Rethinking Hell. What the Bible Actually Says

For a lot of us the first time we ever really thought about Jesus was when someone asked a blunt question. If you were to die today would you go to heaven or hell.

That kind of binary thinking has pushed many people toward faith. Not because they were captured by Jesus and his vision for life on earth. It was fear of the bad place.

So let’s slow down and ask better questions. What is hell. What does the Bible actually say. And how should we think about this idea in a way that is faithful to Scripture and honest about our world.

I did not grow up with church categories. My early images of hell were shaped by cartoons and movies. A devil with horns and a pitchfork. Flames. Little demons poking people. Later I met Jesus and stepped into Christian spaces where the story sounded simple. Believe in Jesus and do the right things and you will go to be with him. Reject him and do the wrong things and you will go to be with the devil.

My brain filled in the blanks with pop culture images. For a long time I tried to manage my morality to avoid the bad place. Over time study and honest wrestling loosened that fear. Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The way of Jesus brings life, not constant shame. If your walk with him feels like carrying a boulder of anxiety about getting caught in a sin the moment you die, there is a better way.

Part of that way is learning how the Bible speaks about death and judgment across different eras and languages. When you open an English Bible you see the word hell. The original words and ideas behind it are not all the same.

Era One. Sheol in Ancient Israel

Before the Babylonian exile, the Scriptures speak most often of Sheol. Sheol is not a fiery torture chamber. It is the grave. The realm of the dead. A place of silence and rest.

Ecclesiastes 9.10 (NET) says there is no work, planning, knowledge, or wisdom in the grave. The Hebrew word behind grave is Sheol. Psalm 139.8 says that even if I descend to Sheol you are there. God is not absent even in death. Psalm 6.5 speaks of Sheol as a place where no one gives thanks. Job 3 imagines death as rest where kings and slaves lie together and the weary are at peace.

In this earliest horizon everyone goes to Sheol. Righteous and wicked alike. There is no two-track afterlife of heaven for good people and hell for bad people. Death is the end of human striving. God alone is God.

Era Two. Exile, Resurrection, and Judgment

History happens. Israel is conquered. The northern kingdom by Assyria. The southern kingdom of Judah by Babylon. Jerusalem falls. The temple is destroyed. People are exiled.

Out of that wound a second era of thought grows in the prophets and later writings. New themes emerge. Resurrectionand postmortem judgment. God will raise the dead and set the world right. The wicked will face God’s verdict.

A real place name becomes a powerful symbol. The Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, associated with tragic idolatry and child sacrifice, in Greek becomes Gehenna. Jeremiah 7 uses that valley as an image of slaughter and judgment. Isaiah 66 ends with a picture of rebels whose corpses are consumed by fire and worms that do not die. These images do not describe cartoon devils. They are signposts for the seriousness of evil and the certainty that God will not ignore it.

By this point Sheol and judgment begin to split conceptually. The righteous are raised to life. The wicked face judgment and exclusion from God’s renewed world. Even here the picture is not the later Western idea of eternal conscious torment. It reads more like divine judgment and destruction outside God’s kingdom.

Era Three. Jesus and Gehenna

When your English translation shows Jesus saying hell, he is almost always saying Gehenna. That matters. Jesus is a first century Jewish teacher speaking to people who know their Scriptures and the land they walk on. He draws directly on the prophetic imagination. Judgment. Fire that is not quenched. The Valley of Hinnom. These are symbols that confront human evil and call people to radical repentance and life in God’s reign.

In Matthew 5.22 he warns that contempt for a brother puts you in danger of the fiery Gehenna. In Matthew 10.28 he says to fear the One who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna. In Mark 9.43 to 48 he uses hard language about cutting off a hand or plucking out an eye rather than being thrown into Gehenna where the fire is not quenched.

He is not teaching self-mutilation. He is intensifying the call to deal decisively with sin because God’s judgment is real. Gehenna in Jesus’ mouth is not a lesson in metaphysical geography. It is a moral and prophetic warning.

Era Four. Early Christians, Hades, and the End of Death

As the movement spreads into the Greek-speaking world another word shows up. Hades. In Greek literature Hades is the general realm of the dead. Much closer to Sheol than to the later inferno of popular imagination. In the New Testament both words appear.

Revelation 20 says that death and Hades give up the dead, then death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. The point is that in God’s final victory even death itself is destroyed. Revelation 21 moves into the hope of new heavens and new earth where God dwells with his people and wipes away every tear.

Why Our English Bibles Say “Hell”

The Bible’s original languages are Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Over time the Scriptures were translated. The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, uses Greek terms like Hades and Gehenna for Hebrew ideas like Sheol and the Valley of Hinnom. Later Jerome translated the Scriptures into Latin. In many places he used a single Latin term to cover these different words and ideas. Later English translations followed that path and gave us one short word, hell, where the biblical authors had more nuance.

Modern translations often footnote this. Check a good study Bible and you will see notes like, the Greek term is Gehenna or the Hebrew is Sheol. Those notes help recover the texture we lost.

So What Do We Do With All This

The image of a literal fiery underworld where people are consciously tortured forever for failing a moral test is not the earliest or only way Christians have read Scripture. That picture became dominant in Western theology especially after Augustine argued for it in City of God. Augustine was brilliant and deeply influential. Many have followed his line. Others have not.

When I read the Scriptures across their own timeline and vocabulary I see Sheol as the grave. I see the prophets introduce resurrection hope and postmortem judgment. I see Jesus warn with the language of Gehenna to announce that God will deal with evil and to call us to life in his kingdom. I see the early church use Hades and Gehenna with different shades of meaning while proclaiming that in the end death itself dies.

What exactly happens the second after you die. The Bible does not give us a tidy chart that satisfies every curiosity. It gives us a Person and a promise. Jesus is risen. Because he lives we have real hope of resurrection and new creation.

God’s judgment is real and good. He is not indifferent to violence, exploitation, or the ways we dehumanize one another. He will set the world right. That future justice is not an excuse for present apathy. It is a summons to repent, to trust Jesus, and to live his way now.

If fear of flames has been the engine of your faith I want to bless you with relief. You do not have to carry that burden. You can set it down and learn to love God for who he is, not simply for the fire insurance you hope he provides.

If you are skeptical of any talk of judgment I want to bless you with hope too. If you have been crushed by injustice, if you have watched the powerful harm the vulnerable, the Bible’s announcement that God will judge the world in righteousness is not bad news. It is good news.

Keep wrestling. Read the passages. Read them in context. Pay attention to the words the biblical authors used and why they used them. Ask what Jesus was doing with the prophetic symbols of his own people. Hold fast to the character of God revealed most clearly in Jesus. He tells the truth about sin. He bears it in his own body. He conquers death. He invites you into life.