If you walk into any church today and ask the person in the third pew about the afterlife, they’ll probably describe a place of fire, pitchforks, and eternal red-tinted misery. It's a staple of our culture. But if you actually sit down and crack open a Greek or Hebrew lexicon, things get weird. Quickly. Does the Bible mention hell? Well, yes, but also no. It depends entirely on which page you’re looking at and which translation you’ve got sitting on your nightstand.
The word "hell" is actually a linguistic mask. It hides four very different concepts that the original authors of the Bible treated as distinct ideas. We’ve flattened them all into one scary basement, but for the people living in ancient Judea, the map of the afterlife was way more nuanced than that.
The Old Testament Silence
Most people are shocked to find out that the Old Testament—roughly three-quarters of the Bible—doesn't really have a concept of "hell" as we know it. There is no mention of a place where the "bad people" go to burn while the "good people" float on clouds. Instead, you have Sheol.
Sheol isn't hell. It’s just the grave.
📖 Related: National Grape Popsicle Day: Why May 27 Actually Matters to Your Summer
Think of it as a shadowy, silent waiting room. Whether you were a king or a beggar, a saint or a serial killer, you went to Sheol. It was described as a place of darkness and silence where the dead "sleep." In Psalm 6:5, the writer asks, "For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?" The concern wasn't being tortured; it was being forgotten. It was the existential dread of non-existence. Honestly, the ancient Israelites were much more focused on life on earth than what happened after they took their last breath.
Then things started to shift.
During the intertestamental period—that gap of a few hundred years between the Old and New Testaments—Jewish thought began to evolve. Influences from Greek philosophy and Persian Zoroastrianism started to mingle with Hebrew tradition. By the time Jesus shows up on the scene, the "waiting room" of Sheol had started to get some partitions.
Gehenna: The Smoldering Trash Heap
When you read the New Testament and see Jesus talking about the "fire of hell," he’s almost always using the word Gehenna. This is where the factual history gets fascinating. Gehenna wasn't a metaphysical dimension. It was a physical place you could walk to.
Just south of the walls of Jerusalem lies the Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom).
It had a nasty reputation. Centuries earlier, it was allegedly the site of child sacrifice to the god Molech. By the first century, it had become the city’s burning trash dump. It smelled like sulfur. Smoke rose from it constantly. Maggots lived in the rotting refuse. When Jesus warned his listeners about Gehenna, he was using a visceral, local metaphor. He was saying, "If you live a life of corruption and injustice, your life becomes as worthless as the trash in the valley."
It was a warning about the destination of a wasted life.
- Gehenna: A physical valley used as a metaphor for judgment.
- Sheol/Hades: The collective "underworld" or the state of being dead.
- Tartarus: Used only once (2 Peter 2:4) to describe a prison for fallen angels.
Hades and the Greek Influence
As the Bible was translated into Greek, the Hebrew word Sheol was swapped out for Hades. Now, if you grew up watching Disney movies, you think of Hades as a guy with blue fire for hair. For the New Testament writers, Hades was simply the Greek equivalent of the grave.
But Greek culture brought the idea of "conscious" existence after death.
Take the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16. It’s one of the most famous passages used to argue for a literal hell. In the story, the rich man is in "torment" in Hades. But scholars like N.T. Wright often point out that this is a parable—a Jewish folk tale structure used to make a point about greed and the flip-flop of status in God's kingdom. Using it to build a literal map of the afterlife is like using a political cartoon to study geography.
Is it literal? Is it symbolic? The debate has raged for 2,000 years.
The Lake of Fire in Revelation
Then we get to the Book of Revelation. This is where the "lake of fire" imagery comes from. It’s heavy, apocalyptic symbolism. Here’s the catch: the text says that Death and Hades themselves are thrown into the lake of fire.
How does "Hell" get thrown into a lake of fire?
This suggests that the "lake" is a symbol of final destruction—what theologians call "the second death." It’s not necessarily a place of ongoing torture, but a place where evil, and even death itself, is finally deleted from existence. This view is called Annihilationism. It’s the idea that instead of suffering forever, the wicked simply cease to be. They are consumed. Gone.
Many modern scholars, including the late John Stott, have leaned toward this view because it seems more consistent with a God of justice than the idea of infinite torture for finite sins.
Why Translation Matters So Much
If you pick up a King James Version (KJV) Bible, you’ll find the word "hell" 54 times. But if you pick up a more modern, scholarly translation like the English Standard Version (ESV) or the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), that number drops significantly. Why? Because modern translators prefer to leave the original words—Sheol, Hades, Gehenna—rather than lumping them under one umbrella.
They realized that calling Gehenna "hell" is like calling a "hurricane" a "bad breeze." It loses the specific cultural weight.
The Three Main Views
Even though the question does the Bible mention hell seems simple, the interpretation of those mentions has split the church into three major camps. No one agrees.
- Eternal Conscious Torment: The traditional view. If you reject God, you suffer forever. This is based on a literal reading of "unquenchable fire."
- Annihilationism (Conditional Immortality): The idea that the soul isn't naturally immortal. God only gives eternal life to the saved. Everyone else is "burned up" and ceases to exist.
- Universalism (Universal Reconciliation): The belief that "hell" is a refining fire, not a retributive one. Eventually, everyone is purified and brought back to God. Gregory of Nyssa, an early church father, held a version of this.
Beyond the Fire and Brimstone
We have to talk about the imagery. The Bible uses fire, but it also uses "outer darkness." Fire produces light. Darkness is the absence of light. You can’t have both literally at the same time in the same space.
This tells us the biblical writers were using metaphors to describe something that words couldn't fully capture. They were trying to describe the agony of being separated from the source of life. C.S. Lewis famously said that the doors of hell are "locked from the inside." He viewed it not as a torture chamber, but as a place where people who don't want God finally get exactly what they asked for: total autonomy, and the loneliness that comes with it.
The Bible is much more interested in the character of the person than the temperature of the destination.
🔗 Read more: Orthodox Jew Women's Rules: What Most People Get Wrong
Actionable Insights for the Curious Reader
If you want to dig deeper into whether the Bible mentions hell without just taking someone's word for it, here is how you should actually study it:
- Get a Parallel Bible: Use a site like BibleHub to compare the King James Version with the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Look for where the KJV says "hell" and see what the NASB uses in its place.
- Look up Gehenna: Research the history of the Hinnom Valley. Understanding the geography of Jerusalem in 30 AD changes how you hear Jesus' sermons.
- Study the "Intertestamental" Literature: Read bits of 1 Enoch or the Maccabees. These books aren't in most Bibles, but they were the "bestsellers" of Jesus' day and show where the ideas of "hell" started to develop.
- Check the Lexicon: Don't just read the English. Use a Strong’s Concordance to find the original Greek or Hebrew word behind the English "hell." You'll find it's almost always Sheol, Hades, or Gehenna.
The Bible's view of the afterlife is a mosaic, not a single photograph. It’s a collection of warnings, hopes, and cultural metaphors that point toward a belief that our choices matter. Whether that means a literal fire or a metaphorical "darkness" is something scholars will likely be arguing about for another two millennia. But one thing is for sure: the popular "cartoon" version of hell is almost nowhere to be found in the actual biblical text.