What does the Bible say Hell is, Really?

What is Hell, What is it like? Where did the idea come from? The idea of a place of everlasting torment, sometimes in fire, goes back before the time of Jesus, clear back to Babylon as a matter of fact. Those Pagan religions did teach of a place of torment after death but they did not follow the God we find in the Bible which is where the Hell in this discussion is taken from. The Bible clearly tells us that death is what we get for sinning, not eternal torture. (Romans 6:23) As a matter of fact, God makes it clear he wouldn't even think of doing such a thing in Jeremiah 7:31.

The word hell, though has a long enough history of it's own, originally meaning, not the burning of things but rather burying of them as in helling potatoes, which simply meant to bury them to keep them fresh. Collier's Encyclopedia (1986 volume 12, pg 28) as well as Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (1981 volume 2 page 187) both agree that hell is an "unhappy" mistranslation of the original words. What are those words, and what do they really mean?

The words translated Hell in the King James Version are the Greek word haides and the Hebrew word sheohl. This version is far from consistent on this as it also translates sheohl 31 other times as "grave" and another 3 times as "pit". What do these original language words, which are the original writings found in the Bible, actually mean then? Simply put they both roughly mean the grave or everyone's common grave in the plural sense. No idea of torture was attributed to them, just death, and as Ecclesiastes 9:5 tells us, dead people are not conscious of anything, so cannot be tortured.One other word is rendered Hell or Hellfire in the Bible, and actually is Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom, where Jesus spoke of the fire not going out and the worm never dying. The valley of Hinnom was a valley next to Jerusalem outside it's wall where garbage and bodies of criminals who were deemed unfit for burial were thrown. Brimstone, aka sulfer was also thrown in there to keep it burning, thus the reference to that. It was simply a fitting symbolic reference to total destruction as is the reference to the lake of fire and sulfer in the Bible book of Revelation.

I find it a sad attempt on the part of Satan and some religious leaders to mislead and control others through fear and intimidation. I also find it an attempt to perpetuate the idea that people continue living after they die instead of dying as God said they were going to. He made this clear way back in the Garden of Eden as well as other places( Ecclesiastes 9:5 ; Psalm 146:4) This does away with a need for or belief in a resurrection of the dead or seeing the need for God's Kingdom to fix the mess humans under Satan's rulership have done(2 Corinthians 4:3,4 ; 1 John 5:19 ; John 14:30). I find it irritating that this huge lie that my loving God tortures people for eternity for less that one century of badness continues to be perpetuated.