Hell in Christianity

Hell in Christian theology is understood as either a place or a state that unrepentant sinners enter after God’s final judgment, or, according to some believers, immediately following death when a person chooses to be separated from God. The nature of Hell is drawn from biblical passages, and when taken literally, some of these have shaped the common image of Hell. Certain theologians view it as the result of rejecting a relationship with God.

Several Hebrew and Greek terms are rendered as “Hell” in most English Bibles. The Hebrew word “Sheol” appears in the Old Testament, and the Greek “Hades” in the New Testament. Some modern translations, like the New International Version, translate Sheol as “grave” and simply transliterate Hades. Groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe these terms refer to a state of complete unconsciousness. Scholars generally agree that Sheol and Hades typically mean the grave, a temporary home for the dead, or the underworld.

Another term, “Gehenna,” appears in the New Testament and is described as a place where both body and soul can be destroyed (Matthew 10:28) in “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43). It is often translated as “Hell,” though sometimes left as Gehenna. In the Hebrew Bible, Gehenna was a physical location outside Jerusalem’s walls, mentioned in Joshua 18:16, Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2, and 19:6, as well as in later Jewish texts like the Talmud and Midrash. The Greek verb “tartarō,” derived from Tartarus, appears once in the New Testament (2 Peter 2:4) and is usually translated as “thrown down to hell.” A few versions render it as “Tartarus,” which the Holman Christian Standard Bible notes is a Greek name for a subterranean place of divine punishment lower than Hades.

In early Jewish belief, the dead went to Sheol, an indiscriminate place below ground marked by darkness, silence, and forgetfulness. By the third or second century BC, this idea evolved to include separate sections for the righteous and wicked, as seen in the Book of Enoch. During the Savoraic or early Geonic rabbinic period (500–640 AD), Gehinnom was seen as the place of ultimate punishment. Rabbi Yehudah taught in Kiddushin 82a:8 that even the best physician goes to Gehenna, and the fittest butcher is a partner of Amalek. This view also appears in the earlier apocryphal works Assumption of Moses and 2 Esdras.

In the New Testament, three Greek words are commonly translated as “Hell.” The most frequent is “gehenna,” a loanword from Hebrew, used almost exclusively in the synoptic gospels (except for James 3:6). It is often described as a place of punishment (e.g., Matthew 5:22, 18:8–9; Mark 9:43–49). The word “hades” is used to refer to the abode of the dead (e.g., Acts 2:31; Revelation 20:13). Only one passage, the parable of Lazarus and Dives (Luke 16:19–31), depicts hades as a place of torment, where a wicked man suffers fiery punishment, contrasted with Abraham’s bosom, with no crossing possible. Some scholars see this as reflecting the intertestamental Jewish view of hades or sheol with separate divisions for the righteous and wicked.

In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus describes an eschatological scene where the Son of Man separates people like sheep from goats, sending those who failed to help “the least of his brothers” into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. This judgment is stark, with no gradations: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire… For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat…” The Book of Revelation also mentions a lake of fire and brimstone where unrighteous people are thrown, and an abyss where the Seven-Headed Dragon is imprisoned during the Millennium.

Some Eastern Orthodox Christians view Heaven and Hell not as spatial destinations but as experiences of God’s just and loving presence. There is no created place of divine absence, nor is Hell an ontological separation from God. Instead, Hell and Heaven are dimensions of God’s intensifying presence, felt as torment or paradise depending on a person’s spiritual state. For someone who hates God and themselves as God’s image-bearer, being surrounded by divine presence would cause unbearable anguish. As Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elizabeth H. Prodromou write, these symbols refer to the experience of God’s presence in two different modes.