Mark 9:43
Mark 9:4343If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two hands and go into hell, into the unquenchable fire.
The Watchtower reads Gehenna in as a symbol of complete destruction — the Hinnom Valley outside Jerusalem, used as a rubbish dump in Old Testament times. The "fire that cannot be put out" is taken as describing the irreversible finality of annihilation rather than as describing ongoing conscious punishment. The amputation imagery is read as urgent warning against any sin that would lead to eternal destruction at Armageddon — but the destruction itself is non-existence, not sustained suffering.
Read with v. 48 as a single warning. "The fire that cannot be put out" — asbestos pyr — describes a fire that does not go out, not a fire that consumed and finished its work. Combined with v. 48's "where the maggot does not die" (Greek skōlēx), the language describes ongoing post-mortem suffering, not annihilation. A rubbish-dump fire at Hinnom went out; Jesus's fire does not. Pair with (everlasting punishment in grammatical parallel with everlasting life) and ("the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever, and they have no rest day or night"). The Watchtower's annihilation reading collapses against Jesus's own description of an unquenched fire and undying worm.
The NWT transliterates Geenna as "Gehenna" rather than rendering "hell" as standard English translations do. The transliteration is technically defensible — Gehenna literally is the Valley of Hinnom — but it is doctrinally load-bearing for the JW system because it lets Watchtower commentary recast the word as a synonym for the Hinnom rubbish dump rather than as the place of conscious post-mortem punishment that Jesus's hearers understood. In Second Temple Jewish literature (1 Enoch 27, 4 Ezra 7, Sibylline Oracles 4), Gehenna already named the eschatological place of fiery punishment by the first century AD. Standard English translations render "hell" because the word is doing theological work, not geographical work.