Gehenna Quotes

They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be eisier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives. Maybe it says somthing about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Mabye it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives. I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me? Probably that I overanalyze things.

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He who travels fastest who travels alone...

Why is physical love bad and spiritual love good? I don't understand. I can't help feeling that they are the same. I would like to boast that I am she who could destroy her body and soul in Gehenna for the sake of a love, for the sake of a passion she could not understand, or for the sake of the sorrow they engendered.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.

He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that’s why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that’s Gehenna for you. Like any other romantic notion, it’s based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn’t the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun.

The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.

Gehenna is lovely these days.

After a while Zeinvel said, “I haven’t forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails.

In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

The dark breaks wide in fragile rays. Dawn on Ithiss-Tor is more subtle than other sunrises. I have lost count of the worlds where I have stood and watched the light rise, peeling away the sky, sometimes in quiet colors, and sometimes in raw, violent slashes, as if the goddess I don't believe in has cut her veins. And sometimes, as on Gehenna, the sky changes not at all, just endless night, or endless brilliance--and after a time, the constant uniformity makes you feel as if you are the thing that must give way.

The first truth about mortals is that none of us wants to die, but all of us are going to. It’s in the name – mortals – the dying ones. If you don’t understand that bit, you won’t understand the rest of it. Here you are, some 5-hundred years old and you haven’t yet figured out something that a 3 year old human is starting to understand. You see, as soon as we can even think, our brains are wrapping themselves around that One Truth, that one offensive, undeniable, irrevocable Truth. The rest of our existence grows up in the shadow of a dead leaning tree, which will at one point in the not unimaginable future fall and crush all that has grown up beneath it… …Rescue them for what? Why from dying! Does that mean they won’t die? No, it just means they won’t die today. At best, we’re talking about delaying the inevitable death sentence laid on our friends. Now how does this particular truth strike you, Mister Immortal…? …And why? Why not merely stand now and fall sooner rather than later? Because there is something precious and sacred about rearguard action. It’s an active retreat that’s been repeated valiantly and ceaselessly from the beginning of mortal time. It just seems wrong to give up. It seems invalid and invalorous. More importantly, it’s indecent to simply lie down and be overrun… …Instead we rage against it and sing our defiance through bloodied teeth. Somehow, in our pointless battle, we find moments for compassion and passion and love. Yes, love. What other reason would a mortal creature have for descending into the Abyss of Gehenna to rescue another mortal soul, sentenced to return in time to that very place, except that that soul is... his beloved, whose very existence is what makes him fight rather than lie down, is what makes him absurdly threaten an immortal creature so beyond him in strength and power and knowledge and years. Love is what makes him hold a hand up to strike an immortal being who will not even feel the blow, but will strike back with lightning fingers rather than fingers of flesh… …If you immortals have so much time, you’d think you could spend some time of it listening to mad mortals rather than always interrupting!

Why is physical love bad and spiritual love good? I don’t understand. I can’t help feeling that they are the same. I would like to boast that I am she who could destroy her body and soul in Gehenna for the sake of a love, for the sake of a passion she could not understand, or for the sake of the sorrow they engendered.

My name’s Elai, Ellai’s daughter, line of the first Cloud, the first Elly; of Pia, line of the first Jin when they made the world. And you’re on my land.

How is someone so smart so stupid? You can’t make money if you always insult my customer. You got to be the worst hooker I ever had

To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten.

Munroe stared at the sky. Cursed her weakness, her inability to block out what it would mean to knowingly deliver the innocent into the same hell that had birthed her to life. In this moment of decision she condemned to death the one she would risk anything to save. To the night, Munroe whispered good-bye. Opened the floodgates to Gehenna—that place of the wicked, that place of the dead—and here in this deserted spot, she buried her soul.

In modern street-English, we use “hell” as a catchall term to describe the bad place (usually red hot) where sinful people are condemned to punishment and torment after they die. This simplistic, selective, and horrifying perception of hell is due in large part to nearly 400 years of the King James Version’s monopoly in English-speaking congregations (not to mention centuries of imaginative religious art). Rather than acknowledge the variety of terms, images, and concepts that the Bible uses for divine judgment, the KJV translators opted to combine them all under the single term “hell.” In truth, the array of biblical pictures and meanings that this one word is expected to convey is so vast that they appear contradictory. For example, is hell a lake of fire or a place of utter darkness? Is it a purifying forge or a torture chamber? Is it exclusion from God’s presence or the consuming fire of God’s glory? While modern scholarship acknowledges the mis- or over-translation of Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna as “hell” - especially if by “hell” we refer automatically to the eternal punishment of the wicked in conscious torment in a lake of fire - the thoroughly discussed limitations of hell language and imagery have been slow to permeate the theology of pulpits and pews in much of the church. Why the reluctance? Do we resist out of ignorance? Or are we afraid that abandoning infernalism implies abandoning faithfulness to Scripture and sound doctrine? After all, for so long we were taught that to be a Christian - especially an evangelical - is to be an infernalist. And yet, not a few of my friends have confessed that they have given up on being “good Christians” because they can no longer assent to the kind of God that creates and sends people to hell as they imagine it.

There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses. CHAPTER 5

We know it well; the first mad paroxysm past, our brave Gneschen collected his dismembered philosophies, and buttoned himself together; he was meek, silent, or spoke of the weather and the Journals: only by a transient knitting of those shaggy brows, by some deep flash of those eyes, glancing one knew not whether with tear-dew or with fierce fire,—might you have guessed what a Gehenna was within: that a whole Satanic School were spouting, though inaudibly, there. To consume your own choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a whole Satanic School spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times.

Pretty soft!' he cried. 'To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!' I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent. 'It would kill me to have to live in New York,' he went on. 'To have to share the air with six million people! TO have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To - ' He started. 'Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!' I was shocked, absolutely shocked. 'My dear chap!' I said, reproachfully. 'Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?' 'Jeeves,' I said coldly. 'How many suits of evening clothes have we?' 'We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets- ' 'Three.' 'For practical purposes, two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.' 'And shirts?' 'Four dozen, sir.' 'And white ties?' 'The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.' I turned to Rocky. 'You see?' The chappie writhed like an electric fan. 'I won't do it! I can't do it! I'll be hanged if I'll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realise that most days I don't get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon and then I just put on an old sweater?' I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap. This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.

The truth is, they don’t want us back on Earth.  Trained killers who’ve lived for years outside the normal Earth routine of constant surveillance.  That’s why they don’t let us go home.  I figured out part of that a while back, but now I realize the whole truth.  They are afraid of my brethren and me, even as they need us to fight their wars.  It is from stuff such as us that revolutions are made.

From space the little world looked like nothing much - perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind - together with numbers of smaller noshmates - were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body. I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names - Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like - that served vessels bound to or fro the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined.

It means ultimately, even God cannot decide for you. The choice is in your hands; therefore, and this is crucial, you must answer for your choice. It will not suffice to plead that you made no choice: that in itself means, like the gun in the hands of the soldier, that you allowed yourself to be carried into battle by whoever grabbed you from the rack. In that case, you have made your choice, whether you will own up to it or not. This struggle which forms now on all sides of us will be total. It will involve every atom in the universe, every physical particle and every living being.

27. Jesus’ disciples interrupt the conversation by their return from Sychar, where they had gone to purchase food (v. 8). Their unvoiced surprise that he was talking with a Samaritan woman reflects the prejudices of the day. Some (though by no means all) Jewish thought held that for a rabbi to talk much with a woman, even his own wife, was at best a waste of time and at worst a diversion from the study of Torah, and therefore potentially a great evil that could lead to Gehenna, hell (Pirke Aboth 1:5). Some rabbis went so far as to suggest that to provide their daughters with a knowledge of the Torah was as inappropriate as to teach them lechery, i.e. to sell them into prostitution (Mishnah Sotah 3:4; the same passage also provides the contrary view). Add to this the fact that this woman was a Samaritan (cf. notes on v. 9), and the disciples’ surprise is understandable. Jesus himself was not hostage to the sexism of his day (cf. 7:53–8:11; 11:5; Lk. 7:36–50; 8:2–3; 10:38–42).

Fruto de una gran misericordia es no dejar impune la maldad: mas, para no verse obligada a condenar a la gehenna al final, se digna castigar ahora con el azote. 5. 5. En efecto, ¿quieres conocer cuán gran castigo es la falta de castigo, pero no para el justo, sino para el pecador, a quien se le aplica el castigo temporal para que no le sobrevenga el eterno? ¿Quieres, pues, conocer cuán gran castigo es la falta de castigo? Interroga al salmo: El pecador irritó al Señor15. ¡Impetuosa exclamación! Puso atención, reflexionó y exclamó: El pecador irritó al Señor. «¿Por qué?», te suplico. «¿Qué viste?». Quien así exclamó vio al pecador entregado impunemente al derroche, a hacer el mal, abundante en bienes, y gritó: El pecador irritó al Señor. ¿Por qué dijiste esto? ¿Qué fue lo que viste? Es tan grande su ira que no le pide cuentas16. Comprended, hermanos cristianos, la misericordia de Dios. Cuando castiga al mundo, no quiere condenarlo. Es tan grande su ira que no le pide cuentas. Y el no pedirle cuentas se debe a la magnitud de su ira. Grande es su ira. Su justa severidad es indicadora de perdón. Pues la severidad es como una verdad cruel. Si, pues, alguna vez perdona mostrándose duro, buena cosa es para nosotros el que nos socorra castigándonos. Y, con todo, si consideramos las acciones del género humano, ¿qué es lo que padecemos? No nos ha tratado en conformidad con nuestras obras

But it was true. I was constantly surprised how the storied names of biblical locales popped up in the most familiar of circumstances: on a simple map, on a graffitied street sign, or in everyday conversations. “The traffic to Bethlehem was terrible last night!” said a Jesuit over dinner one night. Which still didn’t beat “Gehenna is lovely.

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FOLK SAYING: “Better to be in Gehenna with a wise man than in Gan Eden [Paradise] with a fool.

Molech achieved much as the underdog among deities, which was worthy of his pride. He had managed to burrow his home into the Valley of Hinnom, called Gehenna, right under the walls of the holy city itself. What other god came as close? Asherah had seduced her way into the high places of the Israelites with her Asherim, or wooden cult objects, and teraphim, which were little statues of her depicted as the consort of Yahweh. “Yahweh and his Asherah” was the phrase. Ba’al gained much ground through the vices of the Tyrian princess Jezebel who had been married to King Ahab of Israel. She instituted Ba’al worship in Israel, with a temple and altar in the capital city of Samaria, a worship that had plagued the fanatical Jewish priesthood for generations. The northernmost tribe of Dan, near Panias, never freed themselves from the grip of Ba’al’s golden calf worship ever since the early days of the divided monarchy.

Josiah had found the lost Book of the Covenant and instituted massive moral, legal and cultic reforms. That evil, scheming iconoclast tore down all the high places, the statues of Ba’al, the Asherim, and idols of all the host of heaven. He defiled Molech’s own main tophet at the confluence of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys. He spread the bones of the dead over the valley to make it ritually unclean for sacrifices. It was a great setback for Molech. The prophet Jeremiah had even pronounced Gehenna as a “Valley of Slaughter” for the Day of Vengeance.

The parables he just taught on this very overlook of Gehenna carried the same message.” He concluded, “As if Jerusalem will be destroyed again.” She said, “I have always assumed his words were about the judgment of the nations.” He protested, “But he seems to be prophesying that our people will reject his kingship, rather than accept it. And they will be judged just like a pagan nation.” “How could that be?” she asked. “He has always said that he has come to minister to Israel.” “Yes. But remember the tenants in the parable? They kept rejecting the landlord’s plea to bring him the fruit of the vineyard. And when the landlord sent his son, they killed him too. They wanted to steal his inheritance.” “So, the son in the story is Jesus, and the tenants are his people, Israel?” Her voice was thoughtful. He nodded. “Do you remember what Jesus said the landlord would do to the tenants?” She nodded. “He would put those miserable wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants.” He said, “And then he told the Pharisees and chief priests and their followers to their faces that the Kingdom of God would be taken away from them and given to a people producing its fruits.” “The only people other than the people of God are the Gentiles. But he said his ministry was to Israel.

A sense of guilt. A soul ends up in Gehenna not because of what she did in life, but because of the shame she feels for her choices, her failures.” She looked up at me. “Most of these people aren’t evil. They aren’t even bad.

Some souls eventually let go of their pain and find their own way out,” she said, slowly turning her attention from me to Aunt Iris. “Others stay trapped. The demonic faces you saw there—they aren’t demons. They are humans who have been in Gehenna too long. Gehenna has twisted them. Squeezed every last drop of humanity out of them. They grow so dense, so dark, so heavy that sometimes one will drop out of Gehenna and back into our reality. Their perversion causes them to tempt others into doing things that may land them in Gehenna too.” Maisie shuddered. “You’ve seen them,” she said addressing Abby. “The shadow people who always seem to be flitting at the corner of your eye. They crave the light you carry.

Foolishly, he had proclaimed his love for her in front of his friends, and now deeply regretted his words, his vulnerability, his weakness where Samara was concerned. He would never make that mistake again, yet at the same time, he couldn’t stop thinking about her and the kisses they shared. He sensed something was terribly wrong, but he refused to act—refused to humiliate himself further.

Whilst people keep repeating "its paradise"... Everything causes an equal and opposite reaction. So instead, why not try saying "here is a big compost heap (Gehenna)"; then the world might become a better place, rather then worse.

It is far, far better to earn the loyalty of the people you are forced to trust. I find that slaves make unreliable servants. Many of my enemies keep their retainers in bondage - and that, Thompson, is a very useful thing.

The notion that God made certain other things before the creation of the physical world was quite common in Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism—including wisdom, the heavenly throne, the Torah, the garden of Eden, Gehenna, the temple, and intriguingly, the name of the Messiah.27

Don’t degrade your souls to the extent of believing in curses,” Samara told them. “Nobody can curse you except your maker, and mine is patiently waiting for our return inside the Gates of Hell.

Sextus had little Aramaic, but he could hear the word 'Gehenna', the name of the refuse pit where the evil dead would be buried, being repeated over and over again.

A man was speaking intensely, passionately, with a strong accent, spattering words about him like matted glass. She closed her eyes. She didn’t understand most of it-heresy, apostasy, Gehenna-but he seemed upset about something Eorpwald had done.

A few of them might send word to Lucifer, earning his favor. Others might try to kill your baby to protect their families from the evil they believe he’s capable of. I’m sorry to say this, Samara, but he will struggle with whether he’s good or bad for the rest of his life and be forced to constantly prove he isn’t evil like his father.” Onoskelis sighed. “But somehow I get the feeling that you already knew what you’d be facing.

When the passive light, termed in scripture 'darkness,' became blended and unified with the active light, there were myriads of spiritual beings or existences, part of whom were fully developed and ready for incarnation, the rest but imperfectly so. Believing that the light and darkness were antagonistic in nature and principle, there arose a division of opinion amongst them, some declaring themselves partisans of light, others its opponents and advocates of darkness. When the mediating Logos had blended light and darkness and thus symbolized the perfect unity of the divine essence, the advanced and enlightened amongst them embraced and received the fact, whilst those only partially developed remained obdurate in their ideas and opinions and thus by their contrariety and differences of thought and the contentions and quarrels that arose therefrom, Gehenna or Hell came into existence.

There's a subdivision near us called Mill Run. By a stroke of good luck, the planners decided to line the streets with silver maples instead of those trees from the pit of Gehenna known as Bradford pears. (Bradford pears, by the way, are an abomination. I'm not using that word flippantly. They were engineered in the 1960s and because they cross-pollinate with every other kind of pear tree, their prolific offspring is destroying forests faster than kudzu. I think of them as a tree version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They're preferred by developers because they're cheap, they grow fast, and they produce malodorous but pretty white flowers in the spring, which happens to be when most home sales happen. But after the developers leave, the trees require regular pruning, a gust of wind can split them in half, and they're producing an inhospitable forest of non-native offspring that's riddled with thorns. Left unchecked, they'll soon overtake all the lovely oaks, maples, sycamores, and ashes that are native to our part of the world. Take my word for it: they're awful. If you have one in your yard, for goodness sake, cut it down and spend $25 on a maple at Lowe’s.

The actual word “hell” is used roughly twelve times in the New Testament, almost exclusively by Jesus himself. The Greek word that gets translated as “hell” in English is the word “Gehenna.” Ge means “valley,” and henna means “Hinnom.” Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was an actual valley on the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem. Gehenna, in Jesus’s day, was the city dump.

People tossed their garbage and waste into this valley. There was a fire there, burning constantly to consume the trash. Wild animals fought over scraps of food along the edges of the heap. When they fought, their teeth would make a gnashing sound. Gehenna was the place with the gnashing of teeth, where the fire never went out. Gehenna was an actual place that Jesus’s listeners would have been familiar with. So the next time someone asks you if you believe in an actual hell, you can always say, “Yes, I do believe that my garbage goes somewhere

But there were other, darker enemies, who had the power to kill the soul as well: enemies who were battling for that soul even now, during Jesus’ ministry, and who were using the more obvious enemies as a cover. Actually, it’s even worse than that. The demonic powers that are greedy for the soul of God’s people are using their very desire for justice and vengeance as the bait on the hook. The people of light are never more at risk than when they are lured into fighting the darkness with more darkness. That is the road straight to the smouldering rubbish-tip, to Gehenna, and Jesus wants his followers to be well aware of it. This is what you should be afraid of.

In all bookshops there goes on a savage Darwinian struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye-level and the works of dead men go up or down—down to Gehenna or up to the throne, but always away from any position where they will be noticed.

That Jesus is a gardener with a good heart and a green thumb should change your perspective. I promise you that your life is not so blighted that Jesus can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door that leads us away from the ugly world of Gehennas and garbage dumbs and back home to the God-intended garden.

She was a “superteacher,” although they didn’t call it that, trained to be the savior of socially excluded kids, fast-tracking through inner-city Gehennas so that one day she was destined to be head of some imploding school that she would have to try and rescue from disaster, like the captain of a sinking ship. And that was fine and good because she was atoning, but instead of joining a convent, an order of penitents (an idea she’d been tempted by), she’d become a teacher, which was probably more useful than shutting yourself away, praying every four hours, night and day, although, of course, you couldn’t be sure—it might be that cloistered women praying night and day was the only thing that was preventing some cataclysmal disaster—a meteor or global nuclear meltdown.

Sometimes we miss the immediacy of Jesus’ warnings because we project his parousia74 into the eschatological distance. When we read his parables that refer to a returning bridegroom, landlord, or king,75 we usually assume that Jesus was foretelling his second coming and the judgments of hellfire. In fact, the surprise visit/return in most of these parables probably refers initially to Jesus’ incarnation, his resurrection, or once he is rejected, to the resulting chain of events that bring down Jerusalem in AD 70. In other words, if the parousia refers to Jesus’ own generation, rather than to the end of time, then Jesus’ use of the historic destruction in Gehenna circa 587 BC is not a metaphor for John’s eschatological lake of fire. Exactly the opposite. John’s apocalyptic lake of fire is a visionary picture of Gehenna’s historic pyres, prophesied by Jesus (reiterating Jeremiah) and fulfilled in AD 70. More simply, Jerusalem’s destruction does not direct us to apocalyptic visions of fire; the heavenly visions indicate the earthly reality.

Once upon a time, in Palestine, people had made human sacrifices in the valley of Hinnon, later using the valley as a dumping ground for dead animals and executed prisoners. Cremation fires could be seen burning there night and day. With time Hinnon became Gehenna, which became the Hebrew name for the land of the dead.

the chaff here, however, burns with “unquenchable” fire (cf. Isa 66:24). Jewish people had various views of Gehinnom (or Gehenna), or hell: the wicked would burn up instantly; they would be tortured for a year and then either released or destroyed; or they would burn forever. In his message to the religious elite (v. 7) John sides with the harshest option articulated by his contemporaries.

There is no hell. The Witnesses believe hell is a mistranslation of Gehenna, which was an ancient garbage dump. They say that nonbelievers simply die at Armageddon, rather than being thrown into an inferno. “How can you have a kind and loving God who also roasts people?” he asks. I

Then the Yo-Yo was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying, "Gehenna with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!

Darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. This language in Matthew 25:30 would have been familiar to a Jewish audience. It was used to describe a place of judgment (hell, Gehenna) in literature that had been written in the centuries between the Old and New Testaments. The third steward was not a true member of the kingdom and would suffer the consequences.

The term that many English-language Bibles translate as “hell” is Gehenna (gē hinnōm) (Matt. 5: 22, 29–30; 10: 28; 23: 15, 33), which originally referred not to a place of posthumous torment but to a specific geographical location, a ravine near Jerusalem. A valley bordering Israel’s capital city on the southwest, Gehenna was named for the “sons of Hinnom (gē ben( e) hinnōm),” the biblical designation of an ancient Canaanite group that occupied the site before King David captured it about 1000 BCE. Gehenna had an evil reputation as the place where humans were sacrificed and burned as offerings to false gods, a practice that Israelite prophets vehemently condemned (Jer. 7: 31; 19: 11; 32: 35; cf. 2 Kings 23: 10; 2 Chron. 28: 3; 33: 5).

Sadly enough, there were no laws against killing one of your own, denying their existence, or even threatening a demon’s life—not in the bowels of Hell.

In part, conventional practices of translation—such as the aforementioned custom of using the single English word “hell” as a collective translation for Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus—are much to blame for this.

Hecate set her jaw straight and looked down at the demon. “Rot in Hell,” she growled. The demon smirked. "I’m already here and so are you. But I won’t be the one rotting.” He jabbed the tip of his blade into Hecate’s middle, earning a painful moan. “Smite is my name and you best not forget it. My offer stands but you won’t be able to... unless you agree.

The sea,” he says, “gave up the dead which it had in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead that they contained; and the books were opened. Moreover,” he says, “the book of life was opened, and the dead were judged out of those things that were written in the books, according to their works; and death and hell were sent into the lake of fire, the second death.” Now this is what is called Gehenna, which the Lord styled eternal fire. “And if any one,” it is said, “was not found written in the book of life, he was sent into the lake of fire.” And after this, he says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth have passed away; also there was no more sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, as a bride adorned for her husband.” “And I heard,” it is said, “a great voice from the throne, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them; and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them as their God. And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, because the former things have passed away.” Isaiah

Wilson’s weakness was to be over-literal, or to assume that his opponents were. One treatise, The Uttermost Pit, demonstrated with considerable geological learning that there could not be space within the mineral bowels of the Earth for any chambers big enough to contain all the damned souls of the ages. A third, Going to Gehenna, purported to show that the biblical references to the infernal domain were in point of fact to real places of sinister repute, and not to anywhere metaphysical. Wilson lost no opportunity to argue, with any evidence he found to hand, that there could not be any hell or Hades, and so none should fear them.

The Germanic morality cannot be arranged in a hierarchy of good qualities. There is not the slightest approach among the Teutons to a system in which one virtue is vaulted above another like a series of heavens. Such an order of precedence presupposes centralisation; all men must be united under the same condemnation before they can be classified. Neither has the Germanic mind any conception of a common moral Gehenna. Strictly speaking, evil, nidinghood, has no reality at all, but must be interpreted as a negative, a total lack of human qualities. Nidinghood is the shadow every "honour" casts according to its nature. Therefore the boundary line between admiration and contempt stands sharply, without transition stages, without any neutral grey. And therefore the boundary lies differently for different people. What makes a man a niding, a criminal and a wretch, depends on what made him a man of honour.

the name Hell, says the Catechism of the Council of Trent, signifies those hidden places where the souls are detained which have not yet reached eternal beatitude. But these prisons are of different kinds. One is a dark and gloomy dungeon, where the damned are continually tormented by evil spirits, and by a fire which is never extinguished. This place, which is Hell properly so called, is also named Gehenna and abyss. There is another Hell, which contains the fire of Purgatory. There the souls of the just suffer for a certain time, that they may become entirely purified before being admitted into their heavenly fatherland, where nothing defiled can ever enter.