Gehenna, this is the first appearance of this word in the New Testament, gehenna is the Greek word Jesus uses, it’s consistently translated as hell, but hell is not entirely helpful, because the word hell has had attached to it lots of meanings and associations that have come from later developments about this topic in church history. But what did Jesus mean, because gehenna is not even a Greek word, it’s a Hebrew word spelled with Greek letters. The Hebrew phrase gehenna, it refers to an actual valley and if you go and visit Jerusalem, there’s still the valley on the southwest corner of the city, it is still called by this name today. The key is something happened in this valley to turn it into an image or a symbol that Jesus uses as one of his primary images to talk about Divine justice, the ultimate Divine justice that will make all things right and right all wrongs that have been done in human history.
This Valley and the events that happened in the valley in Israelite and Jewish memory, provided this valley to become a symbol that Jesus used to talk about the day and the time when God will right all wrongs and when every wrongdoing will have its just consequence. The urban legend that perpetuated for centuries was that this was Jerusalem’s trash dump, where people dumped their trash over the city walls and it was burned. In medieval Jerusalem that valley was a trash dump, but during Jesus’ time, there’s absolutely no evidence for that, because all of the evidence for the trash dump outside of Jerusalem comes the 13th century AD and later, so what is the right story that we should attach to this valley that makes it an image of God justice?
What happened in the valley, these events are described in the book of Kings and the book of Chronicles and what we’re told in 2 Chronicles 28:1-5, when Ahaz was 20 years old, he became king, he did not do right in the sight of the Lord, he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel up north and he made molten images for the gods of Baal, moreover he burned incense in the valley of gehenna and he burned his sons in fire according to the abominations of the nations the Lord had driven out before the sons of Israel. The first real event that happens in this valley in Israel’s story, is that it becomes the location of a number of shrines, dedicated to local Canaanite gods and the site of child sacrifice to those gods. Then a few generations later 2 Chronicles 33:1-7 tells us that another king of Judah in Jerusalem did this as well, Manasseh built altars for the host of heavens in the two courts of the house of the Lord. In other words, in the temple of Yahweh, he also built shrines and altars to different star deities and also he made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of gehenna. Pass through the fire, it’s a idiom of incinerating an infant on an altar as an offering.
Child sacrifice is viewed with real abhorrence by Israel’s prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible, but this was a practice in the ancient near East in this era. The prophets react to this big time, two prophets who rail against this practice the most are the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Jeremiah is the key figure here, because he lived after Ahaz and he lived in the same time as Manasseh. Jeremiah brings up this horrific practice happening in the valley and he declares God’s judgment on it. This is the meaning that Jesus is drawing upon, Jeremiah 7:30-33, if that’s your mindset, it would be easy in a generation or two to think Yahweh will accept these child sacrifices, because that’s what gods do, but Yahweh makes very clear, he never commanded this, the thought never even entered his mind, didn’t attribute that to me. Jeremiah 7:32, the event that Jeremiah could see was that Babylon was coming and that God was going to hand Jerusalem over to the king of Babylon to destroy it if Israel didn’t turn from it’s ways.
What Jeremiah is describing here, is that this valley where the kings and priests of Jerusalem have been taking the lives, starting fires to take the lives of these innocent children and sacrifice, but God is going to invert this and when the city is taken by Babylon and among the slain will be so many that there won’t be any room for proper burial in the city anymore and so their bodies are going to be tossed into the valley where they started the fires to consume the children, it’s an inversion punishment. The bodies of the people who lit those fires, it’s a form of the law of retribution or of the measure for measure punishment, the place where you lit fires to consume the lives of innocent children will be the place where you meet your death, where your dead body is thrown as a consequence for what you’ve done. That’s the portrait here, you take the lives of others, your life will be taken and you’ll end up landing in the place where you took the lives of others, that’s the portrait here.
Jesus uses this valley and that image to depict the reality that there will be a day of justice, the idea here is the fires of this valley were lit by people, but that God would respond to that grave injustice by bringing justice, the person who digs a pit, will fall into it and so the fires that these leaders lit in gehenna, will be turned back upon them and they will meet their doom in that same valley where they took the lives of others. God is seen as the orchestrator of bringing upon others, the death that they inflicted on the innocent. The role that this image plays, the role that this valley plays, it’s the place where what you did to others is done to you, like an inversion of the golden rule.
The main role of gehenna is this, inversion of our distorted ways of treating each other, so that what I’ve done to other, will be brought back upon me. The nature of gehenna as a symbol of Divine justice, the primary meaning was about Divine justice inverting what was wrong, so that what you’ve done to others will be brought back upon you. That’s why fire is associated gehenna, but those fires were lit by people, the fires that were started to consume the innocent, will turn back and consume the people who started them. Jesus assumes there was an understanding of gehenna apparently that Jesus could just draw upon and he draws upon it for its shock value here, he’s not developing theology of it.
This Valley and the events that happened in the valley in Israelite and Jewish memory, provided this valley to become a symbol that Jesus used to talk about the day and the time when God will right all wrongs and when every wrongdoing will have its just consequence. The urban legend that perpetuated for centuries was that this was Jerusalem’s trash dump, where people dumped their trash over the city walls and it was burned. In medieval Jerusalem that valley was a trash dump, but during Jesus’ time, there’s absolutely no evidence for that, because all of the evidence for the trash dump outside of Jerusalem comes the 13th century AD and later, so what is the right story that we should attach to this valley that makes it an image of God justice?
What happened in the valley, these events are described in the book of Kings and the book of Chronicles and what we’re told in 2 Chronicles 28:1-5, when Ahaz was 20 years old, he became king, he did not do right in the sight of the Lord, he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel up north and he made molten images for the gods of Baal, moreover he burned incense in the valley of gehenna and he burned his sons in fire according to the abominations of the nations the Lord had driven out before the sons of Israel. The first real event that happens in this valley in Israel’s story, is that it becomes the location of a number of shrines, dedicated to local Canaanite gods and the site of child sacrifice to those gods. Then a few generations later 2 Chronicles 33:1-7 tells us that another king of Judah in Jerusalem did this as well, Manasseh built altars for the host of heavens in the two courts of the house of the Lord. In other words, in the temple of Yahweh, he also built shrines and altars to different star deities and also he made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of gehenna. Pass through the fire, it’s a idiom of incinerating an infant on an altar as an offering.
Child sacrifice is viewed with real abhorrence by Israel’s prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible, but this was a practice in the ancient near East in this era. The prophets react to this big time, two prophets who rail against this practice the most are the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Jeremiah is the key figure here, because he lived after Ahaz and he lived in the same time as Manasseh. Jeremiah brings up this horrific practice happening in the valley and he declares God’s judgment on it. This is the meaning that Jesus is drawing upon, Jeremiah 7:30-33, if that’s your mindset, it would be easy in a generation or two to think Yahweh will accept these child sacrifices, because that’s what gods do, but Yahweh makes very clear, he never commanded this, the thought never even entered his mind, didn’t attribute that to me. Jeremiah 7:32, the event that Jeremiah could see was that Babylon was coming and that God was going to hand Jerusalem over to the king of Babylon to destroy it if Israel didn’t turn from it’s ways.
What Jeremiah is describing here, is that this valley where the kings and priests of Jerusalem have been taking the lives, starting fires to take the lives of these innocent children and sacrifice, but God is going to invert this and when the city is taken by Babylon and among the slain will be so many that there won’t be any room for proper burial in the city anymore and so their bodies are going to be tossed into the valley where they started the fires to consume the children, it’s an inversion punishment. The bodies of the people who lit those fires, it’s a form of the law of retribution or of the measure for measure punishment, the place where you lit fires to consume the lives of innocent children will be the place where you meet your death, where your dead body is thrown as a consequence for what you’ve done. That’s the portrait here, you take the lives of others, your life will be taken and you’ll end up landing in the place where you took the lives of others, that’s the portrait here.
Jesus uses this valley and that image to depict the reality that there will be a day of justice, the idea here is the fires of this valley were lit by people, but that God would respond to that grave injustice by bringing justice, the person who digs a pit, will fall into it and so the fires that these leaders lit in gehenna, will be turned back upon them and they will meet their doom in that same valley where they took the lives of others. God is seen as the orchestrator of bringing upon others, the death that they inflicted on the innocent. The role that this image plays, the role that this valley plays, it’s the place where what you did to others is done to you, like an inversion of the golden rule.
The main role of gehenna is this, inversion of our distorted ways of treating each other, so that what I’ve done to other, will be brought back upon me. The nature of gehenna as a symbol of Divine justice, the primary meaning was about Divine justice inverting what was wrong, so that what you’ve done to others will be brought back upon you. That’s why fire is associated gehenna, but those fires were lit by people, the fires that were started to consume the innocent, will turn back and consume the people who started them. Jesus assumes there was an understanding of gehenna apparently that Jesus could just draw upon and he draws upon it for its shock value here, he’s not developing theology of it.
