In religion, fable, and lore, hell AKA hellfire or Fire (proper name: Gehenna in Hebrew and Jahannam in Arabic) is an afterlife location in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, often torture, as eternal punishment after death. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as eternal destinations, the biggest examples of which are and Islam, whereas religions with reincarnation usually depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations, as is the case in the dharmic religions. Religions typically locate hell in another dimension or under Earth's surface. Other afterlife destinations include Heaven, Paradise, Purgatory, Limbo, and the underworld.
Other religions, which do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward, merely describe an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place that is located under the surface of Earth (for example, see Kur, Hades, and Sheol). Such places are sometimes equated with the English word hell, though a more correct translation would be "underworld" or "world of the dead". The ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, and Finnic religions include entrances to the underworld from the land of the living.
In some translations of the Bible and the Quran, the word “hell” is sometimes mistakenly used in the place of "earth” because there are seven gates in the MENA hell, and each earth of the seven is also an underworld of its own in Sumero-Akkadian myth.