“Gehenna, 'the fire of hell'”
Matthew 5:22
Foreign wordSettledJesus
…anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be subject to the fire of hell. (Matthew 5:22 BSB)
* Greek: Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine outside Jerusalem.
What it sounds like today
'Hell,' an abstract otherworldly realm.
The cultural key
The word is Gehenna: the Valley of Hinnom, a real ravine south of Jerusalem where kings had burned children to Molech (Jeremiah 7:31). Jeremiah cursed it as the 'Valley of Slaughter,' and by Jesus' day it had become the standing byword for fiery judgment. (The popular claim that it was Jerusalem's burning garbage dump first appears around AD 1200 and has no ancient evidence; a good caution about tidy explanations.)
Recovered meaning
Jesus points at a literal cursed valley his hearers could walk to, a place of Israel's worst betrayals, and makes it the picture of where contempt and evil finally lead.
Parallels: Mark 9:43–47