It was a garbage dump just outside of jerusalem. obviously the civil service was not as up to date in jerusalem as it is in the US now. Back then people would just dump their trash in this valley. People who were denied a proper burial were also thrown on the trash heap there.
occasionally there would be fires to help with the terrible smell, and to lessen the volume of trash. Child sacrifices happened to Molech here under a few isrealite kings. drums were beaten loudly to keep the fathers from hearing the groans of their children as they were burned alive in the trash.
what a great reputation the place must have had in israel!
also it was reported in some ancient literature that sometimes brimstone(sulfur) would be added to keep the fire burning hotter and longer. this is one of i believe 2 or 3 references where hell and fire have been connected. many of the other references are sketchy at best. one is the reference of john the baptist to the winnowers fire. i.e. the grain (good wholesome christian folk) and the chaff (vile pagans) will be separated out and the chaff will be burned. well obviously john is speaking literally here, after all i am a head of barley...so he must really mean fire... we will get to the others later.
one more note and we should be done with gehenna. one thing we kind of dont get in western culture that the jew did was the idea of purity. There are two scales with two values each. The first is the Holy-Common scale. holy was things set apart for god, common was normal things. the temple and sacrifices had to be holy, the bread you ate for dinner was common. the second scale is clean-unclean. This scale was based on levitical purity laws. it wasnt believed that things could be holy and unclean (but the red heifer's ashes were explained so). so unclean wasnt necessarily a result of sin (e.g. menstruation) but it was not desireable. Anywho, gehenna would have been looked at as unclean and common. Which is pretty much the worst combo. Jews would have avoided the place other than dumping trash.
another interesting point is that in jewish literature we see gehenna evolve as a place where people who commit certain sins go and spend a year or so paying for their sins, while more serious sins require eternal punishment. one of the more minor sins is listening to women too much... wouldnt want to be guilty of that one.
the important point when looking at a lot of these concepts of hell, is to recognize whether or not a word we see as possibly being symbolic evolved from its original meaning to take on a meaning of hell, or if the translators misinterpreted that into the translations. Was jesus just referring to gehenna to evoke images of a terrible, god forsaken place? or did he mean that hell was actually a 1/5ths model of gehenna that is buried 1500 miles below the earths crust, or somewhere in between?
2 comments:
i hope humor is okay on this blog. of course with a name like snod bloggins, you know something has to be funny. you made a tiny little grammatical error that could have huge implications for our theology. at one point in this post, you say so unclean wasnt necessarily a result of sin (i.e. menstruation). i.e. actually means 'in other words.' i think you actually meant e.g., which means 'for example.' i wouldn't even bother to point this out except for the funny results of this very minor mistake. imagine a world in which menstruation is just another word for sin.
the romans road, e.g.:
"for the wages of menstruation is death..."
"all have menstruated and fall short of the glory of god"
gen. 15:6
in the fourth generation your descendants will return here, for the menstruation of the amorites has not yet reached its limit
gen. 31:36 (jacob speaking to laban)
what menstruation of mine prompted you to chase after me in hot pursuit?
and that's just the beginning!
pretty sad for a 4 year latin student in high school eh? thanks for the correction... and humour.
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