Two weeks ago, I wrote a bit about our understanding of hell, which you can read here. I focused on the word Sheol, which had been translated as “hell” in the King James Version of the Bible, setting a course of misunderstanding. A much better translation is “the grave” or some way of speaking of the place of the dead. Since that time I’ve had numerous conversations with St. Mark folks and others about it. Today I want to explore that topic just a bit further, in two ways. First, I’ll look at another term, Gehenna, that the KJV also translates as hell on occasion, again a misleading translation. Then, I want to propose something about interpreting the Bible’s language about hell, which I will continue to explore as my life goes on.
Gehenna – according to lexicons and commentaries – is a reference to “the valley of Hinnom.” It appears starkly in these words from the prophet Jeremiah, “Because the people have forsaken me, and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah have known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent, and gone on building the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt-offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind; therefore the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of Slaughter.”
That’s a mouthful and there’s a lot about it that may have been clear to its original audience, but is lost on us. It does, however, establish the valley of Hinnom, or in this case, the valley of the son of Hinnom, as a wretched, profane, burning place of violence and death. For Jeremiah, this valley is a real place of real tragedy. But, by renaming it “the valley of Slaughter,” Jeremiah is showing a process of how that real place becomes a trope for an accursed site of death and desolation. And that is how this word was used throughout Israel’s history, first dropping the “son of” phrase, then transliterating the term into Aramaic, and finally into Greek as γέεννα, or “Gehenna,” as it appears in the New Testament. The term really gained resonance during what we call the “intertestamental” period, during which a lot of the theology that we find in the New Testament about the afterlife was developed.
So, by the time we get to the New Testament, the word Gehenna is used without introduction or explanation. Again, we have to conjecture a bit about what it meant to its original audience. Here’s my take – which is just me thinking aloud: Originally, the valley of Hinnom had a reputation as a place of slaughter of innocents, which made it profane and sacrilegious. Over time, that site would be used for burning refuse, including human remains. It would gain real reputation as a dangerous place because of the admixture of putrefaction and burning, the smoke of which would be awful and infectious. And so, long after it originally was used for child sacrifices, it was still a detestable but necessary site, because something had to be done with animal parts, waste products, etc. And, again, the KJV translated this term consistently as “hell,” which is unfortunate, having left a misleading imprint on Christian theology.
So, that’s my exploration of Gehenna. Now here’s my proposition: I think the ancient way of thinking about sheol was mostly dealing with the perpetual challenge of death. I think other terms, like Gehenna and hades, that have morphed into “hell” in our thinking, were primarily terms that spoke about corruption. Fire was one of the primary agents of purifying in ancient times, by getting rid of what would ultimately decay anyway. Think of what needed to be disposed: Unclaimed bodies of criminals or enemies slain on the battlefield, animal parts, animals that died of disease, and so on. And if you died of a communicable disease, it would make better sense to toss your body into the fire instead of a tomb, so that the disease would be removed. Every lovely, clean city would have to have some place like this valley of Hinnom, hidden away and only visited when necessary. And such a real, necessary place would offer a marvelous metaphor for how to deal with behaviors and habits that would have a destructive, decaying, infectious effect on community. That might explain Jesus’ argument that it would be better to sever an offensive hand or pluck out an offensive eye than for one’s whole body to be cast into Gehenna. We read the KJV and think, “Oh, an offensive eye will make us end up in hell.” I suspect it was something more like, “the offense of the eye will spread and the whole body will be diseased if you don’t remove it. If your whole body is diseased, you won’t be buried with dignity, but thrown into the fires of Gehenna, to purify the earth of the disease.”
When you and I think about “hell,” we are not thinking about either death or corruption, but about justice. We imagine hell as a way to ensure that those who do evil – and who can live a long and happy enough life on earth doing evil – will be punished in some way. We may not ascribe to a literal, eternal, lake of fire, but heaven as a reward for virtue and hell as a punishment for vice make sense to us from a “divine justice” point of view. And we might be right, but I don’t think that’s what most biblical words that have historically been translated as “hell” are talking about.
For better or worse, that’s all I’ve got this week,
Mark of St. Mark
