WHAT IS HELL? Welcome to Hell: “Gehenna”

Part Four: “Gehenna. " A layman has been poking around inside the scriptures for a peek preview inside Gehenna, or Hell. What he found was a bad odor. Hell stinks! It's a stinky, smoke-filled place. But it isn't the Hell many people conceive of.


One of several words translated as "Hell" in the King James Version of the Bible, Gehenna reveals what may be a big surprise for many people. Far from being the place of eternal punishment so many of us have imagined, Gehenna was the city dump! This is both good and bad news of course.

The bad news: The place was a stench, and the foul-smelling fires burned twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps devout Jews and Christians would take their kids by for drive-by viewing via ox cart? I can hear their voices now:  "That's where sinners end up, Sonny, so keep your nose clean."

The good news (if you could call it that): This literal hell probably did eventually consume/decompose its occupants. The flames and the worms would eventually do their work, and the criminals caste into Gehenna probably were (normally) already dead, so chances are they did not have to watch themselves and their cohorts enduring the flames.


Gehenna has been called “the Jewish hell or purgatory,” but this was not always so. The name Gehenna originally came from a garbage dump outside Jerusalem, in the a place called the Hinnom Gulch. Literally it means “the valley of Hinnom’s son.” (Source, Wikipedia).

Also according to Wikipedia: Gehenna “is first mentioned in Joshua 15:8 as a deep, narrow ravine at the foot of the walls of Jerusalem where refuse was burned."

At that time, the word apparently held none of the present-day connotations of eternal punishment in an afterlife. The later association of Gehenna with judgment and eternal punishment probably derives from the tradition that says the Canaanites sacrificed children to their god, Moloch, in this place.

It is easy to appreciate the symbolic justice of putting the garbage dump on the very site where the god Moloch had been worshipped and where children had been offered in sacrifice to an insatiable, blood-thirsty, false deity. And kitchen garbage was not the only refuse that burned in Gehenna. Dead animals (equivalent of today’s “road kill”) likely were thrown/burned there, as was other loathsome refuse, including, apparently, the bodies of criminals.

However, the result was that the families of criminals were punished along with the criminals: They suffered the indignity of having their loved ones disposed of in this loathsome manner, rather than receiving a proper, religious, burial. Thus the social outcasts, even after their execution, went on heaping additional social disgrace upon the living; I suppose the practice resulted from some perverse, displaced "repayment" for the sins of the deceased.

Gradually, as Judaism evolved, the notion of an afterlife came into being, but some sources say it was not really until after AD 70 (denoting the destruction of Israel), that Rabbinic Jews had embraced a fully-developed notion of the afterlife. Understandably, parents admonished their children by reminding them that criminals would suffer the fate of being thrown into Hell/Gehenna. And it is equally understandable that Gehenna became “metaphorically identified with the entrance to the underworld of punishment in the afterlife.” (Quote source: Wikipedia)

Thus, a literal place (the city dump) became a metaphor for the entrance into a gloomy place of punishment in the afterlife.

Quote from Wikipedia:

“Gehenna (or gehenom or gehinom (גהינום)) is the Jewish hell or purgatory. It has sometimes been described as a final punishment for the wicked and sometimes as a spiritual forge in which souls are purified after death. In English, Jews commonly use the term "hell" in place of "gehenna." The name derived from the burning garbage dump near Jerusalem (the Hinnom gulch), metaphorically identified with the entrance to the underworld of punishment in the afterlife.

“Gehenna also appears in the New Testament and in early Christian writing to represent the place where evil will be destroyed. It lends its name to Islam's hell, Jahannam.

“In both Rabbinical Jewish and Christian writing, Gehenna as a destination of the wicked, is different from Tartarus (deepest sheol) and from hades (sheol) the abode of all the dead. In some accounts, the fiery punishment of Gehenna takes place in one level or section of hades.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Parts 1-4 in review: Three words translated “hell” or “Hell” have been covered briefly. They are Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna. All three are different concepts:

1. Sheol -- minus the uniquely Jewish connotations -- is equivalent to “the grave” in Hebrew and English;
2. Hades -- minus the connotations of Greek pantheon worship -- is equivalent to “the grave” in Greek and in English.
3. Gehenna -- refers to the garbage dump outside Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom. None of the above necessarily imply eternal torment of any person in a literal underworld, although that notion had been developing at the time of Christ.

A more in-depth study would reveal that the concepts of the afterlife developed gradually, and that in the years surrounding the advent of Jesus Christ, a fair amount of borrowing/sharing of ideas went on between Jewish and Greek thinkers as they went about trying to develop concepts of life beyond the grave. Far from being “revelations” dumped on earth in discrete clumps as some people seem to believe, the various notions of hell/Hell resulted from a long process of social evolution.
So, see you in hell, buddy.
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 P.S. Did you know that Frank Ellsworth Lockwood is also the author of the novel, "Captains All"? If you like, you can pre-view or purchase the book here:

https://www.createspace.com/4133264