Bible Theology and the Word

"Much confusion and misunderstanding has been caused through the early translators of the Bible persistently rendering the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades and Gehenna by the word hell. The simple transliteration of these words by the translators of the revised editions of the Bible has not sufficed to appreciably clear up this confusion and misconception."-The Encyclopedia Americana (1942), Vol. XIV, p. 81.

The following chart has a few instances where Bible words are manipulated to support the Hell-Fire doctrine. There are of course alot more instances where Sheol and Hades are rendered.  

Abbreviations:

• A.O.D. = Abode of the Dead
• R.O.D. = Realm of the Dead
• W.O.D. = World of the Dead
• R.O.D. = Realm of the Dead
• P.O.D. = Place of the Dead
• P.O.T. = Pit of Torture
• S.O.D. = State of the Dead
• N.W. = Nether World
• D.U.C. = Dark Underground Caves
• N = New                                                                                                                                                                              
• S = Standard                                                                                              
• A = American                                                                                                 
• I = International                                                                                       
• L = Living                                                                                               
• E = English                                                                                          
• M = Modern                                                                                                     
• B = Bible                                                                                                                   
• V = Version                                                                                                  
• T = Translation                                                                                                           
• W = World                                                                                                        
• C = Contemporary

What is Gehenna?
Catholic periodical Commonweal:
"The final place of punishment, evidently, is Gehenna, the Valley of Hinno[m], which at one time had been a place where human sacrifice was offered to pagan gods, but in biblical times had already become the city dump, a refuse heap on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Here the stench and smoke and fire were a constant reminder to the inhabitants of what happened to things that had served their purpose-they were destroyed."
Simply put, Gehenna is a garbage dump-See Phillips
"Jewish Views of the Afterlife," by Dr. Simcah Paull Raphael (1994).
Any doctrine of eternal torment or suffering in the afterlife depends on the doctrine of soul immortality. According to Dr. Raphael, this doctrine did not develop until "the apocryphal period," and was "a radically new idea that did not exist in biblical times." (p. 83)

Further, it is only "with the First Book of Enoch [that] another new conception enters Jewish postmortem philosophy -- the notion of Gehenna as a place of eternal damnation," thus sometime between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. (p. 88) It is with the apocryphal book of Enoch that
"tours of hell," describing with vivid detail the torments and punishments of the underworld, begin. Interestingly, for some time into the Christian century and beyond, Jewish scholars argued over whether the torments of Gehenna were temporary and purgative, or eternal. (pp. 140-149)

What is Tartarus?
Their being cast into "Tartarus" refers to their being debased, cut off from God's favor and all enlightenment. This is evident from the fact that the expression 'throwing into Tartarus' in the original Greek is a verb. So it refers to an act of debasement and not to a literal place. The idea conveyed is similar to the English word "debase," which uses the noun "base" but does not in itself suggest the existence of a literal base. The Bible here uses symbolic language that the Greeks would understand with Homer's Iliad. See Jude 6.

What is Hades and Sheol?
As we see from the above, Hades and Sheol are simply the grave. That is why the Rotherham Bible says, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might>, for there is no work nor calculation nor knowledge nor wisdom, in hades, whither thou art going." Eccl 9:10