What was the word Jesus used for hell, and was it a real place?

The question

In most English Bibles Jesus warns about “hell”. In the Greek text, the word he uses in those particular sayings is geenna — Gehenna — and it is not a general word for the afterlife. It is a place name. It belonged to a specific ravine outside Jerusalem, and the people listening to him could walk to it.

This page answers two questions: what the word is, and where the place is. It deliberately does not answer a third one, and it says so out loud further down, along with the reason.

The answer

One: the English word “hell” is covering more than one Greek word. The King James translates both hadēs and geenna as “hell”. The World English Bible, which this site quotes, transliterates instead, so where other versions print “hell” it prints “Gehenna” — which is why the passages below may look unfamiliar.

Geenna is Greek for the Hebrew gê-hinnōm, the Valley of Hinnom, or in its longer form gê ben-hinnōm, the valley of the son of Hinnom. It is a name on a map.

It appears twelve times in the Greek New Testament — seven in Matthew, three in Mark, one in Luke, one in James — and every one except the James reference is on Jesus’ lips.

Two: where the place is. The most prosaic evidence is the best. In Joshua 15:8 the valley is used as a surveyor’s landmark, marking a tribal boundary: “The border went up by the valley of the son of Hinnom to the side of the Jebusite (also called Jerusalem) southward.” Nehemiah 11:30 uses it the same way. You do not use a metaphor to fix a property line.

It is the ravine running along the south and south-west of the old city, below the walls. Somebody on the wall could look down into it. It is still there, and people walk through it today.

Three: what happened there. This is where the name acquired its weight, and it is grim.

Jeremiah: “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I didn’t command, nor did it come into my mind” (Jeremiah 7:31). He says it again in chapter 19 and in chapter 32. Kings records a king of Judah putting a stop to it: “He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech” (2 Kings 23:10).

And Jeremiah announces a new name for the place: “it will no more be called ‘Topheth’ or ‘The valley of the son of Hinnom’, but ‘The valley of Slaughter’; for they will bury in Topheth until there is no place to bury” (Jeremiah 7:32).

So by the time anyone in the first century heard the word, it carried six or seven centuries of association: the place where children were burned, which a prophet renamed the valley of slaughter and turned into a byword for judgment.

Four: the correction that costs something, which is why it is worth making.

You will very often be told — in sermons, study notes and almost every online explanation of this topic — that in Jesus’ day the valley was Jerusalem’s rubbish dump, a place of permanently smouldering fires where refuse, carcasses and the bodies of criminals were burned, and that this is the image behind the warnings.

There is no ancient evidence for it.

No biblical text says it. No Jewish writing of the period says it. No Greek or Roman writer says it. No early Christian writer says it. No excavation has produced a first-century refuse layer there. The earliest source anybody has produced is medieval, usually traced to a Jewish commentator writing around 1200 — roughly twelve centuries after the period it describes.

The dump would be useful. It is vivid, it explains the fire, and it would have made this page more colourful. It also appears to be untrue, and repeating a thing because it preaches well is the habit that makes people stop believing anything they are told about the Bible.

What the archaeology does show is burial. Tombs have been excavated in the rock along the valley’s shoulder, and it was there in 1979 that two tiny rolled silver amulets were found, inscribed with a version of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 and generally dated to around the seventh century BC — the oldest known surviving copies of any biblical text. A burial ground, which is what Jeremiah 7:32 would lead you to expect.

Five, and this is the balance the whole page turns on: locating the word does not shrink it.

Read what the sayings actually do with it. In Matthew 5:29–30 it is worse than losing an eye or a hand. In Mark 9:43–47 the alternative to it is “entering into life” and “entering into God’s Kingdom”. In Matthew 10:28 it is what God, rather than any human executioner, is able to do — “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna”. In Matthew 23:33 it is “the judgment of Gehenna”.

None of that is dissolved by a map reference. Anyone who uses the geography to make the warning smaller has to leave the sentences out, and the sentences are the part that matters.

What the geography changes is something else. He did not invent a location to frighten people. He named one they already knew, one they could see, with a specific history of the worst thing done in that city — which is closer to what a prophet does than to what a preacher does.

Six: the question this page is not answering.

How long it lasts is a separate question, and Christians answer it differently. This page does not settle it, and the refusal is deliberate rather than evasive.

The reason is that the duration question is not decided by these passages. None of the twelve Gehenna sayings states how long a person remains there. The nearest thing to a duration statement is the unquenched fire of Mark 9, and readers on opposite sides read that phrase in opposite ways for reasons that have nothing to do with the valley. The debate is conducted from other texts entirely.

Which means that a page about a place name has no business producing a verdict about duration. If it did, it would be doing exactly what the third objection above accused it of: using a geography lesson as a run-up. The positions are set out below, described rather than scored.

The scripture in full

Two notes on that passage, both of which any reader deserves. The repeated refrain at verses 44 and 46 is missing from the earliest manuscripts of Mark and is present in many later ones; most modern translations omit it and the World English Bible keeps it, which is why the line appears three times here and once in some other Bibles. And the refrain itself is a quotation: it comes from Isaiah 66:24, where the phrase describes dead bodies. Readers on different sides of the duration question make different use of that fact, and this page is not making use of it in either direction.

Joshua 15:8 — the valley used as a boundary marker

Isaiah 66:24 — the line quoted in Mark 9

Where Christians disagree

What the text does not tell us

In one paragraph

Gehenna is Greek for the Valley of Hinnom, a real ravine along the south side of Jerusalem — the Old Testament uses it as a surveyor’s landmark in Joshua 15, which is about as concrete as evidence gets. Its reputation comes from what happened there: children burned in the fire, according to Jeremiah and the books of Kings, until a king put a stop to it, after which the prophet renamed it “The valley of Slaughter”. His hearers could see it from the wall. One popular claim should be set aside: the story that it was Jerusalem’s burning rubbish dump has no ancient source at all, biblical, Jewish, Roman, Christian or archaeological, and the earliest trace of it is medieval. Naming the place does not make the warnings smaller — Jesus attaches the word to soul, judgment and the alternative of entering life, and no map reference touches that. It does tell you what kind of act he was performing: he did not invent a place to frighten people, he named one they already knew. How long it lasts is a separate question, Christians answer it differently, and this page does not settle it.