Gehenna vs Sheol vs Hades: What the Bible's "Hell" Words Really Mean
Short answer. "Hell" flattens at least three different words. Sheol is the Hebrew grave-world where everyone goes (Genesis 37:35), not a torture chamber. Hades is just the Greek word the Septuagint used to translate Sheol. Gehenna is a real ravine outside Jerusalem, the Valley of Hinnom, that became an image of fiery judgment, and it is the word Jesus actually uses (Matthew 5:22). Three concepts, one English net.
Sheol: the grave everyone shares, not the fire reserved for the wicked
Open the Hebrew Bible and the dead do not split into the saved and the damned. They all go down to Sheol, the shadowy underworld beneath the earth, the common destination of the righteous and the wicked alike. Jacob expects to descend there mourning his son (Genesis 37:35); the Psalmist describes it as a land of silence and forgetting where no one praises God (Psalm 6:5; Psalm 88:3-12); Ecclesiastes flatly says that in Sheol "there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom" (Ecclesiastes 9:10). It is closer to the Greek dead-world or the Mesopotamian underworld than to anything called "hell." Crucially, Sheol is not a place of punishment: it has no fire, no devil, no sorting of souls. Bart D. Ehrman (Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, 2020) underlines the point: for most of the Hebrew Bible there is no robust doctrine of postmortem reward or torment at all; death is a leveling, not a courtroom. The later machinery of "hell" simply is not here yet, which is the first sign that "hell" is a composite assembled long after these texts.
Hades: a Greek word imported to carry a Hebrew load
The second word is an act of translation. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria produced the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) beginning in the third century BCE, they needed a Greek term for Sheol. They chose hadēs, the name of the Greek underworld and its god. They did this dozens of times, and the swap carried a quiet freight: Hades arrived already furnished with Greek imagery of a realm of the dead. The New Testament inherits this. When Acts 2:27 quotes Psalm 16:10 ("you will not abandon my soul to Hades"), it is simply reading the Greek of a Hebrew line that said Sheol. In Luke 16:23 the rich man suffers "in Hades," and here the realm has begun to acquire compartments and torment, a development of the Second Temple period rather than of the older Scriptures. Alan E. Bernstein (The Formation of Hell, 1993) traces exactly this hardening: how a neutral land of the dead slowly took on moral architecture. Revelation 20:13-14 then has "Death and Hades" give up their dead and themselves get thrown into the lake of fire, treating Hades as a temporary holding-place that is itself abolished. Hades is not the final punishment; it is the waiting room, and even the waiting room is borrowed vocabulary.
Gehenna: a real valley that became a metaphor, and the word Jesus uses
The third word is a place you could once walk to. Gehenna is Greek for the Hebrew ge-hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine running below the southwest of Jerusalem. It was infamous: 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:31 remember it as the site where children were burned in sacrifice to Molech, an atrocity the prophets condemned, and Jeremiah promised it would become the "Valley of Slaughter," choked with the corpses of the judged (Jeremiah 19:6). That historical horror is why the valley's name migrated into an image of God's fiery judgment. This (not Sheol, not Hades) is the word on Jesus' lips. In the Gospels he warns of being thrown into Gehenna, "where the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:43-48, echoing the worm-and-fire of Isaiah 66:24), of Gehenna as a danger to body and soul (Matthew 10:28), and famously tells the Pharisees they cannot escape "the judgment of Gehenna" (Matthew 23:33). Scholars who work on this terminology, Henry Ansgar Kelly (Satan: A Biography, 2006) among them, stress how much is lost when English renders all of this as one flat "hell": Jesus is reaching for a named, local image of judgment, freighted with a specific national memory, not describing the classical underworld. The fire of Gehenna is judgment-imagery rooted in a real burning valley; its duration and finality are exactly the questions later theology fought over.
Tartarus: a one-word cameo from Greek myth
There is even a fourth word, and it appears exactly once. In 2 Peter 2:4 the author says God did not spare the angels who sinned but cast them into: the Greek verb is tartarōsas, "having thrown them into Tartarus." Tartarus is the deepest pit of Greek mythology, below even Hades, where the Titans were chained. The verse uses it not for human dead but for bound rebel angels awaiting judgment, drawing on the Watcher traditions of 1 Enoch (see 1 Enoch 6-16; cf. 1 Enoch 10, which 2 Peter closely echoes; Jubilees 10 develops the same demon-binding theme). It is a striking loan: a New Testament writer reaches into Greek myth for a single, vivid image. That this fourth, openly Greek term sits inside the same English "hell" makes the larger point unavoidable: the English word is a basket, and someone has thrown four different things into it.
What "hell" actually is: a composite of four words
The honest map looks like this, and the differences are not pedantry, they are the whole argument:
- Sheol (Hebrew), the universal grave/underworld; no fire, no punishment, no devil (Genesis 37:35; Ecclesiastes 9:10). Bedrock.
- Hades (Greek), the Septuagint's translation of Sheol, later acquiring compartments and torment; ultimately abolished in the lake of fire (Luke 16:23; Revelation 20:14). Bedrock translation; the moralizing is a later layer.
- Gehenna (from Hebrew ge-hinnom), a literal Jerusalem valley turned into an image of fiery judgment; the word Jesus actually uses (Mark 9:43-48; Matthew 23:33). Bedrock that it is a place-name; its theological scope is contested.
- Tartarus (Greek myth), the pit for fallen angels, used once (2 Peter 2:4). Bedrock as a single borrowing.
The deeper interpretive questions (whether *Gehenna*'s fire is endless, and what "eternal" even translates) belong to the separate fight over aiōnios and the duration of judgment, where the resonance with a participatory Persian eschatology of purgation is real but unproven: resonance you can lean on, not influence you can bank.
Common questions
What is the difference between Sheol and Hades?
Sheol is the Hebrew word for the universal grave-world where everyone goes (Genesis 37:35), and Hades is simply the Greek word the Septuagint chose to translate it, beginning in the third century BCE. So at root they name the same thing: a neutral land of the dead, not a place of punishment. The difference is that Hades arrived furnished with Greek imagery, and by the Second Temple period it had begun to acquire compartments and torment (Luke 16:23), a moralizing that is a later layer.
Which "hell" word did Jesus actually use?
Gehenna, not Sheol or Hades. In the Gospels he warns of being thrown into Gehenna, "where the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:43-48), and tells the Pharisees they cannot escape "the judgment of Gehenna" (Matthew 23:33). It is a named, local image of judgment, freighted with a specific national memory, not a description of the classical underworld.
Was Gehenna a real place?
Yes. Gehenna is Greek for the Hebrew ge-hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom, a real ravine running below the southwest of Jerusalem. It was remembered as the site where children were burned in sacrifice to Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31), and Jeremiah promised it would become the "Valley of Slaughter" (Jeremiah 19:6). That historical horror is why the valley's name migrated into an image of God's fiery judgment. Bedrock that it is a place-name; its theological scope is contested.
Is Tartarus in the Bible?
It appears exactly once. In 2 Peter 2:4 the Greek verb tartarōsas says God cast the sinning angels into Tartarus, the deepest pit of Greek mythology where the Titans were chained. The verse uses it not for human dead but for bound rebel angels awaiting judgment, drawing on the Watcher traditions of 1 Enoch. Bedrock as a single borrowing.
This doesn't tell you whether anyone burns forever. It shows that the English word "hell" is four ancient words in a trench coat, and that knowing which one a verse uses is where every serious answer has to start.
Sources
Genesis 37:35; Psalm 6:5; Psalm 88:3-12; Ecclesiastes 9:10; Psalm 16:10 / Acts 2:27; Luke 16:23; Revelation 20:13-14; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31; 19:6; Isaiah 66:24; Mark 9:43-48; Matthew 5:22; 10:28; 23:33; 2 Peter 2:4; 1 Enoch 6-16; Jubilees 10. Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (2020); Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell (1993); Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (2006).