What was Gehenna?
As most commentators note, Jesus appropriated the concept of Gehenna from Jeremiah’s prophecies against sixth century Judah. According to Jeremiah, the valley of the son of Hinnom (Hebrew: Ge Hinnom, Aramaic: Gēhannā) would become the “valley of Slaughter” when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC (Jeremiah 7:30-34, 19:4-6).
Besides the oracles of Jeremiah, Jesus betrays another source for his conception of Gehenna in Mark 9:47-48. Gehenna is said to be the place Isaiah spoke of: “where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched” (Isaiah 66:24). In Isaiah’s vision the inhabitants of the restored Jerusalem peer out of the city to see the corpses of those who had rebelled against God. The perpetual sight of the many “slain by YHWH” would serve as a deterrence to would-be transgressors (Isaiah 66:16).
These two texts then, Jeremiah and Isaiah, constituted the foundation upon which Jesus built his own vision of Gehenna.
What is Gehenna?
Under the influence of the New Testament and later theologians, however, the unfortunate valley would eventually evolve into a place of postmortem eternal torment. For all intents and purposes, Gehenna has since been equated with Hell in Christian consciousness.
Yet Gehenna’s origins in the oracles of Jeremiah and Isaiah may give us more accurate insight into what the term meant to Jesus. In Jeremiah and Isaiah the Gehenna of worm and fire serves as an image of catastrophic slaughter. It is a necropolis for the scorched and half-buried, rotting bodies generated by military defeat and destruction (cf. Jeremiah 7:33, 14:16, Isaiah 1:30-31, 14:11, 34:8-10). Had Jesus been interested in encapsulating a political disaster similar to Babylon’s decimation of Jerusalem into a single potent image, Gehenna would have been an appropriate choice.
And as it turns out, Jesus was interested. He foresaw Israel’s devastating war with Rome some forty years before it happened (Mark 13:1-23, Luke 13:1-9, 21:20-28). Like Jeremiah and Isaiah before him, Jesus knew that Jerusalem was going to be burned and its corpses heaped up into piles.
With all of this in mind, I want to now make a brief case that Jesus’ Gehenna has little to do with the postmortem Hell of later tradition and everything to do with the Jewish War with Rome. I think one critical piece of evidence has been overlooked.
Gehenna and the day of judgement
- Gehenna is used interchangeably with the day of judgement, that is, the day in which Jerusalem and the surrounding regions are swept away.
Jesus twice refers to a coming day of judgement (κρίσεως) that will level certain unrepentant cities in Galilee, namely, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum (Matthew 10:15, 11:20-24). Along with Jerusalem’s current generation (Matthew 12:38-42), Jesus claims that these cities will suffer a fate similar to, but worse than, Sodom and Gomorrah. What Jesus has in mind then is clearly an eschatological earthly destruction of living inhabitants.
Yet in between his indictment of these 1st century Jewish towns Jesus also warns his disciples to fear the one who can destroy a person in Gehenna, that is, God (Matthew 10:26-30). This threat, unlike the first, is usually understood in terms of a postmortem punishment in Hell. Gehenna, we are told, refers to the hellish abode of the wicked who have died while the day of judgement refers to an earthly upheaval at the end of time. Thus while Gehenna relates to eternity, the day of judgement relates to eschatology. They are related but distinct.
This distinction, however, is probably not warranted by the texts.
One passage in particular demonstrates the large degree of conceptual overlap between Gehenna and the eschatological judgement. As part of a diatribe against the scribes and Pharisees Jesus prophecies that “this generation” will pay for the blood of all the prophets (Matthew 23:29-36). As Jesus goes on to describe how his generation was to pay for such sins he focuses his attention on the coming desolation of Jerusalem’s house, undoubtedly a reference to the destruction of the Temple during the Jewish War with Rome (Matthew 23:28, cf. Matthew 22:7, Isaiah 5:9). This is confirmed as Jesus continues. After the “abomination of desolation” is erected on the Temple’s grounds, Zion will be torn down (Matthew 24:1-28). “Immediately after” this the son of man will come with recompense to bring about the end of the age (Matthew 24:29-31, cf. Luke 21:20-28).
What makes this apocalyptic schema significant for our purposes is that Jesus condenses all of it into the phrase “the judgement that is Gehenna” (τῆς κρίσεως τῆς γεέννης) (Matthew 23:33). The generation that will be unable to escape the desolation of Jerusalem and the subsequent coming of the son of man will also be unable to escape Gehenna. The most straightforward explanation for this is that Gehenna and the day of judgement refer to the same thing, God’s action in history to judge first century Israel. Surely this is how Jeremiah and Isaiah would have understood Jesus’ prophetic imagination.
Scribes of the Kingdom 
I agree with everything you laid out here.
In fairness to the view that Gehenna represents a place of eternal spiritual torment, Gehenna certainly took on certain mythic properties in Jewish thought. The idea that Gehenna is a fiery furnace, or that the valley is an earthly gate to a much larger underworld realm, are present at least as early as the Babylonian Talmud, if not earlier.
Whether this strain of thought would have been shared by Jesus is highly debatable and I think very unlikely – I believe your take is accurate – but it’s good to keep in mind that this trajectory for the idea of Gehenna is a Jewish development (perhaps a Hellenic Jewish development?) and not entirely a misunderstood equivocation by later Christian theologians, although some overlap is certainly possible, as is the two strains of thought developing independently.
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Thanks for adding this Phil. It’s a good point and I think it is quite possible that texts like Matthew 25 and Revelation press us toward a postmortem and eternal kind of punishment after the eschatological judgement day.
Something I decided to leave out of this post was a paragraph on fire in relation to Gehenna and judgement day. Both are frequently associated with fire. Maybe that’s a coincidence (that Hell and the Apocalypse are both fiery) but it seems to me that it is another indication that Gehenna and the day of judgement are one and the same. As I’ve tried to lay out here, I think Matthew 23-25 shows just how close these concepts were—Gehenna, judgement day, and the fall of Jerusalem.
Perhaps my point would have been made better by saying that whatever Gehenna and the day of judgement were, they began with the destruction of Jerusalem and the surrounding region.
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Absolutely, and those events just continue to add to the mythic import of the valley. I mean, the whole reason it was considered accursed to begin with were the horrific rituals that used to be conducted there. The valley was filled with “the blood of innocents” and became a geographical flash point for talking about the slaughter that would occur there when God avenged those deeds.
But over time, this begins to take on symbolic and hyperbolic properties that begin to blur with other images that communicate God’s justice, even beyond death – a growing hope of the Jewish community. Tyrants would eventually get their just desserts even if they managed to somehow evade them in this life.
When you get this blend of the political and theological and symbolical, it’s not hard to see how this line of reasoning takes a certain life of its own, especially when you bring Babylonian or Greco-Roman ideas about the soul and judgement into the mix.
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My thinking is that while Gehenna referred specifically to the Jewish experience of the day of judgement (which was Jesus’ primary concern), Jesus also believed the nations would shortly thereafter experience a kind of Gehenna of their own, a mount Vesuvius event we could say (Revelation 16). It seems like these kinds of gruesome apocalyptic earthly events (The War with Rome or something like Revelation 7) made punishment after death unnecessary or redundant. At the very least the postmortem punishment that might begin by means of the slaughter that is Gehenna and the pouring out of God’s wrath upon the nations isn’t the point of apocalyptic writing. The point is that tyrants will have nowhere to hide on the day of the Lamb’s wrath upon the earth.
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