Ask most American Christians what happens when you die, and you’ll get a fairly consistent answer: your soul goes to heaven or to hell, immediately, forever. There may be some discussion of a final judgment, but for most people the picture is essentially binary — two destinations, one for the saved, one for the lost, fixed at the moment of death.
This is not what the Bible teaches. Not in the Old Testament. Not in the New Testament. Not anywhere.
What the Bible describes — when you read it in its original languages — is a much richer picture: at least five distinct locations, two resurrections, two judgments, and a clear distinction between what happens to the soul between death and the second coming versus what happens after Christ returns. The “heaven or hell” picture most Christians carry around isn’t a simplification of Scripture; it’s a flattening produced by translation choices.
This article walks through the actual biblical map of the afterlife, shows where the translation errors crept in, and gives you the tools to read your own Bible with fresh eyes. It assumes you’ve read Reading Revelation Rightly; if you haven’t, that one explains why the “thousand-year reign” of Revelation 20 is the present age and what the “first” and “second” resurrections refer to.
The Translation Problem in One Verse
Let’s start with the single clearest example of how translation has flattened the biblical picture. Open three modern Bibles to Psalm 16:10 and compare:
King James Version: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.”
New International Version: “Because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay.”
English Standard Version: “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.”
Three translations. Three different words for the same Hebrew term: “hell,” “the realm of the dead,” and “Sheol.” The KJV translators chose “hell.” The NIV translators dropped that for “the realm of the dead” because they recognized the older translation was misleading. The ESV gave up trying to translate it and just transliterated the Hebrew word Sheol directly.
What makes this particularly important is that the Apostle Peter quotes this exact verse on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:27, 31). It is one of the foundational passages of Christian preaching — Peter is arguing that Psalm 16 predicts the resurrection of Christ. The Greek of Acts 2 translates the Hebrew Sheol with the Greek word Hades. So we now have three words referring to the same place: Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades, English variously rendered “hell,” “the grave,” “the realm of the dead,” or just Sheol.
Whatever Peter was talking about, it wasn’t hell as modern Christians use the word. Christ did not descend into the fiery torment reserved for the damned.
The translation problem in this single verse is the translation problem throughout the entire Bible. Let’s unpack it systematically.
The Hebrew Picture: Sheol and the Pit
The Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament — describes the afterlife using a handful of distinct terms. The most important is Sheol, which appears about 65 times throughout the Old Testament. Sheol is the general place of the dead — the abode where souls go when the body dies. It is not heaven. It is not the lake of fire. It is the realm of the departed, awaiting whatever God will do next.
You can see Sheol throughout the Psalms and the Prophets:
“The cords of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me” (Psalm 116:3, ESV)
“If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there” (Psalm 139:8, ESV)
“O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol” (Psalm 30:3, ESV)
“Let me not be put to shame… let the wicked be put to shame; let them go silently to Sheol” (Psalm 31:17, ESV)
Sheol has gradations. Some passages describe a “deepest Sheol” or “the depths of Sheol” (Deuteronomy 32:22, Psalm 86:13). Some passages distinguish a worse place within or beneath Sheol — usually called the Pit (Hebrew bor or shachat). The Pit is a place of decay, ruin, darkness, and corruption. The Psalms describe the experience of being cast there:
“I am counted as one who goes down to the Pit; I am like a man who has no strength, like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep” (Psalm 88:4-6, ESV)
And the prophet Isaiah, describing the wicked who belong there, uses the same imagery — restless churning, mire, the absence of peace:
“The wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.” (Isaiah 57:20-21, ESV)
These aren’t synonyms. Sheol is the general realm of the dead. The Pit is the worse part of it — the place where the unrepentant wicked descend, surrounded by corruption and darkness.
Then there is a third Hebrew concept that gets confused with these two: Gehenna. This word comes from the Valley of Hinnom (Gei-Hinnom in Hebrew), a literal valley south of Jerusalem where, in the time of the wicked kings, children had been sacrificed to the pagan god Molech (2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 7:31). By the time of Christ, the valley had become a kind of permanent garbage dump where fires burned continuously to consume refuse. Jesus used Gehenna as a vivid image of the place of final, eternal judgment — the lake of fire described in Revelation 20.
Crucially, Gehenna and Sheol are not the same place. Sheol is the temporary realm of the dead that exists in the current age. Gehenna is the place of final destruction that comes into play after the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead. The same New Testament that uses both words is careful to distinguish them.
So in the Hebrew picture, we already have at least three distinct concepts:
- Sheol — the general realm of the dead, a place of waiting
- The Pit — a worse region within or beneath Sheol, for the unrepentant
- Gehenna — the future place of eternal destruction at the final judgment
Then translators put all three of these into one English word.
How “Hell” Became a Catch-All
The English word “hell” comes from Old English hel, the existing Germanic word for the underworld. When the first English Bibles were being translated — first Wycliffe in the 1380s, then Tyndale in the 1520s, and ultimately the King James Version in 1611 — the translators reached for “hell” as a generic English equivalent for any word denoting a place of the dead or punishment after death.
So the KJV uses “hell” to translate:
- Sheol (Hebrew, used in the Old Testament) and Hades (the Greek equivalent, used in the New Testament) — the same realm of the dead, in two Bible languages. The KJV uses “hell” for both (sometimes also “the grave” or “the pit”)
- Gehenna (Greek, used only in the New Testament) — the place of final punishment, which is something different
- Tartarus (Greek, used only in 2 Peter 2:4) — the deepest realm, where the rebellious angels are held
Three distinct realms, one English word. This is how the modern American “heaven or hell” framework was born — not from the text of Scripture, but from translation choices that lumped distinct concepts together.
You can verify this yourself. Open a KJV to Matthew 11:23 and Matthew 5:22 — both verses use the word “hell” in English, but the Greek word is different. Matthew 11:23 (“And thou, Capernaum… shalt be brought down to hell”) uses Hades. Matthew 5:22 (“whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire”) uses Gehenna. Two different concepts, one English translation.
To the credit of modern translations, many have started to fix this. The ESV transliterates Sheol directly rather than using “hell.” The NIV uses “the realm of the dead.” The NRSV uses “Sheol.” But the damage to popular Christian imagination has largely been done. Generations of Christians have read “hell” and assumed it meant a single fiery destination — and modern translations, even when they correct the Hebrew, still tend to call Hades and Gehenna both “hell” in English.
The single most useful thing a curious reader can do to understand the biblical picture of the afterlife is to look up the original Greek or Hebrew of every passage that mentions “hell,” “the grave,” “the pit,” “the depths,” “the realm of the dead,” or “decay/corruption.” A study Bible with footnotes, or a free online resource like Blue Letter Bible, will tell you which word is being used. The picture that emerges is much richer — and much more biblical — than the flat “heaven or hell” binary.
Five Locations
When you read the Bible with the original-language distinctions in view, a coherent picture emerges. There are five locations for the human soul described in Scripture. Three of them are operative in the present age, between Christ’s first coming and his second. Two of them come into play only at the Second Coming and the final judgment.
Before the Second Coming
1. Heaven — The presence of God, where the souls of the faithful who have died in union with Christ now reside. Paul tells the Corinthians he would “rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). He tells the Philippians that to die is “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). The Letter to the Hebrews describes the heavenly Jerusalem as containing “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23) — present tense. John, in Revelation, sees the martyred saints under the altar of heaven (Revelation 6:9-11) and the great multitude of the redeemed before God’s throne (Revelation 7:9-12) — present-tense scenes happening now, not at the end of the age.
This is what Revelation 20:4-6 calls the “first resurrection” — the soul’s entry into Christ’s presence at the moment of bodily death. It is the destination of those who, as 1 Thessalonians 4:14 puts it, have “fallen asleep in Jesus.”
2. Sheol / Hades — The general realm of the dead, where souls await the bodily resurrection. The Apostles’ Creed affirms that Christ himself descended here between his death and resurrection — not to suffer there, but to liberate the Old Testament faithful who had been waiting. This is the meaning of Peter’s preaching in 1 Peter 3:18-20, where he describes Christ going and making “proclamation to the spirits in prison” — and 1 Peter 4:6, where Peter says “the gospel was preached even to the dead.”
Acts 2:34 makes a striking statement: “For David did not ascend into the heavens.” If even David — the “man after God’s own heart” — was not in heaven, where was he? Peter’s argument is that David was waiting in Sheol for the Messiah to come, just like all the other Old Testament faithful. This is the same point made in Hebrews 11:39-40, which says of all the Old Testament saints: “And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.” They were waiting. Their perfection awaited Christ.
What about Christ’s own promise to the good thief on the cross — “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43)? Read in isolation, it sounds like Christ is promising the thief immediate entry into heaven. But on Easter Sunday morning, the risen Christ tells Mary Magdalene at the tomb: “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17). Christ Himself, then, had not yet gone to the Father’s heaven during the three days. Where had He been? And where had He brought the thief?
The older Christian reading resolves this cleanly. Paradise in Luke 23:43 does not refer to the final heaven of the Father, but to the upper, righteous compartment of Sheol — what the parable of Lazarus and the rich man calls the bosom of Abraham (Luke 16:22). This is where the Old Testament faithful had been waiting; it is where Christ descended on Good Friday; and it is where the good thief joined Him that same day. The promise was not broken — it was kept exactly as spoken. Then on Easter morning, Christ led the patriarchs and prophets out at what Eastern Christians have always called the harrowing of Hades.
After the resurrection and ascension, the story changes. The faithful who die in union with Christ now go directly to be with Him — “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). The upper-Sheol waiting room is no longer where they go. But the existence of Sheol as a whole — the general realm of the dead, where some souls still await the final resurrection — remains. This is implicit in Revelation 20:13: “Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done.” If Hades had no inhabitants in the current age, this verse would describe the empty being emptied.
3. The Pit / The Sea / The Deep — The worse region within or beneath Sheol, where the unrepentant wicked are held until the final judgment. This is what Revelation 20:13 calls “the sea” giving up its dead. It is what Psalm 88 describes as “the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep.” It is what 2 Peter 2:4 calls Tartarus — the place where God “did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment.” It is what Jude 1:6 calls being “kept by him in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day.”
It is not eternal. It is not the lake of fire. It is the temporary holding place of the wicked dead, between bodily death and the final judgment. Scripture associates it with darkness, decay, and the absence of God’s light — but not with the fire imagery used for Gehenna and the lake of fire.
After the Second Coming
4. The Lake of Fire / Gehenna — The place of final, eternal punishment, which comes into existence at the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead. This is what Christ describes in Matthew 25:41 as “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” It is what John describes in Revelation 20:14-15: “Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and if any one’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”
Notice what this verse actually says. Hades — the realm of the dead — is itself cast into the lake of fire. The intermediate state is itself destroyed. Death itself is destroyed. The Pit is destroyed. What remains, for the unrepentant, is the lake of fire — the “second death” — the final, eternal state of separation from God.
This is the destination Christ warns about when he uses the word Gehenna — not Sheol, not Hades, not the Pit, but the final state of those who have rejected him.
5. The New Jerusalem / The New Heaven and New Earth — The final, eternal destination of the redeemed. This is described in Revelation 21-22 as the bride of Christ, the city of God, the place where “the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:3-4).
This is what the entire biblical story has been moving toward. Not a disembodied existence in some cloud-realm, but the bodily resurrection in a renewed creation. The dust that Adam was formed from is not abandoned but redeemed. The earth is not destroyed but remade. We are not pulled out of the world; the world is set right and we are restored to our intended place in it.
Two Resurrections, Two Judgments
This map of the afterlife clarifies something that has confused many readers of the New Testament: Scripture speaks of two resurrections and two judgments.
“They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. Over these the second death has no power.” (Revelation 20:4-6)
The first resurrection is the soul’s entry into Christ’s presence at the moment of bodily death for those who have died in union with him. This is what Revelation 20:4-6 describes when it speaks of those who “reigned with Christ a thousand years” and over whom “the second death has no power.” Christ Himself describes this in John 11:25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” Two groups are named here: those who have died and will live in a future date (at the general resurrection), and those who live and have never died (those whose souls go directly to Christ).
The first judgment — sometimes called the particular judgment — is the determination at the moment of bodily death of where the soul will go: into Christ’s presence, into Sheol/Hades, or into the Pit. This judgment determines the intermediate state — the soul’s condition between bodily death and the resurrection. For those who have died in union with Christ, the verdict is already given through how they lived — the life of repentance is itself the judgment, and death only reveals what was already true.
The second resurrection is the bodily resurrection of all the dead at the Second Coming of Christ. This is what 1 Corinthians 15 describes at length — the trumpet sounding, the dead being raised incorruptible, the living being changed. It is what Daniel 12:2 prophesied: “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” It is what Christ describes in John 5:28-29: “the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.”
The second judgment — the final judgment or general judgment — is the determination at the Second Coming of each person’s eternal destiny. The Letter to the Hebrews points to this when it says “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The very next verse ties that judgment to Christ’s return: “so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). Notice there is a group eagerly waiting — souls in the intermediate state, awaiting the bodily resurrection and the final judgment that His second coming will bring. This is also what Revelation 20:11-15 describes: the great white throne, the books opened, every person judged according to his deeds, those whose names are in the book of life entering the New Jerusalem, those whose names are not cast into the lake of fire.
The two judgments are not contradictory. The first determines the intermediate state. The second determines the eternal state. Both are real. Both are described in Scripture. The popular American Christian view — that the moment you die you go immediately and finally to heaven or hell, with no further judgment to come — collapses the two into one and misses the bodily resurrection entirely.
Why This Matters
A reader might be tempted, again, to wave this off as theological hair-splitting. Five locations or two — does it really matter where the souls of the dead are right now?
It matters for several reasons.
First, it changes what we think Christ accomplished. If the dead simply go to heaven or hell at the moment of death, then Christ’s bodily resurrection becomes a kind of one-time miracle rather than the firstfruits of a general resurrection. If, on the other hand, the dead are awaiting a future bodily resurrection — as Scripture plainly says (1 Corinthians 15:20-23) — then Christ’s resurrection is the first of many. It is the pattern. It is the promise. It is what will happen to us.
Second, it restores the bodily nature of the Christian hope. Christianity is not a religion of escape from the body. It is the religion of the resurrection of the body. Paul stakes the entire Christian gospel on this in 1 Corinthians 15:14: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” Not “if Christ’s soul didn’t go to heaven” — if Christ is not risen again. Bodily. Verifiably. Tangibly. The bodily resurrection is not optional Christian decoration. It is the gospel.
Third, it gives us a coherent reading of the Old Testament. When you grasp that Sheol is a real place where the Old Testament faithful waited for the Messiah, the entire arc of biblical history makes sense. The patriarchs and prophets were not transported to heaven the moment they died — they waited, in faith, for the One they had been promised. When that One came, he himself descended to where they were waiting and led them out. This is what the Apostles’ Creed means by “he descended into hell.” This is what Ephesians 4:8 means when it says of Christ, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives.” The captives he led upward were the Old Testament faithful, finally entering the heaven that had been closed since Eden.
Fourth, it restores meaning to the prayers of the church. The earliest Christians prayed for the dead — not because they thought their prayers could move souls from hell into heaven, but because they understood that some of the faithful were in an intermediate state, awaiting the final resurrection, and that prayer is the work of love that does not stop at the grave. The catacombs of Rome are full of inscriptions asking for prayers for the departed. This was simply Christian practice, taken for granted, until the Reformation in some traditions rejected it as a medieval accretion. Whatever one’s view on the practice, the theological space for it exists clearly in the biblical map of the afterlife. The dead are not all in their final state. Some are awaiting the resurrection. To pray for them is to participate in the love that binds the living and the dead in Christ.
The map itself is in the text. It always has been. It just got translated out.
Reading Forward
The next article in this series will look at the particular emphasis of the Eastern Christian tradition on the afterlife — what theosis means for our understanding of death, why the saints in heaven are described as active rather than at rest, what the Eastern view of the “intermediate state” looks like, and how the pastoral practice of praying for the departed flows from the same biblical map this article has traced.
For now, the recommendation is simpler. The next time you read a passage in Scripture that mentions “hell,” “the grave,” “the realm of the dead,” “the pit,” or “decay” — pause. Look up the Hebrew or Greek word in the original. Notice which of the four or five distinct concepts it represents. Read the passage again with that distinction in view.
The biblical picture of the afterlife is much richer, much stranger, and much more hopeful than the binary you may have inherited. The dead are not abandoned. The earth is not abandoned. Christ has descended into Sheol to liberate the captives, ascended to reign with the saints, and will return to raise the dead bodily and remake creation entirely. The lake of fire is real, but it is the destination of the unrepentant at the final judgment — not the universal fate of every non-Christian the moment they breathe their last.
There is more time, more mercy, more hope in the biblical picture than most modern Christians have been led to believe. That hope was always there. It just needed to be translated back in.
