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The English word Hell, referring to the Christian afterlife of eternal punishment, comes from the Old English Hel, a borrowed Norse word for the land of the dead.

The Greek originals of the Christian Testaments use Hades, the land of the dead in Greek mythology, where their Old English descendants use Hel. The very earliest Greek Christian writings, though, use the Hebrew word Gehenna instead.

In the original Hebrew of the Torah, the Christian Old Testament’s references to Gehenna are mostly replaced by a different Hebrew word, sheol. Although Jewish oral tradition has various theories on the rewards and punishments awaiting souls in the afterlife, the Torah itself doesn’t offer much of an explanation on the matter.

Sheol is not an explicitly religious term. In ancient Judea, when a city garbage dump grew too large, the authorities would have it burned down to make room for more. The resulting fiery mess was called a sheol. In ancient Judean literature, a sheol, a mountain of fire, was used as a poetic metaphor for earthly death.

Gehenna, or Ge-Hinnom, was the name of ancient Jerusalem’s municipal landfill.

Source: Wikipedia