A study from the corpus
Four words flattened into one hell
A Hebrew word for where the dead are. A Greek god who lends his name to his own kingdom. A ravine south of Jerusalem with a history attached to it. And a verb, used once in the whole New Testament, borrowed from the pit that held the Titans.
English has one word for all four. That is a vocabulary problem rather than a scandal — when the Authorised Version was made, hell was the ordinary English word for the abode of the dead, and it had no rivals. But the four are different kinds of object, and the texts naming them here span 830 years — putting them back is the whole of this study.
Dated from 6 source texts at build time. Corpus last revised 29 August 2026.
Published · Updated
The four, counted
4
Words in the English hell
One of them is a person
830
Years between first and last
Earliest to latest attestation here
3 of 4
Filed as realms
Hades is filed as a deity, because he is one
6
Texts involved
Each one linked below
One at a time
Each word with what it names in its own language, what the corpus’s cited texts say about it, and what happens to it in English. The dates are the texts’, not the words’ — a word is always older than the first surviving page that carries it.
Sheol
A place, and a common noun
Everybody goes there and nothing happens to them. Conduct does not sort the dead in the older Hebrew material: the righteous and the wicked go down alike, into silence, dust and the inability to praise God — which is stated as a loss rather than as a punishment.
Uncertain, and argued over since antiquity. The likeliest root means to ask or to enquire, which would make it the place that asks and is never answered; a competing derivation gives 'the hollow'.
In English
Rendered sometimes as hell, sometimes as the grave and sometimes as the pit, so a reader in English meets three different places where the Hebrew has one.
Where the dead go without distinction of conduct: down, dark and silent, cut off from praise. Described as never satisfied and as having a mouth, in poetry that personifies it without deifying it.
Hades
A god, whose name is used for his kingdom
The one of the four that is a person. He holds the underworld by lot rather than by appointment, is not an adversary of the sky god, and is not in charge of punishing anybody — the Greek dead are sorted by rite and by family, not by virtue.
Greek *Aïdes*, most plausibly 'the unseen'. Speaking the name was avoided, hence the euphemism *Plouton*, 'the wealthy one', from which Latin Pluto.
In English
Translated as hell, which imports a warden and a sentence into a text that has neither, and quietly turns a god into a place.
Receives the underworld in the division of the cosmos among the sons of Kronos.
The abductor, acting with the consent of Zeus and complying with the recall when it comes — the seed is a technicality, not a defiance. He is a magistrate of a fixed jurisdiction rather than an adversary, and the whole later Christian collapse of Hades into the devil is a misreading of exactly this text's tone.
Named as the third brother holding the misty dark by lot, and reported as wounded by an arrow of Heracles and going up to Olympus in pain to be healed. A lord of the dead who can be shot is very far from the devil he is later merged with, and the poem records it without embarrassment.
The abduction again, now in Latin and with the Roman name, told as a love story with Venus setting it up to extend her empire. This is the version Europe read for a thousand years, and the substitution of Dis for Hades is where the Greek magistrate begins turning into a proprietor of hell.
Gehenna
A valley, on a map
A real ravine outside Jerusalem with a specific history: children were burned in offering there, and Josiah defiled the site to stop it. The image of final destruction is built on top of a place, and the place came first.
Greek *geenna*, from Hebrew *ge ben-hinnom*, the valley of the son of Hinnom, running south of Jerusalem — the only one of these words that is a place on a map before it is anything else. Hinnom himself is a personal name, and BDB (1906) calls its derivation and meaning dubious, rejecting as improbable the derivation from a root meaning to wail that is sometimes offered on the strength of what is said to have been done to children there. The word behind the Christian hell is a valley named after a man nobody can identify.
In English
Also hell — the only one of the four for which the English word is arguably doing the intended work, and the one whose local geography disappears completely when it does.
A ravine outside Jerusalem where children were burned in offering under Ahaz and Manasseh, defiled by Josiah so the practice could not resume, and prophesied by Jeremiah to be renamed the Valley of Slaughter.
Used as the image of final destruction — fire, the undying worm, a body thrown away rather than a soul imprisoned. Always a fate that may be avoided, never a common destination.
Tartarus
A verb, used once
Not a noun in the New Testament at all. Second Peter says what God did to the angels that sinned, in a word borrowed from the Greek pit that held defeated Titans — a prison for divine beings rather than a destination for human dead.
Greek Tartaros, of unknown origin and probably pre-Greek. The New Testament uses it only as a verb, tartaroo — to consign to Tartarus.
In English
Rendered as cast down to hell, which merges a holding cell for gods with the fate of the human dead and erases the distinction the borrowed word was made to carry.
In 2 Peter, what God did to the angels that sinned: consigned them to chains of darkness until judgment. Used of rebel powers, never of human dead.
As far below Hades as heaven is above earth, ringed with bronze and night, where Zeus confines the Titans after the war in heaven.
The fifth word, going the other way
Abaddon
avaddon · HebrewA place-name that became an angel. In the Hebrew Bible it is a region of destruction named beside Sheol; in Revelation it is the king over the locusts of the pit, given a Greek name to match. Hades travels in the opposite direction over the same centuries — a god whose name becomes a place — which is the clearest sign that the underworld vocabulary was unstable in both directions rather than simply flattened in one.
What separating them changes
The four words do not describe one afterlife imagined four ways. They describe four different things: a condition everybody ends in, a kingdom with a king, a place with an address, and a prison for divine beings. Only the last two have anything to do with punishment, and only one of those punishes people.
Read with the words separated, a good deal of familiar material says something other than what it is usually taken to say. Sheol swallowing someone is a statement that they died, not that they were damned. The gates of Hades are the gates of the place the dead are kept, which is why the promise made against them is a promise about death rather than about the devil. The angels of 2 Peter are not sent where humans go — the borrowed word exists precisely to say they are somewhere else.
The collapse was not carelessness. English had one word and needed four, and the translators who used it were working with a vocabulary that had already merged the Germanic hel — the ordinary word for the abode of the dead, and the name of the goddess who ruled it — with a Christian doctrine of punishment. The merge was in the language before it reached the page. What the corpus can add is the record of the four objects on their own terms, each with its own texts and dates, so that a reader who meets the English word can see which of the four is underneath it.
Method, and what would change it
Every date, source and quoted characterisation on this page is read from the corpus at build time; the four descriptions of what each word names are editorial and live in the study’s data file. No verse counts are given, because this corpus holds no concordance and the familiar tallies of how often a translation says hell are not checkable from it.
- A Hebrew text using she'ol for a place of punishment reserved for the wicked, rather than for where the dead are. The Wisdom material comes closest and still sorts nobody.
- A Greek text in which Hades the god judges or punishes the dead, rather than holding a jurisdiction he was allotted.
- A New Testament use of tartaroo as a noun, or applied to human dead rather than to sinning angels. There is one occurrence and it is neither.
- An early text treating ge-hinnom as a region of the afterlife rather than as the valley south of Jerusalem, which would collapse the distinction this study rests on.