-Caveat Lector-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/
1999-08/29/001r-082999-idx.html
Early Jews believed dead people, good and bad, all descended
to the same destination, a nondescript underworld called Sheol.
"There is no concrete Jewish vision of the afterlife..."
HELL ON EARTH
The scorched rockwalls of a valley below Jerusalem are saturated
with the blood of untold abominations. This is the pit, the root
of our worst fears.
By Edwin Black
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, August 29, 1999; Page F01
Below the Old City walls in Jerusalem there is a ravine that begins
as a gentle, grassy separation between hills, then quickly descends
south into the rocky earth. Eventually the ravine becomes a steep,
craggy depth, scarred on its far side by shallow caves and pits
pocked by hollowed-out chambers and narrow crypts.
Everywhere you see scorches and smolder from trash fires.
Rivulets of urine trickle down from open sewers at the cliffs
above, watering thorn bushes, weeds and unexpected clumps of grass
among the outcroppings. You smell the stench of decaying offal,
the congealed stink of putrefied garbage and the absorbed reek of
incinerated substances seared into the rock face. Crows circle
low. Worms and maggots slither throughout.
Listen. Imagine. Some cannot help but hear the tormented screams
of babies being burned alive, the macabre incantations of the
idolatrous in gruesome celebration, the agonized cries of helpless
victims, and so many echoes of death and disconsolation that dwell
here so pervasively not even the centuries can silence them.
Welcome to Hell. Some say the real Hell -- or at least one of the
central prototypes for our modern concept of that horrific place.
This is Jerusalem's Gei Ben Hinnom, the Valley of the Sons of
Hinnom. The valley was named for an alien nonsemitic family, the
Hinnom clan that predated the First Temple period a thousand years
before the Christian era, and established the locale as a place of
abomination. Gei Ben Hinnom became Ge Hinnom (Valley of Hinnom),
and eventually Gehenna in English or Gehennem in Arabic and Hebrew.
Those who walked through the biblical Valley of the Shadow of Death
walked here. Hellish images of unending torture and fire as
punishment for a life of evil owe much to this hideous acreage,
just a short walk from the path of righteousness that leads to
the Temple Mount.
Hellish Sacrifice
Perhaps it is fitting that the path to Hell begins delightfully.
In recent years, the northern and inoffensive length of the valley
has become a zone of chic Israeli gentrification: exquisite town
homes, landscaped parks, a concert bowl at the Sultan's Pool and
movie theaters. But, as the ravine carves deeper and deeper
between the rocky hills, and as it rounds the corners of Mount Zion
into East Jerusalem en route to the Arab village of Silwan, Gei Ben
Hinnom conjoins with the Valley of Kidron. Here it traverses a
stretch that has become a sort of urban no-man's-land in the
struggle between Arab and Israeli.
As land that defies political peace, this is the only part of
the valley that Arabs cannot improve and that Jews dare not.
Therefore, little has changed here for centuries. Still visible
are the original, deep angular cuts into the flat scorched stone
that held the infamous Tophet, pagan altars created hundreds of
years before Christ. Tophet altars are said to be named for the
noisy drum that devotees of the mysterious dark god Molech would
beat to drown out the ghastly cries of children immolated in
sacrifice in front of their own willing parents.
In the black rapture of their faith, mothers and fathers not only
witnessed the sacrifice, but glorified the act. Beneath the
ancient Tophet altars, one can still see foreboding square
entryways barely big enough for a human torso to squeeze through.
Within those depths lay a complex of carved-out crypts, as well as
chambers for ritual preparation of the sacrificial victims.
Little is known about Molech. Some archaeologists speculate that
the Molech idol in Gei Ben Hinnom was equipped with outstretched,
cantilevered arms that extended a small platform upon which the
innocent baby was tied. Slowly the platform would swivel toward
the consuming flames as the baby shrieked in helpless agony. No
wonder this most hideous place is the focus of so much biblical
wrath: "He defiled Tophet, which is in the Valley of Ben Hinnom,
so that no one would make a son or a daughter pass through fire
as an offering to Molech" (II Kings 23:10).
"Therefore the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when this
place shall no more be called Tophet, or the Valley of the Sons
of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter" (Jeremiah 19:16).
The Hinges of Hades
But how did a very authentic site of pagan abomination help define
the concept of eternal punishment we call Hell?
Two separate dynamics have been at play for centuries. The first
is the concept of eternal punishment in death for evildoers. The
second is the site of that punishment. Both have changed radically
over time.
Early Jews believed dead people, good and bad, all descended to
the same destination, a nondescript underworld called Sheol.
"There is no concrete Jewish vision of the afterlife," says Rabbi
Shalom Carmy, Yeshiva University professor of Jewish studies and
philosophy and author of a just-released book, "A Jewish
Perspective on the Experience of Suffering."
"Sheol is a place of silence, a place where not even the service
of God continues."
But if afterlife in Sheol was nothing to fear, it was certainly
nothing to look forward to. Ecclesiastes 9:5 declares, "The dead
know nothing and they have no reward."
Ancient Israel, however, was a crossroads, populated by descendants
of disparate tribes. Conquest by foreign armies brought foreign
ideas that slowly crept into the Jewish mind-set. By the 7th
century B.C., Isaiah's writings in 26:19 suggest that "dead corpses
shall rise awake and sing."
And Isaiah frequently predicts a punishment by fire for the wicked.
The Book of Daniel also predicts resurrection for the godly, and
"shame and everlasting contempt" for evildoers.
But earnest Judeo-Christian notions of posthumous reward and
punishment for earthly goodness or sin probably originated with
the widespread influence of the 6th century B.C. reform Persian
prophet Zoroaster and his followers. Zoroastrianism taught that
the universe was ruled by two antagonistic gods: the Divine,
who dwelled above, and the Lord of Lies, who inhabited a vile
underworld. Those judged to have lived a good life were ushered
upward, to the Divine. Bad people went below.
By the time of the Pharisees and a Christian precursor sect known
as the Essenes in the 2nd century B.C., a school of Judaic thinkers
embraced the ideal of immortal resurrection for the good and
damnation for sinners, explains Alice K. Turner in "The History
of Hell."
But the idea was far from universally accepted. Christianity took
centuries to restate, redefine, enhance and finally codify the
conflicting Judaic views on death and eternal judgment. The
process began in the books of the New Testament, especially as
the words of Jesus were recalled and interpreted in parables.
Heaven is identified as the destination for godly people. For the
unrepentant and wicked, images of Sodom's fiery destruction and
burning furnaces of divine retribution are everywhere. Matthew
13:41-42 warns that evildoers will be "thrown into a furnace of
fire." Revelation speaks of a "lake of fire" awaiting the damned.
But the references were scattered, and sometimes contradictory.
Acrimonious debates over whether references to "eternal damnation"
were real or symbolic were eventually settled as part of fierce
church politics. Damnation was determined to be real.
In the 4th century, Augustine insisted, "Hell, which is also called
a lake of fire and brimstone, will be material fire and torment to
the bodies of the damned."
But where would all this take place? The first geographic
specifics on Hell were probably invented by the Greeks. Hades --
the colorful underworld of Greek myth -- was originally the same
kind of nullity as the ancient Hebrew idea of Sheol. The word
Hades came from the Greek term a des, which means only "the unseen"
or concealed. Those who inhabited Hades -- good and bad alike --
were known as "shades," who existed as nonentities. But great
poets and philosophers, such as Plato, Homer, Virgil and Ovid,
eventually contributed much of the gore and dismal landscape in
classics such as "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid," according to
Turner.
The first Christian attempts to describe Hell owed much to the
Greeks. When Dante penned "The Divine Comedy" in the early 14th
century, he upped the ante. So convincing was his fantastic
architecture of Hell that in the 1500s Galileo was moved to
calculate the precise location of the opening to Dante's Hell:
He pegged it at 405 15/22 miles below the surface of the Earth.
The impact of Dante's "Inferno" changed the very language. The
word inferno derives from the Latin word inferus, which means below
or underneath. But because of "The Divine Comedy's" popular impact
-- and only because of it -- the word inferno eventually took on
the meaning of a burning place. It came to mean Hell itself.
Milton more or less completed the imagery of Hell when he wrote
"Paradise Lost" in the 17th century, furnishing it with dungeons,
fiery deluges, burning sulfur and of course awful devils and
demons.
"These images were already developing from the 6th century right
through the 13th," says David Rodier, American University's
chairman of the department of philosophy and religion. "But
Milton fixed the picture to the English-speaking world."
Where in Hell . . .
So now the world knew what to expect from Hell. It remained only
to locate it. The earliest Judaic notions of the geography of
damnation began in Heaven, a literal location in the clouds where
God and His angels dwelled. But within that white-as-snow world,
there was also a dark place of torment and punishment, arguably
the first location of Hell. In an apocryphal book written between
testaments, Enoch offers the following vision: "And they brought
me to the place of darkness, and to a mountain the point of whose
summit reached to heaven. And I came to a river in which the fire
flows like water."
In the next chapter Enoch quotes an angel explaining, "This place
is the end of heaven and earth: This has become a prison for the
stars and the host of heaven [which] have transgressed the
commandment of the Lord."
By the time the books of the New Testament were penned, there were
21 references translated as "hell," which speak of a detestable
place of fire and damnation. This is where the term Gehenna begins
to appear.
Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, had a lot going for it in the
hellishness department. It had already been singled out as an
abomination involving the sins of human sacrifice, torture by fire,
and eternal dishonor for the dead. Hinnom's ghastly child
sacrifice was halted only in the 7th century B.C. when Josiah
overran the valley and desecrated its altars with bones.
Eventually, part of Gei Ben Hinnom became a dump, with constant
day and night burning of trash fires emitting a sulfurous stench.
Another portion of the ravine became a cesspool receiving the
sewage of Jerusalem. Indeed, Essenes and other holy men, believing
Jerusalem too holy for defecation, fastidiously carried their dung
out past the city walls, where they channeled it down to the
valley.
What's more, Hinnom was a final resting place for those shamed in
death. Proper burial was vital under Judaic law, both to combat
the necromancy of early Semitic tribes and to show respect for the
cessation of God's most precious gift. The dishonored and unclean
were not entitled to a proper Jewish burial within the city.
Dishonored corpses were disposed of in the reviled Valley of
Hinnom. Those without family to make arrangements were interred
in the potter's field -- a place where potters worked -- situated
at one end of the valley, the origin of the term "potter's field"
for a burial ground for the lowly.
And according to Greek Orthodox tradition, the valley at Ben Hinnom
even figures in the ultimate act of evil: Judas dejectedly
relinquished to the priests the 30 pieces of silver he received for
his betrayal of Jesus, blood money used to purchase a tract of land
that later became the Convent of St. Onuphrious, which today
straddles a cliff above the deepest stretch of Gehenna.
The abbey's toilets flush into a crude pipe that regularly drizzles
onto the valley below. No wonder the Hinnom ravine became
off-limits for all but the unpure. No wonder Gehenna was a symbol
of damnation. No wonder in Matthew's many references to the
defilement and torment of Hell, the word used is actually
"Gehenna."
Matthew warns in 5:29: "So if your right eye causes you to sin,
take it out and throw it away! It is better to lose a part of
your body than to have your whole body thrown into Hell."
The connection between a sinner's body being thrown into Hell, and
literally tossed into a hole in the ground in an unconsecrated
burial, is more than coincidence.
"By this time in Christian thought, Gehenna is being used as a
contrast to paradise," asserts Walter Mickel, professor of Old
Testament at Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology. "Gehenna has
now become the bad place for an afterlife. What was the metaphor,
that is, the afterlife, becomes the reality. And the physical
place becomes the metaphor. Matthew clearly combined all these
ideas."
So pervasive was the medieval notion of Gehenna as Hell that it
influenced not only Christianity, but much of Jewish thought as
well.
"From the 3rd to the 6th centuries, Talmudic tractates wrote of
Gehenna as a place of torment," says David Kraemer, professor of
Talmud and rabbinics at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
He cites several passages to make his point. One declares, "The
wicked at a future time will be under sentence to suffer in
Gehenna."
Another reads, "The wicked do not repent even at the Gates of
Gehenna."
The Road to Hell
It turns out it's not easy to get to the uttermost depths of Hell.
No Jewish taxi will drive there because strangers and Israelis are
frequently stoned by embittered villagers. So hire an Arab taxi
to drive down a service ramp, and then along the filthy trek that
is Gehenna. Even the Arab driver will resist. Pay extra.
When the taxi can proceed no farther down, get out and scramble up
a short rocky ridge. Two scruffy Arab boys across the way may
jeer, wagging their fingers and shouting warnings to turn back.
Disregard them, and walk to the edge of the cliff face.
There you'll find a great cave, its arched entrance guarded by
six-foot-high thorn bushes. Impenetrable. Urine from the
unsewered toilet in the convent above -- the very convent that
legend claims to be founded with Jesus's blood money -- trickles
from its open pipe down the escarpment and over the cave's
entrance. Feces from man and beast lie everywhere. Rodents dart
and snakes slither.
Here is the lowest point of Gei Ben Hinnom. The absolute pit.
On either side of the cave entrance, hung from spikes driven into
the rock, are twine-strangled jackals, angry snarls frozen in
death.
This essay is based on research conducted for Edwin Black's recent
apocalyptic novel, "Format C:," published by Brookline Books.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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