THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HELL is covered in the latest Philologos column in The Forward. Excerpt:

In ancient rabbinic Judaism, which could cite in its support the biblical phrase ha-shamayim u/shmey ha-shamayim, “the heaven and the heavens of the heaven,” these layers were thought to be seven — a number whose sacred status goes back to the Bible, too. (Think of the seven days of creation, the seventh or Sabbath day, the seven branches of the menorah, etc.) Most likely, this sacredness was linked from the outset to the concept of a sevenfold heaven, which in turn derived from the seven brightest and most independent heavenly bodies: the sun, moon and five visible planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Each of the heavens associated with one of these bodies had its own name in rabbinic literature, as did each of the seven hells. The latter were, using synonyms for the underworld taken from the Bible: She’ol, Avadon, Gehinom, Duma, Tsalmavet, Eretz-Taḥtit and Eretz-Neshi’h.

There is Jewish literature from the Middle Ages that enumerates the inhabitants and punishments of every one of these “houses” of hell, as they are called there, each of which has its own tribunal of judges and is so large that it would take 300 years to walk to one end of it from the other. (Assuming that a man can walk 30 miles a day, this would come to roughly 23 million miles for the entirety of hell.) All seven, according to rabbinic tradition, were glimpsed in a vision by the prophet Isaiah. Thus, we are told, “When Isaiah entered the first house, he saw two men carrying jars of water on their shoulders and emptying them again and again into a pit that never filled. ‘Tell me their secret,’ he said to God. ‘These,’ the Holy Spirit answered him, ‘are the men who coveted what belonged to others and are now paying the price for it.’” The second “house” of hell is for the gossips and slanderers, who are hung from their tongues. In the third are the adulterers, who are suspended from their sexual organs, and so on and so forth.

The seven levels of hell (and the corresponding seven levels of heaven) are dealt with in detail in some of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts being translated for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project.