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)