When Hell Isn't What You Think

Rethinking "Hell" in the New Testament

One of my long-standing pet peeves with how we read the New Testament is our use of the word hell. That word carries so many assumptions in English—images of fire, punishment, eternal torment—that it can obscure the actual nuance of the texts. In our Bibles, hell is often a stand-in for three very different Greek words: Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna. Each carries its own meaning, and none of them quite fit the medieval caricature that the English term conjures.

Gehenna: A Name with a Story

Let’s focus on the big one—Gehenna—because that’s the term Jesus uses most often. A better approach, I think, would be to leave it untranslated. Whether Jesus was referencing a physical location or invoking a metaphor for judgment or devastation, it’s important that we hear him on his own terms.

Gehenna was a real place—the Valley of Hinnom, known in Hebrew as Gehinnom. It had a grim reputation in Jewish memory. According to Hebrew Scriptures, it was a site of child sacrifice to the Ammonite god Molech. Second Kings recounts how King Josiah desecrated the valley so no one could ever again use it to burn their sons or daughters in the fire.

Some have claimed it later became a garbage dump where refuse was burned, and while archaeological evidence is sparse, the symbolic weight is clear. In the Jewish imagination, Gehenna was a kind of hell on earth—a place of devastation and moral failure.

That’s what Jesus is drawing on when he uses the word Gehenna: not a supernatural realm of eternal torment, but a historical location freighted with cultural and ethical memory. Something visceral. Something local. Something that warns us not about later, but about right now.

Armageddon: Another Loaded Word

The same applies to Armageddon. That term shows up in the book of Revelation, where John writes about Har Megiddo—literally, the mountain of Megiddo. Except there’s no such mountain. Megiddo is a valley, part of the Jezreel plain, not an elevated place.

And that’s the point. Revelation is steeped in metaphor and symbol. John is telling us not to look for a real mountain but to recall what Megiddo meant. Historically, it was a battlefield. Egyptians fought there. Babylonians clashed there. Judges and prophets and kings met their end in Megiddo. It’s a place of bloodshed and despair.

So when Revelation conjures up the image of Har Megiddo, it’s evoking a scene of cataclysm—but it’s doing so symbolically. Like Gehenna, it’s not meant to be a GPS location. It’s a warning, a mirror, a story about our worst tendencies played out on a stage we recognize.

Ezekiel and the Valley of Bones

This brings us to Ezekiel. The prophet tells a story of being taken by the Spirit to a valley full of bones. Dry, scorched, decomposing. It’s not meant to be a literal place, but it is meant to bring real valleys to mind: Gehenna and Megiddo.

Ezekiel has seen Jerusalem fall. He’s watched friends and neighbors carried off into exile. So when he describes this valley, it’s not a poetic prelude to a resurrection scene—it’s an invocation of hell. Not Dante’s hell with fire and pitchforks, but something far more devastating: hopelessness, ruin, trauma.

And here, Ezekiel is naming that. Holding space for the devastation. Saying, this is where we begin. Before the bones rattle and come together, before there is sinew or breath or hope again—there is death. Real, painful, societal collapse.

Why This Matters

These words—Gehenna, Armageddon, hell—are not theology tests. They are cultural signposts, historical references, spiritual metaphors. They are tools Jesus and the prophets used to help us name our pain, our patterns, and the places where we've lost our way.

So maybe instead of jumping ahead to the hopeful ending, we need to sit in the valley for a bit. Let ourselves name what feels burned out and broken. That’s where healing begins—not by ignoring the devastation, but by acknowledging it.

And that, ironically, is part of a sermon on Joy. Because when resurrection comes, it doesn't float in from nowhere. It rises up, impossibly, from a valley full of bones.