Saturday, January 9, 2021

Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle on "Gehenna" and the problem with the "Garbage Dump" Interpretation of Jesus' Teachings about Hell

Some who hold to a form of conditional immortality tend to argue that “hell” does not include the concept of conscious punishment, based on the claim that “Gehenna” was a garbage dump, so, they argue, such means a person will be annihilated as punishment. In response to Rob Bell (who I will note, is not the best defender of such a view, he just is one of the most popular [the best would be the late Edward Fudge as well as Chris Date, IMO]). In response to Bell’s Love Wins, where he argues this, Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle (who are hardly ultra-conservatives, especially Sprinkle) noted the problems with such an apologetic:

 

But if Jesus was really referring to the literal city dump when He spoke of gehenna, then many of His statements are awkward to say the least:

 

“Whoever says, ‘you fool’! will be liable to the garbage dump of fire.” (Matt. 5:22)

 

“It is better than you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into the garbage dump.” (Matt. 5:29)

 

“Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in the garbage dump.” (Matt. 10:28)

 

“It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the garbage dump of fire.” (Matt. 18:9)

 

Also, Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees that they have made themselves “twice as much a child of the garbage dump” and then He asks, “How will you escape being condemned to the garbage dump?” (Matt. 23:15, 33, adapted).

 

While I applaud Bell’s attempt to understand Jesus in His first-century Jewish context, his “Gehenna is a garbage dump” theory is both misleading and inaccurate. Here’s why.

 

First, it’s misleading because it confuses the source of an idea for the idea itself (In linguistic terms, Bell confuses the referent with the sense. See D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996], 63-64). Just because Jesus’ description of hell may have been inspired by the image of a burning garbage dump (if it was) doesn’t mean that He is referring to the actual garbage dump when He uses the word Gehenna. For example, I’ve often heard people refer to a gridlocked freeway as a parking lot. The statement is inspired by a literal parking lot, but nobody is claiming that people drive to the freeway, stop, lock their cars, and then go about their business. That’ just the way imagery works. So to say that Jesus was referring to an actual dump is to misunderstand the way language functions.

 

Second, the “gehenna is a garbage dump” suggestion is also inaccurate. The whole theory actually stands on very shaky evidence. Some commentaries and pastors still promote the idea, but there’s no evidence from the time of Jesus than the Hinnom Valley (gehenna literally means “Valley of Hinnom”) was the town dump. In fact, there is no evidence for hundreds and hundreds of years after Jesus that there ever was a garbage dump in the Hinnom Valley in the first century. Nor is there any archaeological evidence that this valley was ever a dump (See Lloyd R. Bailey, “Gehenna: The Topography of Hell,” Biblical Archaeologist 49.3 [1986]:187-81) (if it was a dump, we’d be able to dig around and find evidence). In fact, the first reference we have to the Hinnom Valley, or gehenna, as a town dump is made by a rabbi named David Kimhi in a commentary, which was written in AD 1200.

 

AD 1200! That’s over a thousand years after Jesus lived! This is the first time that the Hinnom Valley was ever associated with the town dump. Here’s the quote from Kimhi:

 

Gehenna is a repugnant place, into which filth and cadavers are thrown, and in which fires perpetually burn in order to consume the filth and bones; on which account, by analogy, the judgment of the wicked is called “Gehenna” (Cited in Bailey, “Gehenna,” 188).

 

Kimhi, writing in the late Middle Ages—from Europe, by the way, not Israel—is the first one to make this suggestion. So here’s the problem: What are the chances that Jesus is thinking of this won dump in using the term gehenna when we have no evidence that there was such a place until over a thousand years after He lived? There’s no evidence in the piles and piles of Jewish and Christian writings preceding the time of Kimhi and the word gehenna was derived from the burning garbage in the Hinnom Valley.

 

And did you notice what Kimhi himself said about the word gehenna? He said that the garbage dump of “gehenna” became an “analogy” for “the judgment of the wicked.” So, even the first writer to connect gehenna with the garbage dump saw it as an analogy for the place where the wicked will be judged.

 

Much of what Bell says about hell relies upon a legend from the Middle Ages.

 

So what was it about the Hinnom Valley that forged the word gehenna into an image of fiery judgement? In the Old Testament, the Hinnom Valley was the place where some Israelites engaged in idolatrous worship of the Canaanite gods Molech and Baal. It was here, in fact, where they sacrificed their children to these gods (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6) making them “pass through the fire” (Ezek. 16:20-21 NASB). When Jeremiah began to preach, the Hinnom Valley started to take on a metaphorical reference for the place where the bodies of the wicked would be cast (Jer. 7:29-34; 19:6-9; 32:35): “Behold, the days are coming . . . when it will no more be called . . . the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter” (Jer. 7:32). Jews living between the Testaments picked up on this metaphor and ran with it. The word gehenna was widely used by Jews during the time of Jesus to refer to the firry place of judgment for the wicked in the end times, as we have seen (On gehenna, see Freedman, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2.296-298. For early Jewish references to gehenna as the place of punishment for the wicked, see 1 En.. 26-27; 54:1-6; 56:1-4; 90:24-27; 4 Ezra 7:26-38; Ascen. Is. 4:14-18; Sib. Or. 4.179-81). (Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle, Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity, and the Things We’ve Made Up [Colorado Springs, Colo.: David C. Cook, 2011], 58-61)

 

For more, see:


Nathan Eubank on Gehenna Purifying People of their Sins (and a note on Hebrews 9:27)