Hell

Hell is the general English word for the final destiny of the wicked under divine judgment, and it stands in for several distinct biblical terms — Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades and Gehenna, and the "lake of fire" — that are not simply synonyms.

The words matter. Sheol in the Hebrew Scriptures is the realm of the dead, described in Ecclesiastes 9:10 as a place where "there is no work, nor plan, nor knowledge, nor wisdom," and the dead go there without distinction of character. Greek Hades corresponds to Sheol in usage, and Revelation 1:18 pictures Death and Hades as powers whose keys the risen Christ holds. Gehenna, the word on Jesus' lips in Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:5, names a place where God can "destroy both soul and body"; as a matter of established language history, the term derives from the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. Revelation adds the imagery of a "lake of fire that burns with sulfur" (Revelation 19:20; 20:15), which it also calls "the second death" (Revelation 21:8).

What Scripture says about the character of that end is stated in several registers. Matthew 25:41 describes "eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels," and Matthew 25:46 sets "eternal punishment" over against "eternal life" using the same Greek adjective for both. Matthew 10:28 speaks instead of destruction, and Revelation uses the language of fire, sulfur, and death. The text does not itself harmonize these images into a single scheme, and the imagery is consistently that of a decisive, irreversible judgment rather than a temporary correction.

Christian traditions read this material differently. The historically dominant Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant teaching is eternal conscious punishment, with Catholic teaching distinguishing hell from purgatory and describing hell as a state of final self-exclusion from God. Conditional-immortality or annihilationist traditions, including Seventh-day Adventists, read "destroy both soul and body" (Matthew 10:28) and the "second death" (Revelation 21:8) as the end of the wicked rather than endless torment, and treat Sheol as an unconscious state. A minority universalist tradition reads the scope of Christ's victory in Revelation 1:18 as eventually encompassing all. Traditions also divide on whether Hades and Sheol are themselves hell or only an intermediate holding place awaiting the judgment of Revelation 20:15.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.