Hell in Christian doctrine is the state or place of final, definitive separation from God, reserved in most traditional accounts for those who die unrepentant or outside saving grace, and it draws its scriptural language from a range of New Testament terms, including Gehenna, a reference to a valley outside Jerusalem historically associated with refuse and, earlier, child sacrifice, which became a byword for judgment, and Hades, the Greek term for the underworld generally, used more loosely in some passages for an intermediate state of the dead.
Christian theologians have long debated the nature of Hell's suffering, with traditional accounts describing literal, eternal conscious torment, others describing it as the natural and terrible consequence of a soul's final, self-chosen separation from the only source of ultimate good, and a minority tradition, including some early Church figures and a growing number of modern theologians, arguing for eventual annihilation or even universal reconciliation instead of unending torment, making Hell one of the most actively contested points of doctrine within Christianity rather than a settled, uniform teaching. Dante's Inferno gave the doctrine its most influential literary elaboration, organising Hell into structured circles of specific punishment, though this remains a work of theological poetry rather than a claim of official Church doctrine in the detail it supplies.