Sheol, Hades, and Hell: What the Bible Actually Means

If you read the Bible in English, it sounds like hell is everywhere. The Old Testament talks about it. Jesus warns about it. The apostles mention it. But the Bible was not written in English, and the word we translate as hell is actually at least four different words in the original languages.

Those words are Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus. They are not synonyms. They describe different realities, in different parts of the Bible, for different purposes. Sheol is not Gehenna. Hades is not Tartarus. And none of them is automatically the hell most people picture when they hear the word. When you read the Bible with those distinctions in mind, verses that used to sound like threats start to sound like warnings, and verses that used to sound vague become precise.

This matters because the gospel itself depends on what kind of problem Jesus came to solve. If hell is a place of conscious torture after death, the cross looks like one thing. If hell is the final destruction of everything that refuses life, the cross looks like another. And if we are reading the Bible carefully, we cannot afford to collapse four different words into one.

The Short Answer

The Bible uses four main words that English Bibles sometimes render as "hell":

• Sheol (Hebrew) — the grave, the unseen realm where all the dead go. It is not a place of punishment in the Old Testament; it is the destination of every human life.
• Hades (Greek) — the Septuagint's translation of Sheol and the New Testament word for the realm of the dead. In some New Testament passages, it has two regions.
• Gehenna (Greek from Hebrew Ge Hinnom) — the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a place of garbage fires and historical idolatry. Jesus uses it as the image for final, irreversible judgment.
• Tartarus (Greek) — a prison for rebellious angels mentioned only in 2 Peter 2:4. It is not a destination for human beings.

If you are reading "hell" in the Old Testament, you are almost certainly reading Sheol. If you are reading Jesus' warnings, you are almost certainly reading Gehenna. The difference is not academic. It is the difference between the grave everyone enters and the judgment only some choose.

Sheol: The Grave That Waits for Everyone

In Hebrew, Sheol (שְׁאוֹל) is the most common word for the place of the dead. It appears sixty-six times in the Old Testament. It is not a place of fire, demons, or active torture. It is described as dark, silent, dusty, and forgotten. In Psalm 88:10-12, the poet asks, "Do you show wonders in the darkness?" and describes Sheol as a place where the dead do not praise God. In Ecclesiastes 9:10, it is the destination where "there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom."

Importantly, both the righteous and the unrighteous go to Sheol. Jacob says he will go down to Sheol in mourning for Joseph (Genesis 37:35). The psalmist says God is present even in Sheol (Psalm 139:8). Job longs for Sheol as a place of rest from his suffering (Job 14:13). None of these are people afraid of punishment. They are people facing the universal reality of death.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon defines Sheol as "the underworld, grave, or realm of the dead." The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament notes that in most Old Testament texts, Sheol is not a place of retribution but "the final, shadowy destination of all human beings." It is death as a place, not hell as a punishment.

This is why older English translations sometimes render Sheol as "the grave" or "the pit." The King James Version often translates it as "hell," but that translation confuses modern readers because it imports a New Testament idea back into the Old Testament. The New International Version and English Standard Version usually translate Sheol as "the grave" or leave it as "Sheol," which is more accurate.

Hades: The Greek Translation of Death's Realm

When Jewish translators rendered the Hebrew Bible into Greek around the second century BCE, they needed a Greek word for Sheol. They chose Hades (ᾍδης), the Greek name for the underworld. The choice made sense because Hades, like Sheol, was the realm of the dead, not a place of active torture for most people.

In the New Testament, Hades appears about ten times. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says the gates of Hades will not overcome the church. He is not saying hell will not defeat the church; he is saying death itself will not have the final word. In Acts 2:27, Peter quotes Psalm 16:10 and says God did not abandon Jesus' soul to Hades. Again, Hades is the realm of the dead, not a place of punishment.

The most detailed picture of Hades is in Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In the story, Hades contains two regions: one of comfort for the righteous man Lazarus and one of torment for the rich man. The two are separated by a "great chasm." This is not a systematic geography of the afterlife; it is a parable warning about wealth, justice, and ignoring the poor. But it does show that by the time of Jesus, Hades could be imagined as a temporary holding place with two conditions, awaiting the final resurrection and judgment.

The key point is that Hades is not the final judgment. It is the intermediate state. The final judgment is associated with Gehenna, not Hades.

Gehenna: The Valley That Became a Warning

The word Jesus uses most often for final judgment is Gehenna (γέεννα), which comes from the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom. It was a real valley on the southwest side of Jerusalem. In the Old Testament, it was the site of child sacrifice to Molech (2 Chronicles 28:3, Jeremiah 7:31). Later, it became a garbage dump where fires burned continuously to dispose of waste and the bodies of criminals. By the time of Jesus, Gehenna was a smell everyone in Jerusalem knew.

Jesus takes that literal valley and turns it into the most vivid image of final judgment. He warns about Gehenna in Matthew 5:22, 29-30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43-48; and Luke 12:5. In each case, the warning is about the final destruction of what refuses God. "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul," Jesus says. "Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna" (Matthew 10:28). The word destroy is important. Jesus does not say "torment forever." He says destroy.

The Greek word for destroy there is apollymi, which means to ruin, lose, or put an end to. In the Gospel of John, the same word is used for the sheep that is lost (Luke 15:4) and for the son who was lost (Luke 15:24). It is also used for the death of Judas (John 17:12). The word carries the idea of final ruin, not endless suffering. Whether that ruin means annihilation or eternal conscious punishment is one of the major debates in Christian theology, but the word itself is about destruction, not torture.

Gehenna is also described as a place of unquenchable fire and worms that do not die (Mark 9:48, quoting Isaiah 66:24). Isaiah's original image is about corpses being consumed in a garbage dump, not about conscious souls being tormented. The fire is unquenchable because it finishes its work. The worms do not die because they keep consuming what is thrown away. The image is about finality, not duration.

This is why Gehenna is the strongest warning in the Bible. It is not a place God sends people for being slightly bad. It is the final end of everything that refuses to become whole. Jesus uses it to warn religious people, rich people, and people who think they are safe because of their pedigree. The warnings are urgent because the result is permanent.

Tartarus: A Prison for Angels, Not People

Tartarus (Τάρταρος) appears once in the Bible, in 2 Peter 2:4. Peter says God cast angels who sinned into Tartarus and handed them over to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until judgment. The word borrows from Greek mythology, where Tartarus was the deepest prison of the underworld. But Peter uses it not for human souls but for rebellious angels.

This is important because some people read about "hell" and picture a single location with Satan in charge. The Bible does not support that. Satan is not ruling hell; he is awaiting judgment. And Tartarus is not a place for human beings. It is a specific holding place for specific beings who rebelled before the flood.

Because Tartarus is mentioned once and never applied to humans, it should not shape our main picture of final judgment. Gehenna is the word Jesus chose for that.

Why the Translation Confuses Us

English Bibles have a problem. There is only one word for hell in English, but four different words in the biblical text. The King James Version translated Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna as "hell" in different places, which made them sound like the same place. Modern translations are more careful, but they still use "hell" for Gehenna and sometimes Hades, which can blur the distinction.

This is not a conspiracy. It is just the difficulty of translating ancient languages into modern ones. But the result is that many readers think the Bible has a single, unified doctrine of hell. It does not. It has a developing picture: Sheol is the grave, Hades is the realm of the dead, Gehenna is the final judgment, and Tartarus is a prison for angels.

When you read the Psalms and see "hell," you should probably picture Sheol — the dark, silent place where all the dead wait. When you read Jesus' warnings, you should picture Gehenna — the burning valley of final destruction. When you read Peter's letter, you should picture Tartarus — a prison for fallen angels. These are not the same place.

What Jesus Meant When He Warned About Hell

Jesus is the most serious hell-preacher in the Bible. That is a strange thing to say, but it is true. He uses the strongest language about Gehenna. He warns that it is better to cut off your hand or tear out your eye than to enter it whole (Matthew 5:29-30). He warns that you can fear the one who destroys both body and soul in Gehenna (Matthew 10:28). He warns the Pharisees that they are making converts "twice as much a child of Gehenna" as themselves (Matthew 23:15).

But Jesus does not describe Gehenna as a place where God gets revenge on people. He describes it as the end of a road. People choose it. The rich man in Luke 16 ignores Lazarus at his gate and arrives in Hades. The goats in Matthew 25 ignore the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. The warning is not, "God is going to get you." The warning is, "If you keep living this way, this is where it ends."

This is why the gospel is good news. Jesus does not just warn about Gehenna; he enters death and comes back with the keys. In Revelation 1:18, he says, "I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades." He does not only hold the keys to life. He holds the keys to death. He has been to the grave and returned, which means the grave is not the final word for anyone who is in him.

The Honest Part

For a long time, I thought the Bible's four words for hell were a problem to solve. I wanted to know which view was right: eternal conscious torment, annihilation, or universal restoration. I read books on all sides. I listened to debates. I wanted a clean answer.

What I found instead was that the Bible refuses to be as neat as the debates. It gives us Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus. It gives us destruction and darkness. It gives us fire and a great chasm. It gives us a God who is love and a God who is a consuming fire. The pictures do not all fit into one tidy system.

But the core is clear: there is a real finality to rejecting life with God, and there is a real rescue available in Jesus. The Bible is not mainly trying to satisfy our curiosity about the afterlife. It is trying to move us toward the one who has already been through death and returned. Whatever Gehenna is, Jesus went to the cross so that anyone who trusts him does not have to find out.

That is why I am less interested in winning debates about hell than I used to be. I am more interested in making sure people know the door is open. The warnings are real. The love is bigger. The word that conquers Gehenna is not our correct theology. It is the name of Jesus.

Read It in the Original Words

The Sola Bible app shows the Hebrew and Greek words behind the English so you can see Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus where they actually appear. When you read them in context, the differences become obvious. Download Sola on the App Store or Google Play.

Jay is the co-founder of Sola and writes the original-language word-study series on the blog. He has a background in pastoral ministry and spends most of his reading time in the Hebrew and Greek behind the English Bible.

Sources and Further Reading

• Francis Brown, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs (BDB), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, entry on שְׁאוֹל (Sheol).
• Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), volume XIV, entry on Sheol.
• Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich (BDAG), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, entries on ᾍδης (Hades), γέεννα (Gehenna), and Τάρταρος (Tartarus).
• G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, on the Old Testament background of Gehenna and judgment imagery.
• N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, on the distinction between Sheol, Hades, and the Christian doctrine of resurrection.

Related Posts

• What Does Ruach Mean? The Hebrew Word for Spirit, Wind, and Breath in the Bible
• What Does Amen Mean? The Hebrew Word for Faithfulness That You Say at the End of Prayer
• What Does Dunamis Mean? The Greek Word Behind 'Power' in the Bible
• Verse of the Day — a daily verse with reflection and original-language context.