Jesus's Word for "Hell" Was a Real Place You Can Visit
Did you know that when Jesus said "hell" in the Gospels, the Greek word He used was the name of a real geographic location south of Jerusalem — a place His listeners could see from the city walls?
The Greek word is γέεννα (Gehenna). It comes from the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom — the Valley of Hinnom — a specific valley running along the southern edge of Old Jerusalem. The place still exists. You can walk it today.
The valley's history is what makes Jesus's choice of word so loaded. In the centuries before Jesus, the Valley of Hinnom was the site of one of Israel's most appalling sins: child sacrifice to the Canaanite god Molech. King Ahaz "burned his sons as an offering, according to the abominations of the nations" in this valley (2 Chronicles 28:3). King Manasseh did the same (2 Chronicles 33:6). The prophets recorded the horror — Jeremiah 7:31 — "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 did not command, nor did it come into my mind."
When King Josiah came to power (~640 BC), one of his major reforms was to "defile Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech" (2 Kings 23:10). He desecrated the place — by tradition, with human bones and refuse — to make it permanently unfit for worship.
By the Second Temple period — the world Jesus walked through — the Valley of Hinnom had become Jerusalem's perpetually-burning garbage dump. Refuse was thrown over the city walls into the valley below. Bodies of executed criminals and unburied animals were dumped there too. Fires burned continuously. Smoke and the smell of decay rose toward the city. Jerusalem's residents would have known the sight, the sound, and the smell all their lives.
So when Jesus says "γέεννα" 11 times in the Gospels — translated "hell" in English Bibles — He's not naming an abstract afterlife concept. He's pointing at a specific, terrible place His audience could see: the valley where children had been burned to a false god, the place King Josiah had desecrated to break the spell of idolatry, the dump where bodies and refuse burned in perpetual fire. The smoke was visible from the temple mount.
The Reformed concern with the modern Western "hell" discussion is that we've made it abstract — a future state, a theological concept, a debate topic. Jesus made it concrete. He used the most vivid, sensory, geographically present image available to His audience. The doctrine of eternal judgment isn't compromised by the geographic referent — it's sharpened. Hell isn't a polite metaphor for "consequences." It's the burning valley where the children were sacrificed, made eternal.
When Jesus said "hell," He pointed at smoke His listeners could see from the city walls.
📖 Passages: Matthew 5:22, 5:29-30, 10:28, 18:9, 23:15, 23:33, Mark 9:43-48, Luke 12:5, James 3:6 (all the NT Gehenna references); 2 Kings 23:10, 2 Chronicles 28:3, 33:6, Jeremiah 7:31, 32:35 (the OT Valley of Hinnom passages)