You won’t find the word ‘hell’ anywhere in the most ancient copies of the Bible. That’s because hell is an English word, and the Bible was, well, not written in English. Instead of ‘hell’, the original languages of Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) contain a perplexing variety of terms like sheol, hades, geenna, krisis, abysson (or ‘abyss’), and the ultra-rare tartaros.
Our attention for today is on the term geenna (which, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll be referring to by the more commonly known Latin word ‘gehenna’). There are a few reasons for this interest in gehenna. Most significantly, in modern versions of the Christian Bible (such as the RSV, NRSV, NIV, ESV, and so on), gehenna is virtually the only word still translated into English as ‘hell’ (the other one is tartaros, which is basically irrelevant because 1. it only appears once in the entire Bible; 2. it has barely any impact on modern Christianity; and 3. it’s easy enough to replace with the term ‘abyss’ — the supernatural demonic prison — by comparing the book of 2 Peter with other Christian sources of the time).
Gehenna hasn’t always been referred to as ‘hell’. The replacement of ‘gehenna’ with ‘hell’ first emerged in the fourteenth century, thanks to the influential translator John Wycliffe. This decision was adopted in the immensely popular 1611 King James Version of the Bible. In the process, gehenna was roped together with unrelated terms like sheol, hades, and tartaros. Modern Bibles have moved away from translating sheol and hades as ‘hell’; not so, however, with gehenna. Perhaps this is because the concept of hell has become so central to many expressions of present-day Christianity — if we stopped translating ‘gehenna’ as ‘hell’, the word ‘hell’ would essentially disappear from the Bible altogether!
Jesus regularly used the term gehenna (or, more accurately, its Hebrew equivalent ge hinnom) in his teachings — more often, in fact, than sheol-hades (discussion on sheol-hades will, unfortunately, have to wait for another time). This is best seen in the books of Matthew (where ge hinnom appears seven times) and Mark (where it appears three times). Despite Jesus’ preference for the word gehenna (or, alternatively, Matthew and Mark’s preference for the concept), it seems as though Christians in the late first century were less interested in the term — elsewhere in the New Testament, the word gehenna appears only twice (once in Luke and once in James).
The word gehenna has its origins in the Hebrew phrase ge hinnom. ‘Ge hinnom‘ itself was the abbreviated form of the Hebrew gei ben-hinnom (which literally translates to “the valley of the son/sons of Hinnom”, an actual geographical location in Jerusalem). This is unsurprising: Jesus regularly used notorious geographical locations like Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as Tyre and Sidon, to vividly pronounce warnings of disaster against his fellow Jews. Why, then, did he use gei ben-hinnom in his teachings? What would Jesus’ Jewish audience have understood by this reference? The answers lie in the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah.
The first clue comes from Mark 9:42-49. Here, Mark records a certain teaching of Jesus: “… it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into [ge hinnom], where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” This is a direct allusion to Isaiah 66:24, the final verse in the entire book of Isaiah. Throughout the book of Isaiah, Jews of the time had been warned of the coming warfare and disasters that would be the consequence of their allegedly evil behaviour. Isaiah 66:5-24 promised that, despite this devastation, Jews who honoured God would survive, and the Jewish identity would continue. People from other countries would even join their nation. The remnants of the Jewish population would “go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against [God]”. The curse that follows, about how “their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh”, is standard prophetic hyperbole (which in itself is a topic for another time). Behind the bombastic language, the picture is straightforward: God’s enemies (including many Jews) would be killed through disaster and war. Surviving Jews would witness the death toll (presumably including many decaying and burnt corpses) and curse the dead.
Isaiah 66:24 is a helpful start, but it is the book of Jeremiah that provides the ultimate information needed. Jesus’ use of ge hinnom as a geographical location comes directly from Jeremiah 7:30-34 and 19:1-15. In these passages, the depiction of gei ben-hinnom is horrifying. It is a “high place”, a religious altar, where members of the Jewish nation (according to Jeremiah) sacrificed their children to a pagan god, Baal. Because of this outrage, God (via Jeremiah) promised that gei ben-hinnom would become gei haregah, the “valley of slaughter”. War would come against the nation. In this darkly ironic prophecy, a disastrous siege would force Jews to cannibalise their own children. Gei ben-hinnom would become a burial site, overflowing with dead bodies — no longer the bodies of sacrificed children, but rather the bodies of disgracefully ungodly Jews, slain by the invading army. Jerusalem would become an accursed wasteland.
In Mark 9:42-49 and Matthew 18:6-9, Jesus presents ge hinnom as the opposite to ‘entering life’. ‘Entering life’, while ambiguous, does fit with emerging Jewish beliefs and language about a future resurrection (yet another topic for another time). If this is the case, then Jesus used ge hinnom — a landscape littered with corpses — as a vivid metaphor for the utter destruction and non-existence that God’s judgment would bring about in the afterlife. Alternatively, Jesus might have used ge hinnom in a flexible sense, sometimes using it to teach about God’s judgment in the afterlife, and at other times using it to teach about God’s judgment in the present (that is, the impending military disaster that was to come against Jerusalem). Matthew’s frequent use of ge hinnom would certainly make sense in light of the First Jewish-Roman War (AD 66-73), in which the Roman army killed massive numbers of Jews and destroyed the temple of Jerusalem.
If the concept of ge hinnom featured so often in Jesus’ prophetic warnings, why was it more or less abandoned by early Christians? A number of reasons can be speculated. Perhaps, for most Jewish Christians, Sodom and Gomorrah simply held more cultural weight as a synonym for judgment and destruction. Hence, outside of the four Gospels, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is used as a concept in Romans, Revelation, Jude, and 2 Peter, while gehenna appears only in James. Secondly, for non-Jewish Christians, it is possible that none of these Jewish geographical concepts (whether Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, or ge hinnom) held much meaning at all. It makes sense, then, that New Testament writings directed to non-Jewish Christians (or mixed audiences) would use other metaphors and illustrations, ones that non-Jewish audiences could more easily understand.
To summarise: Gehenna, like ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and ‘Tyre and Sidon’, refers to an actual geographical location that was culturally notorious amongst first-century Jews. While Jesus apparently used it quite regularly as a metaphor, many early Christians seemed to favour other concepts when representing judgment and the afterlife. Whether Jesus solely used ge hinnom to refer to God’s judgment in the afterlife, or whether he also used the concept to refer to God’s judgment in the present, is uncertain. Regardless, ge hinnom — a valley associated with slaughter and corpses — implies an afterlife of death and destruction, not one of sustained, continuous punishment. (As an aside, the modern association of ‘ge hinnom’ with a burning garbage dump has been repeatedly debunked as a myth).
The fact that modern English versions of the Christian Bible continue to translate geenna as ‘hell’ is as baffling as it is incorrect (especially since sheol and hades are both nowadays rarely translated as ‘hell’). The only appropriate translations of geenna into English are, in my opinion, ‘Geenna’, ‘Gehenna’, ‘Ge Hinnom’, or ‘the Valley of Hinnom’, capitalised proper nouns that indicate an actual geographical place-name.
Now, any discussion of gehenna and the book of Matthew would by no means be complete without consideration of Matthew 25:31-46, one of the central texts for many Christians’ understanding of hell. Such analysis, however, will — I’m sorry to say — have to wait for another time.
This is a modified excerpt from my as-yet-unreleased book, Decoding Gehenna: Hell and the Afterlife in the West. Subscribe or Follow Me for updates and more sneak-peek excerpts!
