not found in the book of life are thrown into it. The text also calls it “the second death.”

Yet Revelation does not use the word Gehenna for the lake of fire. More importantly, Death and Hades are themselves thrown into it. Within the same book, Hades is therefore a temporary realm or power that releases its dead, while the lake of fire belongs to a later moment of final judgment.

Theological tradition may legitimately ask whether Gehenna, the lake of fire, and other images describe different aspects of one final reality. A lexical audit must first state that the text does not use these terms as simple synonyms.

How translation created an impression of unity

Every translator must choose between literal precision and intelligibility. If Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus are all rendered with the familiar word “hell,” readers receive a theologically recognizable concept but lose part of the textual history. If every term is merely transliterated, one may gain precision without providing explanation.

The difference is easy to see between older and newer English translations. The King James Version can render Hades in Revelation 20 and Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4 with the same word “hell.” Modern translations often retain Hades and at least footnote Tartarus in 2 Peter. Readers can then see relationships that one uniform translation word otherwise conceals.

This is not an argument that one translation is therefore “false.” Translation is interpretation. It is, however, a reason to check the source term and its immediate context before building an entire doctrine from one Slovenian or English word.

What this audit establishes—and what it does not

A lexical audit establishes above all difference. Sheol is not simply Hebrew for Gehenna. Hades is not the same thing as the lake of fire in Revelation. Tartarus in 2 Peter is a prison for sinning angels until judgment. Gehenna carries the history of the Valley of Hinnom and becomes powerful language of eschatological judgment in Jesus' sayings.

But none of this automatically proves a complete theology of the afterlife. The fact that words differ does not imply that final judgment is absent. Nor do fiery images, without further argument, establish every detail of later doctrines of eternal hell. Doctrine is built by synthesizing many texts, not by a single dictionary entry.

The fairest conclusion is therefore double. The Bible does not contain one unchanged technical word for “hell” from beginning to end. It does contain, across different periods, an increasingly dense language of death, judgment, resurrection, destruction, and punishment. Only after distinguishing those layers can we fairly ask how—and whether—they should be theologically integrated.