Is there Biblical support for the concept of Hell?

The Luke story says Hades in Greek, not Hell.

There are three words in the Bible that are commonly translated as “Hell” and none of them refer to the Christian concept of a place of eternal torment. Those words are:

  1. Sheol. A Jewish concept of an underworld simolar to the Greek Hades. Tjis was a place where everyone went, not just bad people and it was not regarded as permanent. It was only sort of a holding tank for the dead until the day of judgement…the day that all the dead would be physically resurrected and judged. After Israel was occupied by Greeks, it began to acquire some Greek ideas about punishment/reward in Sheol. That influence manifested itself in the idea that Sheol was divided into a good part (called the "side (or bosom) of Abraham) and a bad part where bad people may have been punshed. But this punishment was not eternal. All people good and bad were to be resurrected for a day of judgement. At that time, good people would get eternal life and the bad people would be annihilated.

  2. Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnon, a real valley outside of Jerusalem which was used as a garbage dump and a disposal site for the carcasses of animals along with (sometimes) the bodies of criminals. People burned fires more or less continuously there in an attempt to control the stench. Gehenna was also believed to have been a site of human sacrifice by ancient Canaanites and so was basically considered to be forsaken by God. Gehenna eventually came to be a symbol for ignoble death, and a figurative site for where bad people would be annihilated on judgement day (that’s annihilated, not tortured). Gehenna is a word that Jesus uses several times in Matthew and which often gets translated as “Hell.”

Hades, the Greek underworld, as cited above in Luke. In the New Testament (which was written in Greek) Hades basically amounts to a Greek translation of Sheol.

The Christian concept of Hell as a place of eternal, conscious torment, is not in the Bible