In his translation of the New Testament, David Bentley Hart ends with a series of Concluding Scientific Postscripts. In the section on Translating Certain Words, he better defines the word “Gehenna,” which is often translated using the “Hell” (the Anglo-Saxon word for the place of the dead.)
Gehenna/Hell:
The next word is “Gehenna.” In the New Testament there is no single Greek term corresponding to the Anglo-Saxon “hell,” despite the prodigality with which that word is employed in traditional English translations, and no term at all that quite corresponds to the picture of hell – a kingdom of ingenious tortures ruled by Satan – that took ever more opulent and terrifying mythical shape in later Christian centuries. Rather, there is “Hades,” the realm of the dead beneath the earth, corresponding to the Hebrew “Sheol” (where, for instance, both “Dives” and Lazarus await the end of all things, or where perhaps disembodied souls heard the gospel from Jesus before his resurrection, and so on); there is “Tartarus” (once, in 2 Peter 2:4), a name drawn from pagan Greek lore referring to a place of postmortem imprisonment and punishment, and more especially to the prison of the Titans, but in the New Testament referring not to some sort of final “hell” of perpetual torment, but solely to the subterranean prison where fallen angels and demonic spirits are held until the day of judgment; and then there is “the gehenna,” the Aramaic form of the Hebrew “Ge-Hinnom,” “Valley of Hinnom” (originally the “Ge-ben-Hinnom,” “Valley of Hinnom’s Son”). This last term appears eleven times in the synoptic Gospels (seven in Matthew, three in Mark, and one in Luke), and only once in the rest of the New Testament (in the Letter of James). Precisely why this valley to the south and west of Jerusalem had by Christ’s time become, in apocalyptic literature and Rabbinic tradition, a name for a place of punishment or purification or both (usually after death) is difficult to tell. Scripture and tradition say that the Tophet was there, the place of child sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and Ba’al, a practice attested in Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah, and Jeremiah; and while there is as yet little archaeological evidence supporting the claim, the association of the Ge-Hinnom with the sacrifice of infants to evil gods was well established long before the Christian period. There is also some small evidence in the valley’s southwest reachs that it might have been a place of tombs and (after the arrival of the Romans) of crematory grounds. There is as well a mediaeval tradition, which may be based on older accounts, that the valley served as a rubbish tip and charnel ground, where refuse was burned and where animal and human corpses were left as carrion, but again the archaeological evidence for this is lacking; perhaps in favor of this possibility, however, are Christ’s words as reported in Mark 9:45-48, where he describes the valley in terms of the description in Isaiah 66:24 of human corpses being consumed by inexterminable worms and inextinguishable fires (neither of which, incidentally, is described as either otherworldly or eternal in nature). Then again, these same images also fit well with Jeremiah’s vision of the Ge-Hinnom gorged with corpses – the “valley of slaughter” – as a result of God’s historical punishment of Jerusalem and of those Israelites who had worshipped false gods and sacrificed their babies, using the king of Babylon as the instrument of his wrath; and, indeed, some very formidable New Testament scholars over the years, noting the seemingly more than incidental echoes of Jeremiah in the teachings of Jesus, have concluded that the language of the gehenna in the synoptic Gospels really referred to the historical “wrath” and “judgment” that many could see descending on Israel in Jesus’s own time (culminating in the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in AD 70), rather than to a cosmic Day of Judgment yet to dawn. After all, Jesus in the Gospels clearly states that the “eschatological” events he prophesies will come to pass during the lifetime of some of his listeners. But we really do not know precisely how this valley became a metaphor for divine punishment, in this world or the next, or exactly what the image’s figural function in Christ’s evangel was.
Neither do we know with great certainty precisely what meanings and connotations the term would have had for Jesus or for his listeners. Before, during, and soon after the time of Jesus, it was common parlance among a great many sects and schools, and was understood sometimes as a place of final destruction, sometimes simply as a place of punishment, and sometimes as a place of purgatorial regeneration. The two dominant rabbinical schools of Christ’s time, that of Shammai and that of Hillel, both spoke of it as a place of purification or punishment for a limited period, but both also taught that for the incorrigibly wicked there would or could be a state of eternal or final shame, remorse, suffering, or ruin; Shammai had a somewhat grimmer view on the number of the ultimately lost (about a third of humanity, on some accounts), whereas Hillel had a far keener sense of the power of God’s mercy to save. For Shammai, the gehenna was principally a refiner’s fire for those souls neither incorrigibly wicked nor blamelessly good, and those subjected to its pains would ultimately be raised up to paradise. Hillel apparently thought of the gehenna as a place of final punishment and annihilation (body and soul) of the utterly depraved but thought their number extremely small. And rabbinical tradition says that it is from Hillel that what became the standard Rabbinic view – that no one can suffer in the gehenna for more than twelve months – originally comes; the idea at least goes far as back as Rabbi Akiva, in the generation just after Christ. But really, we do not know whether Jesus advanced a similar view of the gehenna’s fire, or what duration he might have assigned to the sufferings of those committed to it, or how metaphorically or literally he or his listeners might have understood its imagery. Clearly, though, metaphor was his natural idiom, and so it seems unlikely that his language here should be assumed to be any more literal than his language of ovens or harvests or threshing floors or the closed doors of feasts. And later Christian tradition casts no real light on the issue, given the diversity of views that prevailed in the early centuries of the church, and the total absence of any language of the gehenna, or of any kind of lasting postmortem torment, in the earliest Christian documents we possess, the letters of Paul. As for whether Jesus viewed that fire as one of final destruction or one of purification, this too is difficult to say with certainty. The former possibility seems in keeping with the apparently “annihiliationist” images frequently employed by Jesus – chaff and darnel weeds and dead branches being consumed in an over (if these are metaphors for sinners rather than, as certain patristic exegetes believed, for their sins) – as well as with his talk of the gehenna’s power to destroy both body and soul. The latter possibility, however, could explain those same images equally well while also, at the same time, making sense of certain other metaphors used by Jesus in the Gospels to describe the punishments that follow from divine judgment: to wit, if remanded to the prison, “you shall most certainly not emerge from there until you repay the very last pittance” (Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke 12:59); the unmerciful slave is “delivered . . . to the inquisitors until he should repay everything owing” (Matthew 18:34); some wicked slaves “will be beaten with many blows” and others “beaten with few blows” (Luke 12:47, 48); “everyone will be salted with fire,” the fire in question being explicitly that of the gehenna, and salting being a common image of purification and preservation – for “salt is good” (Mark 9:49-50). It might also explain why the Greek word used for “punishment” in Matthew 25:46 is “kolasis” – which typically refers to remedial punishment – rather than “timôria” – which typically refers to retributive justice (it might not, however, since by late antiquity “kolasis” had perhaps become somewhat less specific in connotation). And, if one regards Paul’s language as a reliable reflection of the teachings of the apostolic church, one might take 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 – which distinguishes not between the saved and the “damned,” but only between those who (their works passing the test of fire) merit rewards in the Age to come and those who (their works failing that test) will instead have to be saved “as by fire” – as at least a suggestive gloss. Or, then again, one could take the gehenna in the sense sanctified by so much of the Eastern Christian mystical tradition as a metaphor for how the soul that seals itself against love of God and creatures experiences the saving glory of God: as, that is, a “flame” of exterior chastisement rather than a “light” of transfiguring grace. But that is a spiritual interpretation, not an historical reconstruction. As for the remaining possibility, that the gehenna is a name for a place neither of annihiliation nor of purification, but of eternal conscious torment – the God of love’s perpetual torture chamber – for this rather repellant idea there is easily the least evidence in the Gospels (if any); but the notion may have some substantial precedent in Jewish intertestamental apocalyptic literature, such as the book of Enoch, as well as in some early Rabbinic traditions, and it accords with most later Christian readings of that sole suggestive verse, Matthew 25:46 (especially after the fifth century). One might also suppose that other images of exclusion used by Jesus – locked doors, outer darkness, wailing and the grinding of teeth – are descriptions of a literally perpetual state of existence after death, of which there can be no end and from which there is no hope of deliverance through purification. And one can perhaps assume that the “inexcusable” sin of blasphemy against the Spirit, mentioned in all three synooptic Gospels, is one for which the penalty exacted must be everlasting, rather than one necessarily leading to either annihiliation or purification. But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, the absence of any hint of such a notion in the Paline corpus (or, for that matter, in the fourth Gospel, or the “Catholic Epistles,” or those very early doctrinal and confessional texts the Didache and Apostle’ Creed, or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers…) makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally unintelligible. Moreover, to read back into these texts either the traditional view of dual and in some sense synchronously eternal postmortem destinies or the develop high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute distinction between “Hell” and “Purgatory” would be either (in the former case) a dogmatic reflex rather than an exegetical necessity or (in the latter) an act of simple historical illiteracy. But I leave it to readers to reconcile the various eschatological passages of the New Testament with one another, or not, as they choose; the most I can do is offer an observation about two of the greatest and most brillant Church Fathers of the latter fourth and early fifth centuries. The Greek-speaking Gregory of Nyssa, who was a universalist and who simply assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, was able to unite all the various biblical images and claims in a fairly seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon. Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who took very much the contrary view, was far more selective in his use of scripture, was dependent on often grossly misleading translations, and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform well to the theological system he imaged he had found in Paul’s writings. This is, if nothing else, instructive. Fir myself, at any rate, I have translated “the gehenna” as “the Vale of Hinnom” or “Hinnom’s Vale,” keeping the proper name (which would have been audible to Jesus’s listeners) but using the somewhat daintily pretentious “vale” to insinuate a hint of gauzy otherworldliness into the image (since by Jesus’s time it was clearly no longer simply a geographical designation, but a metaphor with an enormous range of associations and connotations).