The Greek word gehenna appears in the New Testament twelve times, eleven of which are spoken by Jesus in the synoptic gospels (the exception is James 3.6).* Although many English bibles translate gehenna as "hell," the Greek word refers to an actual geographical location: the Valley (or "Ravine") of Himmon. The English gehenna derived from the Greek ge'enna, which is itself derived from the Aramaic gehanna that is equivalent to the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, literally "Valley [or Ravine] of Himmon." This ravine lie southwest of Jerusalem, and it had a checkered (and eerie) history. The valley made itself into the annals of scripture as the place where idolatrous Israelites sacrificed their children to Moloch, a god of the Ammonites. Both Ahaz and Manasseh (two awful Israelite kings) instituted children sacrifice on altars erected in the ravine; the children would be set ablaze and burn as a gift to Moloch. This lasted until the reign of King Josiah, who put a stop to the child sacrifice and ushered in religious reform, purging the nation of its idolatry. The prophet Jeremiah, writing long after Ahaz and Manasseh, declared that the ravine would be called the Valley of Slaughter under God's judgment (Jer 7.32-33). He warns the people of Jerusalem that when the Babylonians came to their city, the bodies of the dead would be buried in the Valley of Hinnom because there would be no room for burial within the city walls; he prophesied that the corpses of the dead would become food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth, and none will frighten them away. (Jer 7.33; cf. 19.7). Jeremiah further warned that God would make the encircled city of Jerusalem a horror, a thing to be hissed at. Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its wounds. (19.8) Thus Jeremiah prophesied that Jerusalem itself would be made like Gehenna. According to tradition, in the days of the New Testament, this Valley of Hinnom--despised because of its black history--became the city's garbage dump, so that the "flames" and "worms" spoken of by Jesus echo the reality of the garbage dump. It's more likely that Jesus' use of those judgment motifs is his echoing of Isaiah 66.24, where Isaiah says that the corpses of those who rebelled against God would be subjected to a worm that shall not die and a fire that shall not be quenched; the prophet Isaiah, of course, isn't talking about postmortem judgment but about what it will look like when God judges, within history, the nation of Israel. His judgment is marked by corpses being consumed by worms and flames.
This ought to alert us, at the least, to be wary in interpreting Jesus' words about gehenna literally. It is one interpretive jump to make his references to gehenna references to postmortem hell; it is quite another jump to make his descriptions of gehenna literal, so that those in postmortem hell really are subjected to undying worms and undying flames. While I believe the first interpretive jump is valid (though by no means demanded), the second runs against the very nature of language in first-century Judaism. Westerners, indebted to rationalistic Enlightenment thinking and living in an extension of Hellenization, tend to come to the scriptures with a literal eye. Because we are literalists, we cannot help but read the Bible in this way, and sometimes it doesn't even cross our mind to ask if first-century Jews or Greeks would've approached the scriptures as we do. The Bible is chocked full of symbolic and figurative language that seeks to convey the essence of something without giving extrinsic details about it. This, I believe, is what we find in Jesus' descriptions of gehenna (and in other descriptions not associated with gehenna, such as the "weeping and gnashing of teeth"). We are not sworn to take Jesus' language as literal descriptors of postmortem judgment; nor are we sworn to take his references to gehenna as symbolic of postmortem judgment.
Recently, many scholars (such as my pal Tom Wright) have interpreted the gehenna texts in a different light. Because gehenna is an actual place and not a generic "hell", it follows that Jesus may have actually been talking about the geographical Valley of Hinnom. This train-of-thought builds upon the assumption that Jesus acted in the praxis of a prophet in line with both Jeremiah and Isaiah; as both Jeremiah and Isaiah warned the Jews of God's coming divine judgment on them and Jerusalem, so, too, Jesus is warning the Jews of his day of God's coming divine judgment on them and Jerusalem. Jeremiah and Isaiah saw their bitter prophecies come to pass with the Babylonian sacking of the city around 586 B.C.; Jesus' warnings came to pass with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. Jesus' warnings about gehenna, then, aren't to be taken as Jesus warning about the "final state" of the damned; rather, Jesus' message was political. "Unless [the Jewish revolutionaries] turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom on their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries... whose resources they covet or whose strategic location they are anxious to guard. Rome would turn Jerusalem into a hideous, stinking extension of its own smouldering rubbish heap." (from N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope) Thus Jesus' language about "fire" and "worms" isn't to describe (what Wright would call) our Medieval picture of hell, but, rather, it serves as a reference to both the prophet Isaiah (and by proxy, Jeremiah) and the actual nature of gehenna as a smoldering garbage dump. Jesus is a prophet like Isaiah and Jeremiah, calling the people of Israel to a sort of national repentance, to embrace his way of peace rather than of war, so that they may not suffer the coming wrath of God. The Jewish historian Josephus speaks of how the Romans, after they sacked Jerusalem, were forced to throw bodies over the walls of the city because there was no room for them behind the walls. Just as the Babylonians filled the Valley of Hinnom with corpses, so the Romans did, too. Furthermore, the Tenth Roman Legion made good use of the geographical gehenna as a crematory.
This recent take on Jesus' use of gehenna has several points in its favor. It appreciates the prophetic praxis of Jesus, and it makes sense of the gehenna texts within the wider scope of Jesus' challenges and warnings to his contemporaries; the synoptic tradition is chocked full of Jesus' warnings to his contemporaries and his prophecies about the coming fall of Jerusalem, and interpreting the gehenna texts within this light makes sense of the overall narrative. As far as a theory goes, it is coherent, it is simple, and it sheds light on wider subjects in the synoptic tradition. The problems I have with it are three-fold:
(1) There is no evidence for gehenna being a garbage dump. The idea that gehenna was constantly afire with the rubbish of society comes from Rabbi David Kimhi's commentary on Psalm 27. He writes, Gehenna is a repugnant place, into which filth and cadavers are thrown, and in which fires perpetually burn in order to consume the filth and bones; on which account, by analogy, the [judgment] of the wicked is called 'Gehenna.' Kimhi wrote this around A.D. 1200 (that's over a millennium after the days of the New Testament), and his testimony is corroborated neither by other primary sources nor by archaeological evidence. If the Valley of Hinnom were a garbage dump, we would expect to find archaeological evidence of that fact; a garbage dump in the Valley of Kidron (on the eastern side of the city) gives archaeological evidence of being a garbage dump while the Valley of Hinnom does not. The idea that Gehenna was a garbage dump has garnered support, so that the majority of scholars repeat the mantra despite the lack of evidence. While gehenna may indeed have been a garbage dump, that's nothing more than speculation.
(2) Calling into question gehenna's identity as a garbage dump doesn't harm the recent theory regarding Jesus' use of gehenna; it simply means that when Jesus speaks of the worm that doesn't die and the flames that will not be quenched, he isn't pointing to a literal description of gehenna but echoing (as I've already said) Isaiah 66. Jesus also echoes a wide variety of intertestamental literature which portrays gehenna precisely as the place of God's coming eschatological judgment. In other words, Jesus' use of symbolic worms and fire echoes not only the prophet Isaiah but a common Jewish thought, that of gehenna as a living metaphor for the final judgment of the wicked.
(3) The biggest weakness in the argument that Jesus was talking about historical judgment within time rather than apocalyptic judgment at the end of time is that Jesus doesn't do something original with gehenna; rather, he builds upon those who have come before him. If we are to argue that Jesus is solely referencing the coming fall of Jerusalem, we must admit that he does so in discontinuity with those who come before him; discontinuity can be as telling as continuity, but discontinuity without any explanation regarding the discontinuity is questionable at best. It would make more sense that Jesus, in the same vein-of-thought as many of his predecessors and contemporaries, understood gehenna to be a living metaphor for the final judgment of the wicked. By the time of the intertestamental period (the 400-odd years between Malachi and Matthew), the phrase gehenna was widely used as a metaphor for eternal damnation. Rather tellingly, the Targums (the Aramaic paraphrase translation of the Hebrew Bible) add the term Gehinnom to verses that (as they saw it) spoke of the resurrection, the judgment, and the fate of the wicked. An example is Isaiah 66.24; Jesus quotes the Targums with his addition of Gehenna to the text, an addition that the Targums added but which is absent in the original Hebrew scriptures. Jesus, speaking at the tail-end of the intertestamental period, uses the phrase gehenna without explaining his meaning; it makes sense that he doesn't explain the meaning because those to whom he's talking fully understand what gehenna is all about. Some Jews took the symbolic imagery of gehenna and interpreted it as referring to the actual geographical location, so that the Valley of Hinnom itself would be consumed by fire; but this view was minor and not widely held. Although there are shades and variations of Jewish understandings of gehenna (and locating Jesus on the spectrum isn't the point of this post), the common understanding is that gehenna was a living metaphor for the judgment of the wicked. In other words, it was a living metaphor for what we might call hell.
This is why generations upon generations of Christians have interpreted gehenna as a reference to hell. In the later rabbinical writings that came after Jesus, Jewish rabbis speak of gehenna in the context of hell; this bolsters the evidence that many Jews both before and after Jesus saw gehenna as a type of that which was to come. St. James, in 3.6, uses the word gehenna; it makes more sense that he is speaking of hell rather than the actual geographical location, and this indicates (though not definitively) that the early Jewish Christians, to whom James wrote, understood gehenna as a signpost to eternal damnation. The apostolic fathers used imagery reminiscent of Jesus' language about gehenna to write about hell. This implies (but not definitively) that the early church understood the synoptic tradition of gehenna to refer to hell. One could ask, "Why did gehenna develop such an association?" The answer, I believe, goes back to what took place there during the days of the kings Ahaz and Manasseh: the Valley of Hinnom was a place of idolatry, and an idolatry of the worst sort. The vile and murderous things done in the valley lived on in Jewish memory and came to take on an otherworldly significance. The Talmud, a collection of Jewish writings composed between A.D. 200 and A.D. 500, speaks of gehenna as the location of hell, accessible by "gates" to the underworld. These later declarations may give us a glimpse at why gehenna became synonymous with hell: the living memory of what took place at the geographical Valley of Hinnom turned gehenna into an entrance to the underworld, over which God was sovereign. While this argument may seem dubious to some, we should at least admit it is better than the argument that gehenna was a garbage dump; after all, the writings of the Talmud predate Rabbi Kimhi by several hundred years.
Because archaeological and literary evidence doesn't support the idea that the valley became a sulfurous garbage dump where fires burned Night and Day, the Jewish motif of fire probably derives from the practice of burning sons and daughters as sacrifices to Moloch; as the Jews came to speak of gehenna as a living metaphor for the fate of the wicked, the fires took on new significance: as Ahaz and Manasseh burned their children alive, so, too, the wicked will suffer a similar fate. The symbolic use of fire for purging, purification, and judgment stretches through the Old Testament to the later Jewish writers. Jewish eschatology about the final states frequently used gehenna as a living metaphor for what awaited those who rebelled against God or refused to submit to Him as Creator. Taking all this together, we have good reason to suppose that Jesus, when speaking of gehenna, was speaking of what we would call "hell"--but we must note that his language is symbolic rather than literal, and deducing what hell is like from these texts is an exercise of the imagination and nothing more.
How, then, does the recent argument about Jesus' warnings of gehenna being geared towards Jewish revolutionaries, and in content referring to the fate of Jerusalem under the Romans rather than the fate of wicked humanity under the wrath of God, fare? Here I'm not so sure. You may have expected me to come down on one side of the fence or the other; indeed, it seemed that I was seeking to demolish the perspectives of Wright, among others. The truth of the matter, however, is that I simply don't know where I stand; I'm certainly no Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. It is possible, of course, that Jesus prophesied in the vein of Isaiah and Jeremiah while not giving credence to the intertestamental use of gehenna; it is possible, too, that Jesus meant both the final judgment and the anticipation of that final judgment that would come through fallen masonry and Roman swords. It is possible, too, that context is to be our guide, and Jesus' meaning regarding gehenna in one text may be political while, in another, it is "spiritual" (recognizing, of course, that the western dichotomy between religion and politics would've been incomprehensible, and anathema, to Jews of Jesus' day). Like I said: I don't know where I stand on gehenna (much less on the subject of hell!), but this is good Food for Thought.
* The synoptic texts for Gehenna are Matthew 5.22, 29, 30; 10.28; 18.9; 23.15, 33; Mark 9.43, 45, 47; and Luke 12.5.
Because archaeological and literary evidence doesn't support the idea that the valley became a sulfurous garbage dump where fires burned Night and Day, the Jewish motif of fire probably derives from the practice of burning sons and daughters as sacrifices to Moloch; as the Jews came to speak of gehenna as a living metaphor for the fate of the wicked, the fires took on new significance: as Ahaz and Manasseh burned their children alive, so, too, the wicked will suffer a similar fate. The symbolic use of fire for purging, purification, and judgment stretches through the Old Testament to the later Jewish writers. Jewish eschatology about the final states frequently used gehenna as a living metaphor for what awaited those who rebelled against God or refused to submit to Him as Creator. Taking all this together, we have good reason to suppose that Jesus, when speaking of gehenna, was speaking of what we would call "hell"--but we must note that his language is symbolic rather than literal, and deducing what hell is like from these texts is an exercise of the imagination and nothing more.
How, then, does the recent argument about Jesus' warnings of gehenna being geared towards Jewish revolutionaries, and in content referring to the fate of Jerusalem under the Romans rather than the fate of wicked humanity under the wrath of God, fare? Here I'm not so sure. You may have expected me to come down on one side of the fence or the other; indeed, it seemed that I was seeking to demolish the perspectives of Wright, among others. The truth of the matter, however, is that I simply don't know where I stand; I'm certainly no Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. It is possible, of course, that Jesus prophesied in the vein of Isaiah and Jeremiah while not giving credence to the intertestamental use of gehenna; it is possible, too, that Jesus meant both the final judgment and the anticipation of that final judgment that would come through fallen masonry and Roman swords. It is possible, too, that context is to be our guide, and Jesus' meaning regarding gehenna in one text may be political while, in another, it is "spiritual" (recognizing, of course, that the western dichotomy between religion and politics would've been incomprehensible, and anathema, to Jews of Jesus' day). Like I said: I don't know where I stand on gehenna (much less on the subject of hell!), but this is good Food for Thought.
* The synoptic texts for Gehenna are Matthew 5.22, 29, 30; 10.28; 18.9; 23.15, 33; Mark 9.43, 45, 47; and Luke 12.5.
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