Afterlife Vocabulary

Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus, the Abyss, and Paradise — six words English hid inside one, disambiguated and sourced.

Summary

English Bibles hid six different words inside "hell": Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus, the Abyss, and Paradise. This page pulls them apart and shows where each belongs.

Sheol (Hebrew) and Hades (Greek) name the realm of the dead, not the final judgment.
Gehenna is Jesus' word for final judgment, from the Hinnom valley outside Jerusalem.
Tartarus appears once, for angels held for judgment; the Abyss is the demonic prison.
Paradise is presence with Christ now; the story ends in bodily resurrection.

One word, three places

English readers meet a single word, "hell", where the original languages give at least three distinct realities. The King James translators rendered the Hebrew Sheol (H7585) as "hell" 31 times, "grave" 31 times, and "pit" 3 times across its 65 occurrences. They then used "hell" again for the Greek Hades (G86) and again for Gehenna (G1067). Three concepts, one English word.

The first correction is the simplest: Sheol and Hades are the same place under two languages. Hades is the word the Septuagint used to translate Sheol, and the New Testament inherits it (compare Ps 16:10 with Acts 2:27, where Peter quotes the psalm and Sheol becomes Hades). Both name the realm of all the dead before judgment, Jacob expects to go down to Sheol mourning (Gen 37:35), and even David's Lord is not left there (Ps 16:10).

Gehenna is the outlier. It is not where the dead wait; it is where the judged are sent. The name comes from the Valley of Hinnom (Hebrew gê-hinnōm) south of Jerusalem, where Ahaz and Manasseh burned children to Molech (2 Kgs 23:10; Jer 7:31; 2 Chr 28:3). Eleven of its twelve New Testament appearances are on the lips of Jesus (Matt 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 23:33; Mark 9:43–47; Luke 12:5), with one in James 3:6. To read "hell" flatly is to lose the difference between the grave and the fire.

The map of the dead

Only one passage draws the geography of the intermediate state, and Jesus tells it: the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). Lazarus dies and is "carried away by the angels into Abraham's bosom": a phrase that occurs exactly once in Scripture, a Second Temple idiom for the blessed dead gathered to the patriarch (Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, bk. IV). The rich man dies and is "in Hades... in torments" (Luke 16:23). Between them a "great gulf" is fixed, uncrossable in either direction.

And the beggar - Worn out with hunger, and pain, and want of all things, died: and was carried by angels (amazing change of the scene!) into Abraham's bosom - So the Jews styled paradise; the place where the souls of good men remain from death to the resurrection. — John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Bible (1765), on Luke 16:22

Wesley's note is the seam Jesus is working: "Abraham's bosom" was already the Jews' own name for the righteous dead's waiting-place, and Jesus takes the phrase his hearers already used and fills it with content only he could give.

So the realm of the dead has two compartments: comfort and torment. Jesus names the comforted side again from the cross: "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). Paradeisos (G3857) is a Persian loanword meaning a walled garden; the Septuagint used it for Eden, and Paul was "caught up into Paradise" (2 Cor 12:4), which Revelation locates in the presence of God with the tree of life (Rev 2:7).

This is still the intermediate state, not the final one: see Intermediate State for the fuller case. After the resurrection and judgment, "death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire" (Rev 20:13–14): the waiting realm is itself emptied and abolished, called the "second death." The vocabulary is precise: Hades holds the dead now; the lake of fire holds the verdict.

Conscious now, or asleep until then? Paul writes of "the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better" (Phil 1:23: see the Philippians hub), and that to be "absent from the body" is to be "at home with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8): language that only carries weight if there is someone there to experience it. Revelation shows martyred souls under the altar consciously crying "How long?" (Rev 6:9–11).

Set against this: Ecclesiastes 9:5 says "the dead know not anything," and the Old Testament calls death "sleep" often enough (Dan 12:2; Acts 7:60) that some readers (soul-sleep, or psychopannychism, discussed as early as the Reformation and held later among some Adventist bodies) take the interval itself as unconscious rest, with "with Christ" experienced as instantaneous from the sleeper's side.

MannaFest plants its flag with the first reading: the intermediate state is consciously with Christ, not blank rest, and "sleep" describes the body's repose and the certainty of waking, not the soul's unconsciousness. John Burke's Imagine Heaven (2015) treats this as the site's contemporary anchor, weighing decades of near-death testimony as confirming (never establishing) what Luke 23:43 and Phil 1:23 already say.

Gehenna, Tartarus, and the Abyss

Three fiery or imprisoning words are easy to blur, and each is distinct.

Gehenna (G1067) is the destiny of judged humans: "fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in [Gehenna]" (Matt 10:28). It stands nearest to what Revelation calls the lake of fire.

The Abyss (abyssos, G12), "bottomless," is a prison for spirits, not people. Demons beg not to be sent there (Luke 8:31); the Abyss releases its locust-army under the fifth trumpet (Rev 9:1–2, 11); and Satan is bound there a thousand years (Rev 20:1–3). The King James renders it "bottomless pit" seven times and "the deep" twice across nine occurrences.

Tartarus appears once: the verb tartaroō (G5020), a hapax legomenon, in 2 Pet 2:4: God "cast down to Tartarus" the angels that sinned, delivering them into chains of darkness reserved unto judgment. Jude 6 gives the parallel: angels who left their proper habitation, kept in everlasting bonds. Read against Genesis 6 and the Watchers tradition the site holds, Tartarus is the holding cell of the rebel angels, not a place for human dead at all.

The payoff of keeping the words apart: the grave (Sheol/Hades) is temporary and universal; Paradise and Abraham's bosom are the righteous dead's comfort; Gehenna is the human verdict; the Abyss and Tartarus are angelic prisons. One English word erased all of that: the original vocabulary restores it.

The end of the wait: bodily resurrection

None of these words name the believer's final hope. Paradise, Abraham's bosom, even "with Christ": all of it is the soul's waiting-place, not its destination. The destination is a body. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44); "we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump... and the dead shall be raised incorruptible" (1 Cor 15:51–52): see 1 Corinthians for the chapter in full.

Job says it centuries earlier, from the ash heap: "I know that my Redeemer liveth... And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God" (Job 19:25–26): not a bodiless hope, an embodied one.

Jesus draws the same line at the grave itself: "the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment" (John 5:28–29). Two resurrections, one event of raising, opposite verdicts: the point where Hades finally empties and hands its dead to judgment (Rev 20:12–13; see Revelation).

So the sequence the vocabulary sets up is: die → wait consciously in Paradise or in torment (Hades/Sheol) → rise bodily at the resurrection → stand at judgment → the wicked and Hades itself go into the lake of fire (Gehenna's horizon), the righteous into resurrection life. "Sleep" names the waiting body in the ground, never the waiting soul; the wait ends not in disembodiment made permanent but in a body remade.

The vocabulary of the dead6

Six words, one flattened into “hell”

English gives us one word where Scripture gives six. Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, the Abyss, Tartarus, and Paradise name different places, times, and inhabitants. The ledger below keeps them apart.

Laid side by side, the same distinctions read as a matrix, where each term sits, who is there, and for how long.

The six afterlife terms compared by realm, audience, and duration
Term	Realm	Audience	Duration
Sheol	The grave, the pit: the Hebrew underworld	Righteous and wicked alike (Gen 37:35)	Intermediate, before judgment
Hades	“The unseen”, the Greek word for Sheol	All the dead, before judgment	Intermediate, then emptied: cast into the lake of fire (Rev 20:14)
Gehenna	Valley of Hinnom, a byword for fiery judgment	Judged humans (Matt 10:28)	Final, the punishment after judgment
Abyss	“Bottomless”: the deep, the pit	Demons and the beast, not human dead	A temporary holding: Satan bound there 1,000 years (Rev 20:1–3)
Tartarus	The deepest pit: a single Greek verb, a hapax	The angels that sinned, in chains	Held, “reserved unto judgment” (2 Pet 2:4)
Paradise	A “walled garden”: the Septuagint's word for Eden	The righteous dead, with God	Intermediate: the soul's waiting-place, not its final destination

The confusion corrected

The word that hid three

The King James translators rendered Sheol, Hades, andGehenna alike as “hell.” So one English word carries the grave of the patriarchs, the intermediate realm of the dead, and the final fire of judgment. Sheol and Hades are the same place under two languages — Hades is simply the Septuagint’s Greek for Sheol. Gehenna is something else entirely: not where the dead wait, but where the judged are sent (per Matt 10:28; Rev 20:14). The Valley of Hinnom lent its name.

This Valley of Hinnom... became the general emblem of the place of future punishment. Thus Gehenna and Sheol were kept distinct.

Alfred Edersheim· The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, bk. IV, 1883Public domain

Strong's Concordance· KJV rendering tallies (public domain)

The map of the dead

Two compartments, a gulf between

Luke 16:19–31 is the one passage that draws the geography. The righteous dead are comforted; the wicked are in torment; a “great gulf” is fixed between, uncrossable either way.

The comforted

Abraham's bosom · Paradise

Lazarus is “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22) — the one time the phrase occurs. Jesus names the same rest “paradise” to the thief (Luke 23:43), the word the Septuagint used for Eden.

The tormented

Hades · in torment

The rich man “in Hades... being in torments” (Luke 16:23) sees Abraham afar off. This is still the intermediate state — Hades itself is later cast into the lake of fire (Rev 20:14), the “second death.”

In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham from afar, with Lazarus by his side.

Luke 16:23BSB

The single text that shows the dead conscious, sorted, and separated.

The last sorting

Where the vocabulary ends

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (Sistine Chapel, 1541): the final sorting the intermediate states await.
Public domainMichelangeloWikimedia Commons →

Sheol and Hades are waiting rooms; Gehenna and the lake of fire are the verdict. After the resurrection, “death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire” (Rev 20:14) — the intermediate realm itself is emptied and abolished.

Contested ground

What the dead experience

◈Conscious presence or soul sleep?contested · Presented at full strength

Soul sleep.The dead “know not any thing” (Eccl 9:5, 10); “in death there is no remembrance of thee” (Ps 6:5). On this reading Sheol is unconscious rest until resurrection.

Conscious state (the site’s posture).The rich man and Lazarus are awake and aware (Luke 16); Jesus promises the thief presence “today” (Luke 23:43); Paul counts death “far better,” to “be with Christ” (Phil 1:23; 2 Cor 5:8). The Ecclesiastes texts describe the body’s silence under the sun, not the soul’s extinction.

Where Christ went.“He descended into the lower parts” (Eph 4:9) and “preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Pet 3:19) — read by many as His visit to the realm of the dead between cross and resurrection.

Follow the words

Where to go next

Word

Sheol: the word studyEvery one of the 65 occurrences, and why the KJV split it three ways.

Word

Gehenna: the word studyFrom a Jerusalem trash-fire valley to the vocabulary of final judgment.

Lens

Rare words lensTartarus and “Abraham's bosom” each appear exactly once in the NT.

Verse

The rich man and LazarusThe one passage that maps the two compartments of the dead.

Where it leads

Featured studies3

Built on the same Scripture9

On Prophecy15

On The end times2

The whole shelf: Revelation & the Last Things →