{"id":2506,"date":"2011-04-07T11:12:54","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T16:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/biblearchive.com\/blog\/?p=2506"},"modified":"2011-04-07T11:12:54","modified_gmt":"2011-04-07T16:12:54","slug":"ah-gehenna-rey-didnt-start-the-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblearchive.com\/blog\/ah-gehenna-rey-didnt-start-the-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Ah, Gehenna: Rey Didn’t Start The Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my post on Gehenna<\/a> (part of my Hellish Week<\/a>) I made a statement that I had read in several places and which needs to be retracted because it is historical dubious. Here is what I said:<\/p>\n

What they forget to mention is that the site wasn\u2019t merely for garbage; it was a place for burning. The place wasn\u2019t only a dump, it was a crematorium. The bodies of dead criminals were thrown and consumed there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And you\u2019ll find this elsewhere. For example, Hagner (WBC) states (117):<\/p>\n

The name Gehenna is from the Aramaic words \u05d2\u05bc\u05b5\u05d9 \u05d7\u05b4\u05e0\u05bc\u05b8\u05dd, g\u00ea \u1e25inn\u0101m, for the \u201cvalley of Hinnom\u201d (cf. Josh 15:8; 18:16), a despised place to the southwest of Jerusalem where at one time human sacrifices were offered to the god Molech (cf. 2 Kgs 23:10; Jer 7:31) and where in later times the city\u2019s refuse was burned. The constant burning there made the valley a particularly suitable metaphor for eternal punishment<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or in the NET it reads:<\/p>\n

This was the valley along the south side of Jerusalem. In OT times it was used for human sacrifices to the pagan god Molech (cf. Jer 7:31; 19:5\u20136; 32:35), and it came to be used as a place where human excrement and rubbish were disposed of and burned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the Analytical Lexicon of the New Testament\u2019s article on Gehenna states that it is<\/p>\n

…literally valley of Hinnom, a ravine south of Jerusalem where fires were kept burning to consume the dead bodies of animals, criminals, and refuse; figuratively in the Gospels and James for hell, a fiery place of eternal punishment for the ungodly dead<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem is that this seems to lack historical evidence. From a footnote (Bibliotheca Sacra 155 (Jan.-Mar. 1998) 324-37) conveniently found here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The traditional explanation that\u00a0a burning\u00a0rubbish heap in the\u00a0Valley\u00a0of\u00a0Hinnom
\nsouth\u00a0of\u00a0Jerusalem\u00a0gave rise to the idea of a fiery\u00a0Gehenna\u00a0of judgment is attributed to
\nRabbi David\u00a0Kimhi’s\u00a0commentary on Psalm 27:13 (ca. A.D. 1200).\u00a0He maintained that
\nin\u00a0this loathsome valley fires were kept burning perpetually to consume the filth and
\ncadavers\u00a0thrown into it. However,\u00a0Strack\u00a0and\u00a0Billerbeck\u00a0state that there is neither
\narcheological\u00a0nor literary evidence in support of this claim, in either the earlier intertestamental\u00a0or the later rabbinic sources (Hermann L.\u00a0Strack\u00a0and Paul\u00a0Billerbeck, Kommentar\u00a0zum\u00a0Neuen\u00a0Testament\u00a0aus\u00a0Talmud and\u00a0Midrasch<\/em>, 5 vols. [Munich: Beck,1922-56], 4:2:1030).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I quickly consulted more of my sources for example Davies & Allison (ICC, p515):<\/p>\n

The standard view, namely, that the valley was where the city\u2019s garbage was incinerated and that the constantly rising smoke and smell of corruption conjured up the fiery torments of the damned, is without ancient support, although it could be correct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…but I could find only a few that committed to saying the same thing. They almost all say that it is a place of continually burning garbage, some (like the dictionary article above) add the cadavers.<\/p>\n

Keith Keyser<\/a> brought this all to my attention (via email) by linking to an article over at the Bible Places blog<\/a> which went back to a post by McBride<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, this wasn\u2019t a fundamental point to my post (that the place had burning garbage and corpses) since I based most of my conclusions based on what Christ was saying about Gehenna. So all my previous points, I think, still stand: Gehenna is a bad place that is to be shunned. If this corpse and garbage burning is non-historical then I actually think it makes Jesus\u2019 usage all the harder to refute\u2014but we don\u2019t know, so I retract it for honesty’s sake. It sounds pretty good, it might very well be true, but as of right now, based on my scanning, we only have evidence from some twelve hundred years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my post on Gehenna (part of my Hellish Week) I made a statement that I had read in several places and which needs to be retracted because it is historical dubious. Here is what I said: What they forget to mention is that the site wasn\u2019t merely for garbage; it was a place for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,11],"tags":[613,612,123],"class_list":["post-2506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apologetics","category-eschatology","tag-gehenna","tag-hell","tag-historicity"],"yoast_head":"\nAh, Gehenna: Rey Didn't Start The Fire - Rey Reynoso's Bible Archive<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/biblearchive.com\/blog\/ah-gehenna-rey-didnt-start-the-fire\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ah, Gehenna: Rey Didn't Start The Fire - Rey Reynoso's Bible Archive\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In my post on Gehenna (part of my Hellish Week) I made a statement that I had read in several places and which needs to be retracted because it is historical dubious. 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