Gehenna

Gehenna is a rare case where a place of punishment in the afterlife can be traced to a specific piece of real geography. The name derives from the Valley of Hinnom (Gei Hinnom) just outside Jerusalem, a ravine that the Hebrew Bible associates with the worst of apostasies, the burning of children in sacrifice to foreign gods under the kings Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Kings, Jeremiah). Defiled by these associations, the valley became in later tradition a byword for divine judgement, and by the Second Temple period Gehenna had been transposed from a cursed valley into a realm of the afterlife: a place where the wicked are punished or purged by fire after death.

In rabbinic Judaism this developed into a nuanced doctrine, Gehenna as, for most souls, a temporary state of purification lasting up to twelve months, rather than eternal torment, after which the soul ascends; only the utterly wicked are destroyed or remain. The New Testament, using the same word (translated "hell" in older English Bibles), draws on this imagery for its warnings of judgement. Gehenna thus stands behind much later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic imagining of a fiery hell, while retaining, in its Jewish form, a strong emphasis on purification and limit rather than endless punishment.

Ge-Hinnom is a real ravine running south and west of the old city of Jerusalem, and it can be walked today. Its reputation comes from the prophets: Jeremiah condemns what was done at Topheth in that valley, where children were passed through fire, and declares that it will be called the valley of slaughter. A place associated with the worst thing the prophets could name became, over the following centuries, the name for the place of judgement.

One very widely repeated explanation should be dropped. The claim that Gehenna was Jerusalem's burning refuse dump, which is why it stands for perpetual fire, appears first in a commentary by David Kimhi around the year 1200 and has no support in any ancient source, in the archaeology of the valley, or in rabbinic literature. It reached English readers through nineteenth century commentaries and is now in a great many study Bibles and sermons. There is no evidence for it.

The rabbinic material is also more temperate than the popular version. A standard position holds that the judgement of the wicked in Gehinnom lasts twelve months, which is one of the reasons the mourner's kaddish is recited for eleven, so as not to imply that the deceased needed the full term. Permanent punishment is a minority view in that literature rather than the default.