The word “hell” in your Bible is standing in for four different words. Four words that meant four different things. When you look at what each one actually said, the fire everybody pictures turns out to be something people built over hundreds of years. This is how it happened.
One Word Standing In For Four
The word “hell” turns up many times in an old King James Bible. It feels solid, like one clear place with one clear meaning.
It is not one word. It is four.
The men who first wrote the Bible did not write in English. They wrote in Hebrew and in Greek. When the King James translators sat down with those pages, they found four separate words in front of them, and they gave all four of them the same English name. They called them all “hell.”
Here are the four.
The first is Sheol. That is a Hebrew word, and it simply means the grave. The still, quiet place under the ground where everyone goes when they die. Not just bad people. Everyone. Even the great fathers of the faith expected to go there.
And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.Genesis 37:35
Jacob was a good man, and he still said he would go down into the grave. That grave is Sheol. It is dark and it is silent, and it is not fire. A grieving father was saying something plain there. He wanted to go down and be with his boy. Not into flames. Into the same quiet ground. If you have ever lain awake afraid of where someone you loved has gone, Jacob was not picturing flames either. He was picturing rest, and he hoped to share it.
For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?Psalm 6:5
The second word is Hades. That one is Greek. It was the name the Greeks gave to their own shadowy world of the dead, long before Jesus was born. When Greek-speaking writers needed a word for the grave, they borrowed this one.
The third word is Gehenna. That one is not an idea at all. It is a place you could walk to, a real valley outside Jerusalem, and its true story is stranger than anything you have been told. We will go there in a minute.
The fourth word shows up only one single time in the whole Bible. It is Tartarus, another word straight out of Greek myth.
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.2 Peter 2:4
Four words. Four meanings. One English name. Press all four of them into “hell,” and it starts to look like one burning pit runs from the first page of the Bible to the last. It does not. One small English word got used in place of four, and that one word changed how the whole world thinks about death.
The Real Valley
So let us walk to that third word. Let us go to Gehenna.
Gehenna is a Greek way of saying an old Hebrew name: Ge-Hinnom. The Valley of Hinnom. It is a real ravine just south of the old city of Jerusalem. You could stand in it. And every Jew who heard Jesus say that name knew exactly why it was a cursed place.
Long before Jesus, some of Israel’s own kings did a terrible thing in that valley. They built fires there, and they burned their own children as gifts to a false god named Molech. It is the darkest crime in the whole Bible.
And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.2 Kings 23:10
A father. A son or a daughter. A fire. That is the horror that lived in that valley, and that is what the name meant to anyone who heard it.
Then the prophet Jeremiah stood at the edge of that same valley and spoke a warning from God. He said this place of murder would become a place of judgment, and he gave it a new and awful name: the valley of slaughter.
Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter: for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place.Jeremiah 19:6
So when Jesus named Gehenna, he was not pointing at a made-up underworld. He was pointing at a real place with real history in it, a valley of child-murder and a prophet’s warning. That is a hard, sad truth, and it is true. It is also nothing at all like the tidy fiery basement people picture today.
How the Picture Got Painted
What surprises people most is where the picture actually came from.
The hell most people imagine, with endless fire and screaming forever and a devil holding a pitchfork, was not handed down whole from Jesus. It got built up slowly, by many different people, over many hundreds of years.
First came a Greek idea. The Greeks taught that the soul can never die, that it lives on no matter what happens. That idea changes what punishment can be. If a soul can never end, then its punishment can never end either. That idea did not come from the Hebrew Bible. It came out of Greek thinking, and over time it worked its way into how Christians pictured the next life.
Then came the teachers. A man named Tertullian spoke strongly about a fire that never stops. And a great thinker named Augustine, hundreds of years after Jesus, wrote it down as firm truth: the fire is real, and it is forever. He was putting an idea together, one piece at a time, out of the pieces he had been handed. He was not simply repeating something plain and obvious that had been there from the start.
There is a quiet fact here that history almost forgot. In those early centuries, good Christians did not all agree about this. Some believed the fire lasted forever. Some believed the lost simply pass away. And some believed that God, in the end, heals and gathers everyone home. Three views, all held by faithful people. More and more of them came to believe in the forever fire over time, but it was never the only thing Christians believed.
Then, more than a thousand years after Jesus, a poet named Dante wrote a famous poem. He drew hell as circles, floor below floor, each one with its own punishment. It is a powerful poem. But it is a poem. The Bible never drew that map. Dante did, out of his own imagination, and Dante’s picture is the one most people see in their heads today when somebody says the word hell.
The Word Even the Scholars Argue About
Someone will say, “But Jesus himself said everlasting punishment.” And he did use a strong word.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.Matthew 25:46
The Greek word behind “everlasting” there is a word scholars still argue about to this day. It can mean “never-ending.” It can also mean “belonging to the age to come.” Serious, careful Bible experts land on both sides of it. I am not going to tell you it clearly means one and not the other, because that would not be true.
But I can tell you this plainly. The forever-torment reading is not the only faithful way to read Jesus’s own words. It is one honest reading among honest readings, and that changes how sure anyone should sound when they say it.
Who Is Really Behind Those Four Words
Maybe someone once used that fire to make you feel small. Maybe you were told you were too far gone, that you had sinned past the point of return, that a door had already shut on you and the flames were already lit with your name on them.
Or maybe the fear was never for you at all. Maybe you have stood at a graveside, or lain awake at three in the morning, sick with worry about someone you loved and lost. A parent. A child. A friend who died before they ever got right. And you were terrified that a good God was burning them right now. If that is the weight you have been carrying, this whole story was for you most of all.
Hear this. That picture was made by people over hundreds of years. It is not the plain, simple thing Jesus set down at the start. When you pull those four little words apart and look at each one, there is no torturer waiting with his tools. What is there instead is the God who ran down the road to hug a son who had thrown his whole life away.
You were told to be afraid of a place. You were never told its real story. Now you know a little of it, and knowing the story has a way of shrinking the fear.
So don’t carry this one alone. If reading this made you feel a little less afraid, come sit with us a while. We are New Testament Only, and this is exactly what we do. We take the old stories that people got wrong, and we go through them slowly, in plain words, for free. There is a whole shelf of them waiting, and a new one every week. Come find us online, and let us send the next one straight to your inbox. No fear attached. Just the story, told true. Whoever you were afraid for, there is room for them in it. And there is room for you.