Open the King James Version at Psalm 16:10 and you read, “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.” Turn to Luke 16:23 and the rich man is “in hell” too. In Matthew 5:22 the one who calls his brother a fool is “in danger of hell fire”. In 2 Peter 2:4 God cast the sinning angels “down to hell”. And in Revelation 20:14, “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire”.
That last verse should make a careful reader stop. If hell is thrown into the lake of fire, then “hell” in that verse cannot mean what most English speakers mean by the word. The answer is that the King James translators used one English word for four different words in the original languages, and a fifth idea, the lake of fire, sits beside them. Each has its own history and its own meaning. This article takes them one at a time and shows what Open Word Bible does with each.
Sheol: where everyone goes
The Hebrew Bible’s word for the place of the dead is שְׁאוֹל, sheʾol. It appears about 65 times, mostly in poetry. Its first appearance is in the mouth of a grieving father. When Jacob is shown Joseph’s bloodied coat, his family tries to comfort him, and he refuses:
And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, “No, I will go down to my son, mourning, to Sheol.” Thus his father wept for him.
The Hebrew is שְׁאֹ֑לָה, “to Sheol”, with an ending that marks direction. Jacob is not saying that he expects punishment. He means that he will mourn until he dies, and that in death he will join his son. Our meaning decision for this verse says so plainly: Sheol is the place where all the dead go down, good and bad alike, pictured as deep beneath the earth, and it is not a place of punishment in Genesis. The decision lists “hell” as an alternative it rejects.
That picture holds across the Old Testament. Sheol is down, the opposite of the heavens. It is quiet and shadowy. Its inhabitants are called by a word that the record for Isaiah 14:9 explains as “the weak, shadowy dead”, usually translated “shades”. Ecclesiastes says there is “no work and no planning, no knowledge and no wisdom” there (9:10). Psalm 6 pleads for rescue on the ground that the dead cannot praise God:
For in death no one calls you to mind. Who gives you thanks down in Sheol?
The record for that verse adds a caution worth repeating. The psalm is not teaching what happens after death; it pleads for life now. Later Scripture speaks more fully of hope beyond death (Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2).
Yet Sheol is not beyond God’s reach. Psalm 139 makes the point by setting the two extremes side by side:
Should I climb up to the heavens, you are there; should I lie down in Sheol, there you are as well.
The meaning decision calls Sheol “the opposite of the heavens”, and notes that even there God is present (compare Amos 9:2). And in Isaiah 14, a taunt song against the king of Babylon, Sheol becomes a vast hall where dead kings rise from their thrones to greet the newcomer, mocking him because he is now as weak as they are. The king aimed at the heights and lands in “the deepest corners of the pit” (14:15). It is a powerful poem about pride brought low, and our records read it as poetry: the dead kings are a picture, not a map of the afterlife.
How English has rendered it
English Bibles have never agreed on Sheol. The King James Version renders it roughly half the time “hell” and half “the grave”, with a few cases of “the pit”. Jacob goes down “into the grave”; David’s soul is not left “in hell”; Jonah cries “out of the belly of hell” (Jonah 2:2). The choice often seems to depend on whether the speaker was thought to be righteous or wicked, which is a distinction the Hebrew word does not make.
Modern versions have taken three paths. Some, like the RSV and its successors, keep the name “Sheol”. Some say “the grave”, which is clear but narrow, since Sheol is more than a hole in the ground: it is the whole realm of the dead. The NIV 2011 often says “the realm of the dead”. Each choice gains something and loses something.
What Open Word Bible does
Our records give one meaning for Sheol everywhere: the place or realm of the dead, not a place of punishment in particular. The rendering decisions then choose wording by level, and the choice is not quite the same in every book.
- Literal always keeps “Sheol”, so the reader can see the name.
- Balanced keeps “Sheol” in the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes and Jonah. In Genesis 37:35 it says “the grave”, because, as the rendering decision there puts it, that is the plain sense of Jacob’s words.
- Readable says what Sheol is: “the place of the dead” in the Psalms, “the grave” in Isaiah, Ecclesiastes and Jonah.
None of our levels says “hell” for Sheol anywhere. Jonah’s prayer, in the Hebrew numbering 2:3, shows the pattern:
He said: “When I was in trouble I cried out to the LORD, and he gave me an answer; from deep in Sheol I called for help, and you heard my voice.
The record explains “the belly of Sheol” as an idiom: to be in its belly is to be as good as dead, swallowed by death as Jonah was swallowed by the fish.
Hades: the Greek name for Sheol
When Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, in the centuries before Christ, they needed a word for Sheol. They usually chose ᾅδης, Hadēs. In Greek stories Hades was the god of the underworld and then the underworld itself, the shadowy home of all the dead. It was a reasonable match. (See The Septuagint for that translation.)
The New Testament writers inherited the word with its Old Testament sense. The clearest case is Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, which quotes Psalm 16 from the Greek:
for you will not abandon me to the world of the dead or allow your Holy One to experience decay.
Our meaning decision says that here Hades stands for the Hebrew Sheol, where all the dead go, and that it is not a place of punishment. The rendering decision gives the reasoning for the wording: “hell” suggests punishment, which is not meant, and “the grave” is too narrow. So Literal keeps “Hades”, Balanced says “the world of the dead” and Readable “the place of the dead”. The same psalm in Hebrew, in Psalm 16:10, says “Sheol” at Literal and Balanced and “the place of the dead” at Readable. The two verses line up, as they should, since one quotes the other.
Hades appears ten times in the standard Greek text of the New Testament. Some of these uses carry the old sense unchanged. Jesus says that Capernaum, which hoped to be lifted up to heaven, will go down to Hades (Matthew 11:23); the record calls Hades there “the lowest place, opposite heaven”, and points back to Isaiah 14:15. In Matthew 16:18 “the gates of Hades” will not overpower the church; the record reads this as the power of death, recalling “the gates of Sheol” in Isaiah 38:10, and marks the exact sense of the idiom uncertain. In Revelation, Jesus holds “the keys of death and Hades” (1:18), which the record explains as authority over death and the realm of the dead.
The rich man and Lazarus
One passage is different. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man dies and is buried:
From Hades, in the midst of his torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham a long way off, and Lazarus close beside him.
Here Hades is a place of torment, with a flame (16:24), and it is divided: Lazarus is comforted beside Abraham, across a great chasm. Our meaning decision takes this into account. It still gives Hades its usual sense, “the place of the dead”, but notes that here it is a place of torment for the rich man, separated from the place where Lazarus is, and that it is a different word from Gehenna. The rendering keeps “Hades” at Literal and Balanced, and Readable says “the place of the dead”.
Scholars read the parable in different ways. Some take its picture of the dead as a real glimpse of the state between death and resurrection. Others note that it uses pictures of the afterlife current in Jewish thought of the time, in which Sheol had come to be divided into compartments for the righteous and the wicked, and that its main point lies elsewhere, in the warning of its last verse about those who will not listen to Moses and the prophets. Either way, the word Jesus uses is Hades, not Gehenna, and the translation keeps that visible.
Gehenna: a valley outside Jerusalem
The word most often behind “hell” in the Gospels is quite different. γέεννα, geenna, is a place name. It comes from the Hebrew for “the Valley of Hinnom”, a ravine running along the south side of Jerusalem.
The valley has a dark history in the Old Testament. Kings of Judah, Ahaz and Manasseh among them, burned their sons there as sacrifices (2 Chronicles 28:3; 33:6), at a place called Topheth. Jeremiah condemns it:
In the Valley of Ben-hinnom they have built the high places of Topheth, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, a thing I never commanded and that never entered my mind.
King Josiah defiled Topheth so that no one could use it again (2 Kings 23:10), and Jeremiah said the valley would be renamed “the Valley of Slaughter” (7:32). By the time of Jesus, the name of this place of fire and death had become a name for the fire of God’s final judgment. The book of Isaiah ends with a related picture, the corpses of rebels outside the city, where “their worm will not die, nor will their fire be put out” (66:24).
Jesus uses the word eleven times in the Gospels, and James uses it once (3:6). That is all. It is never used by Paul, John or the writer of Acts. Every use is a warning. The best known is in the Sermon on the Mount:
But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will have to answer for it in court. Anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘You empty-head,’ will answer to the high council. And anyone who says, ‘You fool,’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
The record’s meaning decision says that Gehenna is the place of final judgment by fire, and gives the history of the valley. It lists “the grave” as a rejected alternative.
In Mark 9 Jesus says it is better to lose a hand or an eye than to be thrown into Gehenna, and he quotes the last verse of Isaiah:
If your eye leads you into sin, tear it out. You are better off entering the kingdom of God with only one eye than being thrown into hell with two, where the worm that eats them never dies and the fire is never put out.
The rubbish dump
Many readers have heard that the Valley of Hinnom was Jerusalem’s burning rubbish dump in Jesus’s day, and that this explains the fire. The idea is old, but it is first found in a medieval Jewish commentator, David Kimhi, around 1200. Scholars have found no earlier evidence for it, and archaeology has not confirmed it. Our record for Mark 9:43 lists “the town rubbish heap only” as an alternative and does not adopt it. The valley’s meaning comes from its history in Scripture, from the child sacrifices and from the prophets’ judgments on them, not from a dump.
What Open Word Bible does
For Gehenna the levels divide differently from Sheol and Hades. Literal keeps the place name, “Gehenna”, at every use, so the reader can see what Jesus said. Balanced and Readable say “hell”. The rendering decision for Mark 9:43 explains why: they use the English word for the place of final judgment, which is what the name stands for.
So “hell” does appear in our Balanced and Readable text, but only for Gehenna. That is the one Greek word whose meaning matches what the English word now means. When the record for Matthew 16:18 says that “hell” would confuse Hades with Gehenna, this is the distinction it is protecting.
Tartarus: a word used once
Second Peter 2:4 has a word found nowhere else in the Bible: ταρταρώσας, a verb meaning “to put into Tartarus”.
God did not spare the angels who sinned. He threw them down into Tartarus and handed them over to chains of deepest darkness, where they are held for judgment. Nor did he spare the ancient world. When he brought the flood on a world of ungodly people, he kept Noah safe with seven others, Noah who proclaimed righteousness. He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ruin and burned them to ashes, and made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly. But he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was worn down by the shameless conduct of lawless people. Living among them day after day, that righteous man tormented his righteous soul over the lawless deeds he saw and heard. If God did all this, then clearly the Lord knows how to rescue those who are godly from their trials, and how to hold the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, above all those who chase after the flesh with its defiling desires and who look down on the Lord’s authority.
In Greek stories, as our meaning decision explains, Tartarus was the deepest part of the underworld, far below Hades, where the gods had imprisoned the rebel Titans. Jewish writers in Greek used the name too, and the Greek text of 1 Enoch names Tartarus among the places an angel is set over. Peter borrows a word his readers knew for the prison of rebel spirits. The decision stresses that it is a holding place before the judgment, not the final judgment itself: the angels are “held for judgment”.
That is why the rendering decision keeps “Tartarus” at every level, and adds “the deepest prison” at Readable. It lists “hell” as an alternative and rejects it, because “hell” would suggest the final punishment, which Peter places later.
The lake of fire
Revelation uses yet another image: τὴν λίμνην τοῦ πυρός, “the lake of fire”. The beast and the false prophet are thrown into it (19:20), then the devil (20:10), and then:
Then Death and Hades themselves were cast into the lake of fire.
The lake of fire is the second death.
Our record for Revelation 1:18 makes the connection explicit. It rejects “hell” for Hades on the ground that “hell” in English means the place of final punishment, which Revelation calls the lake of fire, and Hades is thrown into it. The verse that sounds so strange in the King James Version, “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire”, becomes clear when the words are kept apart. The realm of the dead, which has held all who died, gives up its dead for judgment (20:13) and then is itself destroyed. The record for 20:14 connects this with Paul’s words, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26), and with the promise that in the new creation there is no more death (21:4).
Four words, one English word
Here is the whole picture in brief.
- Sheol (Hebrew) is the realm of all the dead, righteous and wicked. Our levels say “Sheol”, “the grave” or “the place of the dead”, never “hell”.
- Hades (Greek) is the same realm, the word the Greek Old Testament used for Sheol. Our levels say “Hades”, “the world” or “realm of the dead”, or “the place of the dead”, never “hell”.
- Gehenna (Greek, from Hebrew) is the place of final judgment by fire, named after the Valley of Hinnom. Literal says “Gehenna”; Balanced and Readable say “hell”.
- Tartarus (Greek) is a prison for rebel angels until the judgment. Every level keeps the name.
- The lake of fire is Revelation’s picture of the final judgment, into which even Death and Hades are thrown.
The King James Version is not careless here. The English word “hell” comes from an old Germanic word for the hidden place of the dead, and in 1611 it could still carry something of that wider sense. The Apostles’ Creed in English says that Christ “descended into hell”, meaning the realm of the dead, not the place of the damned. But the word has narrowed since then. For most readers today, “hell” means only the place of final punishment. Leaving it in Psalm 16 or Acts 2 now says something the original does not say.
What the translation does not decide
Keeping these words apart answers a question of vocabulary. It does not settle every question about final judgment, and our records do not pretend to.
Christians have long disagreed about the nature and duration of final punishment. The traditional view in most churches holds that it is conscious and unending. Others have argued that the wicked are finally destroyed and cease to exist, a view often called conditional immortality. Still others have hoped that God will in the end reconcile all people to himself. Each view appeals to Scripture, and each has had serious defenders.
Our records leave this open where the text leaves it open. On Matthew 10:28, where Jesus speaks of God “who can destroy soul and body alike in hell”, the meaning decision is marked uncertain: whether “destroy” means ending existence or lasting ruin “is not settled by this verse”. On Revelation 14:10 the record says that Christians have understood the nature and duration of final punishment in different ways, and that the note does not decide between them. These are matters of meaning, and they belong in decisions and footnotes, not in a choice of English word (see Settings change wording, never meaning).
What the translation can do is show the reader which word stands in the text. A reader of Open Word Bible who meets “hell” in Balanced or Readable knows that Jesus said “Gehenna”. A reader who meets “the place of the dead” knows the original said Sheol or Hades. And at the Literal level, all four names are there to see. Like all our drafts, these records are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers.
The same Gospels that speak of Gehenna also speak of fear, and of whom to fear. That is the subject of The fear of the LORD.
Open Psalm 16, Luke 16, Mark 9 or Revelation 20 and tap a verse to see the full records.