Gehenna

“And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

— Matthew 10:28 (ESV)

Gehenna is the New Testament Greek term (γέεννα) Jesus used, in eleven of its twelve occurrences in Scripture, as the name for the place of everlasting punishment to which the wicked are consigned after the resurrection and final judgment.¹ The word transliterates the Hebrew gê hinnōm, “the valley of Hinnom,” a ravine southwest of Jerusalem where, under Ahaz and Manasseh, children were burned alive in worship of Molech.² By New Testament times the valley’s name for judgment and desecration had passed to the place of final punishment itself, distinct from Hades, the dead’s general, temporary abode before judgment.²

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor its wider Reformed family names Gehenna; their seventeenth-century vocabulary speaks only of “hell” and “everlasting torments” or “destruction,” not of the Greek term itself. The confession’s chapter on the last judgment states that “the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast aside into everlasting torments, and punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power,”³ language the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration state almost word for word.⁴ This is the doctrine Gehenna names in Scripture’s own vocabulary, not a confessional gloss on the term itself.

Biblical Basis

The King James Version renders three distinct Greek (and, behind one of them, Hebrew) words as “Hell”: Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna.¹ Hades is the general place of departed spirits, righteous and wicked alike, and is nowhere else associated with torment except in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:23), where the wicked man’s own sinful state, not Hades itself, accounts for his suffering.¹ Tartarus occurs only once, of the fallen angels “cast…down to hell” to await judgment (2 Pet. 2:4).¹ Gehenna occurs twelve times (Matt. 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6), and Christ himself uses the term in every occurrence but James 3:6.¹ Each instance concerns torment and punishment yet to come: Matthew 18:9 pairs Gehenna directly with “eternal fire” as its equivalent, Christ asks the scribes and Pharisees how they will “escape the judgment of hell [Gehenna]” (Matt. 23:33), and he warns that it is better to enter life maimed than, keeping both hands, “to go into hell [Gehenna], into the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).¹

Gehenna is “distinct from hades…the underworld…and the pit but identical with the furnace of fire…and the lake of fire.”² Hades and the abyss hold the wicked only until the resurrection and the final judgment; Gehenna, or the lake of fire, is where they are “hurled” afterward, together with death and Hades themselves (Rev. 20:14-15).² Its fire is called “unquenchable” and “eternal” (Matt. 18:8; Mark 9:43, 48), a burning Scripture elsewhere describes as never ending (Rev. 14:11; 2 Thess. 1:9).²

Historical Development

The valley of Hinnom was, in the Old Testament, first a boundary marker between the territories of Judah and Benjamin (Josh. 15:8; 18:16). Under kings Ahaz and Manasseh it became a site of child sacrifice to Molech (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6; 2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6; Jer. 32:34-35). Josiah destroyed the high places there and had the valley declared ceremonially unclean (2 Kings 23:10), and Jeremiah, prophesying against the same practice, renamed it in advance “the Valley of Slaughter,” where a coming bloodbath would fall on the nation (Jer. 7:32; 19:6).²

The pseudepigraphal book of 1 Enoch is the earliest text Bavinck cites for the further step of transferring the valley’s name to a place of eschatological judgment, predicting that the wicked would be gathered there for punishment.² By later Jewish tradition, once Josiah’s desecration had put the valley to profane use, it also became a place for burning refuse; just as “Gan Eden,” the garden of Eden, named the abode of the righteous dead, “Gehinnom” came to name the place of punishment for the unclean and ungodly.² Jesus’s own Gehenna sayings presuppose this already-transferred sense, not the valley itself.

Related Doctrines

References

James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XLII. The Final States of the Righteous and the Wicked,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 479-480. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 33, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩