Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus: What Does the Bible Actually Call "Hell"?

English Bibles hand readers a single word, "hell," for four genuinely different original-language terms — and this site's own original-language display, sitting underneath every verse, is exactly the tool for telling them apart.

Sheol: the grave, not a place of torment

In the Hebrew Old Testament, the word most often translated "hell" is Sheol — but the King James Version itself doesn't translate it consistently, rendering the identical word as "hell," "grave," or "pit" depending on context. Sheol in its oldest usage describes simply the realm of the dead, or the grave itself, without the specific imagery of fire or torment English readers now associate with "hell."

Hades: the Greek realm of the dead

The New Testament's Greek generally uses Hades where the Old Testament used Sheol — borrowing the name of the Greek underworld's ruler for the abode of the dead generally, not a place reserved only for the wicked. It's Hades that appears in Jesus's parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and again in Revelation, where it's explicitly distinguished from final judgment.

Gehenna: a real valley, turned into a symbol

Gehenna is the word Jesus himself uses most often for final judgment, and it starts as an actual place — the Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem's walls, associated in the Old Testament with child sacrifice to the god Molech and later used as a place of burning refuse. By Jesus's day the name had become shorthand for a place of fiery judgment, which is how he uses it repeatedly.

This site's own display of the New Testament's original Greek text shows the word itself sitting inside that verse — Jesus warns of the one able to destroy both soul and body "ἐν γεέννῃ," in Gehenna, a specific and different word from the Hades of Luke's parable above.

Tartarus: a single verb, used exactly once

The fourth word is the rarest by far. 2 Peter, describing the judgment of fallen angels, uses a Greek verb found nowhere else anywhere in the Bible — ταρταρόω, "to Tartarus," borrowed directly from Greek mythology's name for the prison-pit beneath Hades where the Titans were bound.

Why one English word covers four

The King James translators, like most English Bibles before and since, chose to render all four of these distinct original words with a single English term. That choice flattens real distinctions the original languages preserve — between the grave in general, the realm of the dead awaiting judgment, the specific place and image of fiery judgment, and the one-time use of a mythological term for fallen angels' imprisonment. Reading each verse's own original-language text, available on every verse across this site, is the most direct way to see which of the four a given "hell" actually is.