What does the Bible say about heaven and hell?

Direct answer: the Bible speaks about heaven and hell far less systematically than most readers expect, and English translations blur the picture by using one word, "hell", for as many as four distinct originals. The Old Testament's Sheol is the realm of the dead in general. The Greek Hades in the New Testament is close to it. Gehenna, the word Jesus actually uses in the warnings, is the name of a valley outside Jerusalem. Tartarus appears once. On the other side, the Bible's fullest description of the final state — Revelation 21 — is not a description of souls in the sky but of a new heaven and a new earth, with a city descending to it.

Which words are translated “hell”?

None of this settles the theological question. It does explain why two readers can quote "hell" at each other from different verses and be discussing different things.

What does the Bible say about hell directly?

The sharpest images are in the Gospels, and they are images. Jesus speaks of Gehenna:

If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out. It is better for you to enter into God’s Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire, ‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’ (Mark 9:47-48)

The closing line is a quotation from Isaiah 66. In the judgment scene of Matthew 25, the language is exclusion and duration: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels" (25:41), and "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (25:46).

The parable in Luke 16 supplies the most detailed scene, and it is worth noticing that it is a parable and that its setting is Hades rather than a final state: "In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom" (16:23), and later, "between us and you there is a great gulf fixed" (16:26).

Revelation 20 closes with different imagery again: "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire" (20:14).

What does the Bible say about heaven?

Less about clouds than popular imagination expects, and more about a restored creation. The fullest passage is Revelation 21:

I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away, and the sea is no more. I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice out of heaven saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with people; and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more. The first things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4)

The direction of movement is downward. The city comes to the earth; the people are not extracted to a distant place. Alongside this, the New Testament also describes an intermediate state — Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:8 of being "willing rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord" — and the relationship between that state and the final one is where much of the traditional divergence sits.

What did Dante add, and what did popular culture add?

A great deal of what English speakers picture is not in the Bible.

• The nine descending circles, with sins sorted by category and matching punishments, are the architecture of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, written in the early fourteenth century. It is a poem, and it says so.
• The devil as the manager of hell, with horns and a pitchfork, is medieval and later art. In Matthew 25:41 the fire is described as prepared for the devil, not administered by him.
• Harps, clouds and wings are art and cartoon shorthand. The Bible's heaven imagery is a city, a garden, a banquet and a wedding.
• "Limbo" as a place for unbaptized infants was a theological hypothesis discussed in Catholic theology, never a defined doctrine, and the International Theological Commission set it aside in a 2007 study.

Separating these additions from the text is not a way of softening the subject. The biblical language about judgment is severe. It is simply not the language of the Inferno.

How do the Christian traditions differ?

Universalism — the hope or claim that all are finally restored — has appeared in every century of Christian thought and is a minority position in each of these traditions, held by individual theologians rather than defined by them.

What the Bible does not do here

• It does not give a map. There are no coordinates, no levels and no census. Every passage above is imagery drawn from fire, darkness, a city, a banquet or a valley outside Jerusalem.
• It does not promise access to the destination of a particular person. No text in the Bible offers a procedure for determining where someone who has died is.
• It does not make the fear of hell a technique. The passages that describe judgment are addressed to their hearers about their own lives, not handed to them as an instrument for sorting other people.

If someone you love has died and this question is the one keeping you awake, the article on what happens when someone dies, according to the Bible treats the grief side of it directly, and what happens at a funeral, a wake or a memorial service covers the practical side.

Bible text: World English Bible (public domain). This article describes what the text says and what different Christian traditions teach; it does not recommend one of them.