5 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 408.
6 Ibid. s. 410.
terms, in a professed parable. The sense of the parable is, that the formal distinctions of this world will have no influence in the allotments of the future state, but will often be reversed there; that a righteous Providence, knowing every thing here, rules hereafter, and will dispense compensating justice to all; that men should not wait for a herald to rise from the dead to warn them, but should heed the instructions they already have, and so live in the life that now is, as to avoid a miserable condemnation, and secure a blessed acceptance, in the life that is to come. By inculcating these truths in a striking manner, through the aid of a parable based on the familiar poetical conceptions of the future world and its scenery, Christ no more endorses those conceptions than by using the Messianic phrases of the Jews he approves the false carnal views which they joined with that language. To interpret the parable literally, then, and suppose it meant to teach the actual existence of a located hell of fire for sinners after death, is to disregard the proprieties of criticism.
"Gehenna," or the equivalent phrase, "Gehenna of fire," unfortunately translated into our tongue by the word "hell," is to be found in the teachings of Christ in only five independent instances, each of which, after tracing the original Jewish usage of the term, we will briefly examine. Gehenna, or the Vale of Hinnom, is derived from two Hebrew words, the first meaning a vale, the second being the name of its owner. The place thus called was the eastern part of the beautiful valley that forms the southern boundary of Jerusalem. Here Moloch, the horrid idol god worshipped by the Ammonites, and by the Israelites during their idolatrous lapses, was set up. This monstrous idol had the head of an ox and the body of a man. It was hollow; and, being filled with fire, children were laid in its arms and devoured alive by the heat. This explains the terrific denunciations uttered by the prophets against those who made their children pass through the fire to Moloch. The spot was sometimes entitled Tophet, a place of abhorrence; its name being derived, as some think, from a word meaning to vomit with loathing, or, as others suppose, from a word signifying drum, because drums were beaten to drown the shrieks of the burning children. After these horrible rites were abolished by Josiah, the place became an utter abomination. All filth, the offal of the city, the carcasses of beasts, the bodies of executed criminals, were cast indiscriminately into Gehenna. Fires were kept constantly burning to prevent the infection of the atmosphere from the putrifying mass. Worms were to be seen preying on the relics. The primary meaning, then, of Gehenna, is a valley outside of Jerusalem, a place of corruption and fire, only to be thought of with execration and shuddering.
Now, it was not only in keeping with Oriental rhetoric, but also natural in itself, that figures of speech should be taken from these obvious and dreadful facts to symbolize any dire evil. For example, how naturally might a Jew, speaking of some foul wretch, and standing, perhaps, within sight of the place, exclaim, "He deserves to be hurled into the fires of Gehenna!" So the term would gradually become an accepted emblem of abominable punishment. Such was the fact; and this gives a perspicuous meaning to the word without supposing it to imply a fiery prison house of anguish in the future world. Isaiah threatens the King of Assyria with ruin in these terms: "Tophet is ordained of old, and prepared for the king: it is made deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it." The prophet thus portrays, with the dread imagery of Gehenna, approaching disaster and overthrow. A thorough study of the Old Testament shows that the Jews, during the period which it covers, did not believe in future rewards and punishments, but expected that all souls without discrimination would pass their shadowy dream lives in the silence of Sheol.
Between the termination of the Old Testament history and the commencement of the New, various forms of the doctrine of future retribution had been introduced or developed among the Jews. But during this period few, if any, decisive instances can be found in which the image of penal fire is connected with the future state. On the contrary, "darkness," "gloom," "blackness," "profound and perpetual night," are the terms employed to characterize the abode and fate of the wicked.
Josephus says that, in the faith of the Pharisees, "the worst criminals were banished to the darkest part of the under world." Philo represents the depraved and condemned as "groping in the lowest and darkest part of the creation. The word Gehenna is rarely found in the literature of this time, and when it is it commonly seems to be used either simply to denote the detestable Vale of Hinnom, or else plainly as a general symbol of calamity and horror, as in the elder prophets.
But in some of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, we meet repeated applications of the word Gehenna to signify a punishment by fire in the future state.7 This is a fact about which there can be no question. And to the documents showing such a usage of the word, the best scholars are pretty well agreed in assigning a date as early as the days of Christ. The evidence afforded by these Targums, together with the marked application of the term by Jesus himself, and the similar general use of it immediately after both by Christians and Jews, render it not improbable that Gehenna was known to the contemporaries of the Savior as the metaphorical name of hell, a region of fire, in the under world, where the reprobate were supposed to be punished after death. But admitting that, before Christ began to teach, the Jews had modified their early conception of the under world as the silent and sombre abode of all the dead in common, and had divided it into two parts, one where the wicked suffer, called Gehenna, one where the righteous rest, called Paradise, still, that modification having been borrowed, as is historically evident, from the Gentiles, or, if developed among themselves, at all events unconnected with revelation, of course Christianity is not involved with the truth or falsity of it, is not responsible for it. It does not necessarily follow that Jesus gave precisely the same meaning to the word Gehenna that his contemporaries or successors did. He may have used it in a modified emblematic sense, as he did many other current terms. In studying his language, we should especially free our minds both from the tyranny of pre Christian notions and dogmas and from the associations and influences of modern creeds, and seek to interpret it in the light of his own instructions and in the spirit of his own mind.
We will now examine the cases in which Christ uses the term
Gehenna, and ask what it means.
First: "Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou vile wretch! shall be in danger of the fiery Gehenna." Interpret this literally, and it teaches that whosoever calls his brother a