It does not say what this judgment entails. It does not say how soon a person will be judged after death. However, these things would almost certainly be ignored by an evangelical who believes in a conscious intermediate state between death and the resurrection of in eternal torture in hell. A non-rationalist could make many assumptions after reading this verse that are not only assumed, which makes them epistemologically invalid already, but that also contradict the plain teaching of the Bible elsewhere. Now, what does Hebrews 9:27 not teach?
To start with, that it says people die once does not exclude them dying more than once, such as in the case of someone like Lazarus of John 11, whom Jesus resurrected, if they were to die again afterward. In no way does it state or do the concepts behind the words logically necessitate that there is strictly one death everyone faces before they are eventually resurrected, an event Hebrews itself mentions in 6:1-2 that is spoken of over and over throughout the Bible [1]. Just like Hebrews 9:27 says nothing about what exactly the criteria are for judgment after one dies, it also says nothing about death itself other than that people die.
Also, this verse does not in any way specify what this judgment consists of. The vast majority of Christians (or "Christians") one will meet out in America, as well as plenty of non-Christians, assert that on Christianity, the wicked/unsaved who die go immediately to a conscious afterlife of punitive suffering. If they are not as stupid as they could be, they might at least distinguish this afterlife from true hell, which no one would be inside right now (Revelation 20:11-15). Everyone goes to Sheol/Hades [2] where there is total unconsciousness (Job 3:11-19, Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Psalm 6:5, and so on). The inhabitants of Hades, or Sheol (Psalm 16:10, Acts 2:27), sleep until their body is restored to life and their mind is restored to awareness (Daniel 12:2).
Hebrews 9:27 does not conflict with any of this. Again, all it says is that people die and judgment in some way follows. It does not say spirits of the dead are consciously brought to God to be judged ahead of the resurrection in Revelation 20. This is consistent with soul sleep until that time, which is what the rest of the Bible teaches. More importantly, Hebrews 9 does not put forth eternal torture in hell, the greatest heresy of church history after theistic irrationalism (the self-refuting philosophy ultimately holding that logical axioms are not inherently true because God is not governed by them). Its judgment is unclarified, and the culmination of punishment in hell as described in other verses is a literal second death that is never revoked (Matthew 10:28, John 3:16), what all sin deserves in a cosmic sense (Romans 1:32, 6:23).
None of these details are remotely addressed in Hebrews 9:27. I have still heard this verse discussed as support or "proof" that the Bible teaches everything from an immediate afterlife experienced before the resurrection, while other people on Earth live on simultaneously, to eternal conscious torment for all the unsaved. Yes, Hebrews 9:27 is about death and judgment, but the Bible does not present an immediate afterlife of torture or an afterlife of endless torture for dead humans at any point in the eschatological timeline. To discover what it does affirm, one would have to look outside of Hebrews altogether and either shed or avoid assumptions respectively.
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