Chapter 21

The Nature of Hell

A Biblical Taxonomy of Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and the Lake of Fire

When most Christians today hear the word "hell," a single picture flashes through their minds: a burning, eternal pit where the damned suffer forever. The picture feels so settled, so monolithic, that it seems unfair to question it. But here is the trouble. The English word "hell" is doing far too much work. The Bible itself uses several different terms for the realms of the dead and the place of final judgment, and these terms do not all mean the same thing. When a preacher says "hell" from the pulpit, the congregation hears one word and pictures one place. The Bible, however, distinguishes between at least six different realities — and conflating them is one of the chief sources of confusion in the whole debate about the afterlife.

This chapter is about clearing the ground. Before we can think clearly about postmortem opportunity, the intermediate state, or the final destiny of the lost, we have to know what the Bible actually says — term by term. My thesis is simple: the Bible distinguishes between Hades (the temporary intermediate state), Gehenna (Jesus' Valley-of-Hinnom imagery for final judgment), and the Lake of Fire (the eschatological reality in Revelation). These three are not interchangeable. Once we keep them straight, a great deal of theological space opens up — space that the traditional, all-purpose "hell" had collapsed.¹

Sheol — The Old Testament Realm of the Dead

We begin in the Hebrew Scriptures with the word Sheol (שְׁאוֹל). It appears about sixty-five times in the Old Testament, and what is striking is how unlike "hell" it really is. Sheol is the destination of all the dead, righteous and wicked alike. When Jacob hears that Joseph is dead, he wails, "I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning" (Gen. 37:35). Jacob is the patriarch of the covenant people; he is not picturing himself in the lake of fire. He is picturing the realm of the dead, where everyone goes.²

The same picture runs through the rest of the Old Testament. The Psalmist cries, "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Ps. 139:8) — meaning that even the realm of the dead is not outside God's reach. Hosea declares, in a passage Paul will pick up centuries later, "I shall ransom them from the power of Sheol; I shall redeem them from Death" (Hos. 13:14). Sheol is sometimes pictured as gloomy, shadowy, a place of diminished existence — but it is not portrayed as a place of unconscious nothingness. In Isaiah 14:9–10, the dead kings in Sheol speak, taunt, and recognize the newly arrived king of Babylon. They are conscious. They are aware. They are dead, but they are still there.³

Two features of Sheol matter most for the postmortem opportunity thesis. First, God's presence reaches into Sheol. Psalm 139:8 alone is enough to undo any picture of Sheol as a place sealed off from God's reach. Second, God can rescue from Sheol. "God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me" (Ps. 49:15; cf. Ps. 86:13). The realm of the dead is not, in the Old Testament, a place from which divine love is excluded. It is a place over which God still rules.⁴

Over time, the picture deepens. Earlier Old Testament texts present Sheol as undifferentiated — everybody goes to the same shadowy place. Later texts begin to hint at distinctions between the righteous and wicked dead, and by the intertestamental period, Jewish writings such as 1 Enoch describe multiple compartments within Sheol/Hades, with the righteous in one place and the wicked in another. This development sets the stage for the New Testament's distinction between paradise (where Jesus tells the thief on the cross he will be that day, Luke 23:43) and the place of torment in Luke 16:23.⁵

Hades — The New Testament Equivalent of Sheol

When the Old Testament was translated into Greek (the Septuagint, or LXX) two centuries before Christ, the translators chose the word Hades (ᾅδης) to render Sheol. They did this consistently — sixty-one times across the LXX, by one count. Sheol and Hades are the same concept in different languages: the realm of the dead.⁶ In the New Testament, Hades shows up about ten times: Matthew 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Revelation 1:18; 6:8; and 20:13–14.

Now we come to the most important point of the entire chapter. Hades is not the Lake of Fire. Hades is not Gehenna. Hades is not the final destination of the wicked. Hades is a temporary holding place — and we know this because the New Testament itself tells us so. Look at Revelation 20:13–14, the anchor passage of this chapter:

And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:13–14, ESV)

Read that slowly. Hades itself is thrown into the lake of fire. Whatever Hades is, it is a place that ends. It is a temporary state that gives up its dead and is then itself destroyed. The lake of fire and Hades are not the same thing — Hades is destroyed by the lake of fire. They are two different realities.⁷

James Beilby puts the point bluntly: "The Greek word for hell is gehenna, not Hades. Hades is the place of the dead and therefore it is best to say that Jesus descended into Hades."⁸ When Christians confess in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus "descended into hell," the underlying word is Hades — the realm of the dead — not the lake of fire. Jesus did not descend into the place of final destruction; He descended into the temporary realm where all the dead resided. (The descent itself is treated in depth in chapters 11–13.)

What about the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31? I will say only a little here, since chapter 18 treats the parable in full. Notice carefully what Luke writes: "in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off" (Luke 16:23). The rich man is in Hades. He is not in Gehenna. He is not in the lake of fire. The "great chasm" between Abraham's side and the rich man is a feature of the intermediate state — not necessarily of the final, eschatological reality. To use Luke 16 as proof that the unsaved have already received their final, irreversible sentence the moment they die is to read into the parable a geography it does not teach.⁹

Gehenna — Jesus' Valley-of-Hinnom Imagery

The next term is Gehenna (γέεννα), and here we move from the realm of the dead to the imagery of judgment. Gehenna is the Greek form of the Hebrew ge-Hinnom (גֵּי הִנֹּם), the "Valley of Hinnom" — and it is a real place. You can visit it today. It runs along the south and southwest side of the Old City of Jerusalem. In Jesus' day it was a place with a horrifying history.

In the Old Testament, the Valley of Hinnom was the site where wicked kings of Judah burned children alive in sacrifice to the pagan god Molech (2 Kings 23:10; 2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6; Jer. 7:31; 19:2–6; 32:35). The prophet Jeremiah responded with a thundering oracle: God would make the valley itself a symbol of judgment, a place where corpses would be piled up — so that it would no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of Hinnom but the "Valley of Slaughter" (Jer. 7:32; 19:6). By the time of Jesus, some Jewish traditions also held that the valley had become Jerusalem's smoldering garbage dump, though scholars debate how strong the evidence for this tradition really is.¹⁰ Either way, the picture is clear: a defiled, burning, accursed valley — the perfect image for divine judgment.

Jesus uses Gehenna imagery about a dozen times, almost always in contexts of urgent moral warning: Matthew 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43–48; and Luke 12:5. Notice the function. Jesus does not use Gehenna as a description of the temporary state of the dead; He uses it rhetorically, in calls to radical discipleship — better to lose a hand than to be cast into Gehenna; better to fear the One who can destroy soul and body in Gehenna than to fear those who can only kill the body.¹¹

Two features of Jesus' Gehenna sayings deserve close attention. First, the "unquenchable fire" of Mark 9:43, 48 is drawn directly from Isaiah 66:24, where the prophet describes the corpses of God's enemies being consumed. The Greek word is asbestos (ἄσβεστος), and it does not mean "burns forever." It means "cannot be put out by human effort." The Old Testament makes this plain: in Jeremiah 17:27, God threatens Jerusalem with "unquenchable fire" — and Jerusalem burned, and the fire eventually went out. The fire was unquenchable in the sense that no one could stop it from accomplishing its purpose, not in the sense that it would burn forever.¹²

Second, "their worm does not die" (Mark 9:48) is also drawn from Isaiah 66:24 — and in Isaiah, the worm is feeding on corpses, not on living, conscious souls. The image is one of total destruction, not of eternal torment. Combined with Matthew 10:28 — where Jesus warns of the One who can destroy (Greek apolesai, ἀπολέσαι) both soul and body in Gehenna — the imagery actually fits annihilation more naturally than it fits eternal conscious torment.¹³ (Whether one ultimately lands at conditional immortality or universal restoration, the imagery itself does not require eternal conscious torment.)

One question presses: is Gehenna identical to the Lake of Fire, or are they two different things? Scholars are divided. Some treat them as identical. Others see Gehenna as Jesus' prophetic shorthand for the same eschatological reality John later names the Lake of Fire. For our purposes, the key point is this: Gehenna language refers to final judgment, not the intermediate state. Jesus never once uses Gehenna to describe what happens to the dead between physical death and the final judgment. That role belongs to Sheol/Hades.¹⁴

The Lake of Fire — The Eschatological Reality

The fourth term, the Lake of Fire (ἡ λίμνη τοῦ πυρός), appears only in the Book of Revelation: 19:20; 20:10; 20:14–15; and 21:8. Unlike Sheol/Hades (the temporary realm of the dead) and Gehenna (Jesus' rhetorical fire imagery), the Lake of Fire is the post-judgment, eschatological reality. It is what comes after the Great White Throne.

Several features of the Lake of Fire matter here. First, it is the final destination — the place where the Beast, the false prophet, the devil, Death, Hades itself, and unrepentant sinners are consigned after the last judgment (Rev. 19:20; 20:10, 14–15). Second, it is twice called "the second death" (Rev. 20:14; 21:8). For those who hold to conditional immortality — as I do — this language naturally suggests destruction, the cessation of life, rather than eternal conscious existence in suffering.¹⁵ Third, as we have already seen, it is distinct from Hades — Hades is thrown into the Lake of Fire, which is impossible if the two are the same.

Fourth, and most striking of all, Revelation 14:10 says that those who worship the beast will be tormented "in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb." Read that carefully. The Lake of Fire, on John's own description, is not separation from God. It is encounter with God. Whatever else the Lake of Fire is, it is a place where God's presence is manifest. R. Zachary Manis, a careful philosophical theologian who is not a universalist, draws the implication: the lake of fire in Revelation 19–21, the river of fire in Daniel 7, and the "sea of glass glowing with fire" in Revelation 15 are all references to the divine presence — the glory of the Lord experienced as fire.¹⁶

This is the synthesis chapters 23–26 will develop in depth, drawing on Manis, Sharon Baker, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition (Kalomiros, Isaac the Syrian). Briefly: I take the Lake of Fire to be God's full, unshielded presence — which purifies all it touches. For those who repent, that presence burns away sin and saves. For those who persist in rejecting Christ even after fully encountering Him, the fire consumes everything bound up with their rejection — and the result is what Scripture calls "the second death." It is not God hatefully destroying anyone. It is the natural consequence of remaining unrepentant in the presence of a holy God.¹⁷ (For the full treatment, see chapters 23–26. If the more hopeful universalist reading proves correct, the same fire eventually purifies all and brings all to repentance — but my working position remains conditional immortality.)

The Smaller Terms: Tartarus, Outer Darkness, and the Abyss

Three more terms round out the biblical taxonomy. None of them carries the weight of Sheol/Hades, Gehenna, or the Lake of Fire, but they fill out the picture.

Tartarus appears only once in the New Testament, as a verb: 2 Peter 2:4 says God cast the rebellious angels into tartaroō, "chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment." Two things matter here. First, Tartarus is not a destination for human beings — it is a holding place for fallen angels. Second, Peter explicitly calls it temporary: the angels are kept there until the judgment. Like Hades, Tartarus is a pre-judgment holding place, not a final state.¹⁸

The "outer darkness" (τὸ σκότος τὸ ἐξώτερον) appears in three Matthean parables (Matt. 8:12; 22:13; 25:30), each describing exclusion from the messianic banquet. Notice the imagery: darkness. This sits awkwardly with fire imagery — fire and darkness are difficult to harmonize as literal descriptions of the same physical place. The most natural reading is that "outer darkness" is metaphorical, picturing exclusion and loss rather than mapping the geography of hell.¹⁹

Finally, the Abyss (ἄβυσσος) appears in Luke 8:31; Romans 10:7; and several places in Revelation (9:1–2, 11; 11:7; 17:8; 20:1–3). It functions as a holding place for demonic beings, not a destination for humans. Its relevance for our taxonomy is limited but worth noting: it is yet another temporary, pre-judgment holding place — adding a fourth such category alongside Sheol/Hades, Tartarus, and the chains of 2 Peter 2:4.

The Translation Problem and a Summary Table

Now we can see why so much confusion has piled up around the English word "hell." When the King James translators rendered both Hades (the temporary realm of the dead) and Gehenna (Jesus' fire imagery for final judgment) with the same English word, they collapsed two distinct biblical realities into one. The result, as Stephen Jonathan notes, is that "Hades is mentioned on just ten occasions and translated as 'hell' in the KJV which has led to confusion as the Greek word Gehenna, traditionally accepted as a place of eternal punishment, is also translated as 'hell.'"²⁰ Most modern English translations have improved here — the ESV, NIV, NASB, and others usually leave Hades transliterated and reserve "hell" for Gehenna. But the older confusion still echoes in popular preaching and lay imagination, where "hell" remains a single, monolithic place of eternal torment that the dead enter the moment they die.

Here is the picture, set side by side:

Why This Taxonomy Matters

None of what I have said in this chapter, by itself, proves that postmortem opportunity is true. A reader could agree with every distinction I have drawn here and still hold that the moment of death seals every person's eternal destiny. The taxonomy clears the ground; it does not build the case. The case itself is built in the chapters around this one — the descent of Christ to the dead (chapters 11–13), the universal reconciliation passages (chapter 14), the answers to the standard objections like Hebrews 9:27 and Luke 16 (chapter 18), the linguistic case that aiōnios does not inherently mean "eternal" (chapter 20), and the divine presence model of the Lake of Fire (chapters 23–26).

What this chapter does is something more modest, but absolutely necessary. It undoes a confusion that has prejudiced the debate for centuries. Once we stop treating "hell" as a single, monolithic, immediately-final reality — once we see that the Bible distinguishes a temporary realm of the dead from the eschatological judgment that comes later — the question of postmortem opportunity becomes possible to ask in the first place. If Hades is temporary, then the unsaved dead are in a temporary state. If their final destiny is pronounced only at the Great White Throne (Rev. 20:11–15), then the period between death and the final judgment is a period during which their destiny is not yet fixed. That is the open theological space in which the rest of this book argues that God, true to His character, continues to pursue the lost.

I am not asking the reader to agree, on the strength of this chapter alone, that the unsaved do receive a postmortem opportunity. I am asking only that the reader stop assuming that the Bible rules it out from the start. The traditional collapse of Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and the Lake of Fire into a single term "hell" makes postmortem opportunity look impossible by definition. The actual biblical taxonomy makes the question wide open.

That, by itself, is a great deal.