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The Highway to Hinnom | Hell – Part 2


If you go back to your semi decent translation of the Bible, then in the Old Testament you will find Sheol, and in the New Testament you will find Hades, but you’ll also find Hell making an appearance. The ‘Hell’ that we see printed in our Bibles, is actually the word ‘Gehenna’ in the original Greek texts. It’s a name which doesn’t really mean anything to most Christians, but to first century Christians and Jews, it would have been loaded with significance. Gehenna comes from the Hebrew word ‘Gehinnom’, which means ‘Valley of Hinnom’.

 

The Valley of Hinnom was a significant place in Jewish history, because it was where the people of God, including some of the kings of Judah, sacrificed their children as burnt offerings to the god, Baal. As a result of their actions, God proclaimed that the Valley of Hinnom would be known as the ‘Valley of Slaughter’, and that the enemies of God’s people would attack them and fill the valley with their corpses. As a result of all this, the Valley of Hinnom gained a certain reputation, and if you had mentioned it to someone in the first century, it would have brought all of this to mind. It is believed that following this, Gehenna eventually became the location of Jerusalem’s city rubbish dump, and the place where all its waste was burned. Gehenna was located on the southeast side of Jerusalem, and the prevailing winds would blow away from the city, which is why it is thought the valley became the city dump. As well as the waste and sewage from the city going there, it was also believed that the dead animals from the temple sacrifices were thrown there to rot, where they were eaten by worms and maggots. So, on top of it being a historically significant place, Gehenna was also a physically disgusting place which smelled of sewage, burning rubbish, rotten carcasses, plus it was full of disease and maggots.

 

There is some disagreement over this view, which comes from David Kimhi, who was a 12th Century Rabbi. Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck, who were early 20th century scholars, contested this view, stating that there wasn’t been any evidence to suggest this theory was correct, although many theologians still agree with Kimhi’s view. I suppose time will tell if David Kimhi was right or not.

 

Gehenna has another interesting link which gives us an idea of how people felt about it. In Acts 1, we read an account of how Judas Iscariot took the money he was given to betray Jesus, and he bought a field. We are told that he died in that field, that his body burst open and his guts spilled out. Everyone heard about this, and the field became known as ‘Akeldama’, which means ‘Field of Blood’, and this field was located in the Valley of Hinnom. Matthew 27 offers a slightly different account, and explains that Judas regretted betraying Jesus and returned the money he had been given to the chief priests, and they used it to buy a piece of land in the Valley of Hinnom, which was used as a burial site for foreigners, which was known as the Field of Blood. This indicates how people thought of the Valley of Hinnom, and I can’t help thinking there is something poetic about priests using blood money to buy real estate in Gehenna, or that Judas died in Gehenna in such a shocking way.

 

So, Gehenna was significant as an actual location in Jerusalem, but it also gained a metaphysical significance, as a place where people would be punished when they died. We see this view in the New Testament, and in other writings from around that time, but the idea of a metaphysical Gehenna only developed about six hundred years before the birth of Jesus. We know this because Gehenna is mentioned extensively in the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud was first compiled in around 200 CE, and contains views on the scriptures, and on the Oral Torah, which were passed down through rabbinic tradition. This tradition is said to go back to the time of Moses, but it became popular about five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, and about a hundred years after the human sacrifices took place in the Valley of Hinnom. We know that the idea of a metaphysical Gehenna followed those events, because before then, Hinnom was just a standard, run of the mill valley. See Joshua 15:8 and 18:16

 

The Talmud contains views of Gehenna which would have been known to Jesus, because it is likely that Jesus was a schooled rabbi, or at the very least, he was taught by rabbis and heard their teachings, as was the custom for Jewish boys at that time.

 

Some of the rabbinic views from the Talmud are that:

 

·       Gehenna was created before the world was created.

·       Wholly wicked people will immediately be written and sealed for Gehenna.

·       The judgment of the wicked in Gehenna lasts for twelve months and this is enough time for their sin to be atoned for.

·       Everyone will ascend from Gehenna apart from three sets of people; adulterers, people who humiliate others, and people who called others derogatory names.

·       Anyone who follows the counsel of his wife descends into Gehenna.

·       There is no Gehenna in the World to Come.

 

 

The Talmud shows a varied understanding of post death punishment and atonement. There are hundreds of references to Gehenna and many different thoughts around it. In most cases, Gehenna is separate from Sheol, which itself is also mentioned hundreds of times, and Hades which is referenced, although to a lesser extent. Whilst the Talmud presents some of the different views of Gehenna, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus held those same views. He may have done, but that all comes down to how you interpret the words of Jesus in the gospels, which can be, and has been debated extensively. However, the views of the Talmud do provide an important context and explain how people generally viewed the idea of a metaphysical Gehenna and post death punishment, and also how Jesus interacted with people who would have held those beliefs.

 

We could look at how Jesus speaks about Gehenna in the gospels, and study the different ways that the Bible speaks about it, and consider the different interpretations of the texts and what they mean, but that would involve a much more in-depth study, which isn’t for now. The main thing I wanted to do is show you that the concept we have of Hell is not as simple as we think, and it’s important for us to understand that it’s complicated.

 

If we want to take the Bible seriously, then we have to acknowledge the complexity of Hell. We can’t just pass off Sheol, Hades and Gehenna, and say they are all the same, because the Bible doesn’t talk about them in that way, and Jesus and the people he spoke to, didn’t understand them in that way either.

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music

 

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