When Jesus wanted to name the worst place a person could end up, he did not make up a new word. He named a real valley that anyone in Jerusalem could walk to in a few minutes. Long before he was born, fathers had stood in that valley and handed their own children to a god. Then they watched them burn. Jesus chose that place on purpose. Once you know its story, the word he used stops sounding like a threat from God. It starts to sound like a warning about what people do when they serve a god who wants children.
The valley below the city
Jerusalem sits up on hills, and on its south side the ground drops away into a deep valley. In Hebrew, the old language of the people there, it was called Ge-Hinnom, which means the valley of Hinnom. The gospels were written in Greek, and in Greek the name became γέεννα (geenna), "the valley of Hinnom." Centuries later, English Bibles put an old word for the world of the dead in its place, and the valley dropped out of sight.
Down in that valley was a spot called the Tophet, a word that seems to mean a fire pit or a burning place. The old books of the kings say this was where children were passed through the fire for a god named Molech. His name sounds a lot like the old word for king. People went to him when they were sure that only the gift of a child would be enough.
In the first lesson we saw a world where every people had its own god to fight for it. Molech was that same belief at its very worst.
The kings who did it
Jerusalem was the capital of Judah, the small southern kingdom that was left when King Solomon died and his land split in two. The old history books name two kings of Judah who brought their own sons to the fire.
The first was Ahaz, who ruled about seven hundred years before Christ. Armies from the north were closing in on his little country, and he was afraid. So he made his son pass through the fire, the way the kings around him did. He gave up the dearest thing he had, because he believed a god would only save his city for a price like that.
The second was Manasseh, the great-grandson of Ahaz, and he ruled Judah for fifty-five years, longer than any other king. He built back the altars his father had torn down. He even set up altars to the stars right inside the temple yards. Then he made his own son pass through the fire too. A second old book tells the same history again, and it says this happened in the valley of Hinnom itself.
Then came Josiah, the grandson of Manasseh, who was only eight years old when he became king. When he grew up, he set out to tear down the altar of every god but his own. He smashed the stone pillars. He burned the wooden poles of Asherah, a mother goddess people prayed to for babies and good crops. In the north he killed the priests of the hilltop shrines right on their own altars. When he came to the Tophet, he made it unclean. That way no father could ever bring a son or a daughter there for Molech again. From then on, the valley was a ruined and shameful place, and people said its name with a shiver.
So even the end of the burning came with killing. One king gave his child to a god, and another king stopped it by killing other men for their gods. Both of them did what kings did in that world, and both were sure they were doing what heaven wanted.
It happened far beyond Jerusalem
In the earlier lessons we met Mesha, the king of Moab, the land across the Jordan River to the east. When a war went badly for him, he took his oldest son up on the city wall. There, where both armies could see, he burned the boy as an offering. The children of Hinnom were not alone.
Far to the west, on the coast of North Africa, stood the great city of Carthage. It was built by Phoenicians, sailors and traders who came from the coast north of Galilee, from cities like Tyre. They prayed to Baal Hammon, a father god they believed gave them their crops and their land. They also prayed to Tanit, a goddess they called the face of Baal, who kept watch over their city.
Outside the walls of Carthage, diggers have found a large burial field, and they named it the tophet after the valley in Jerusalem. It holds thousands and thousands of clay jars. The jars are full of the burned bones of babies and very small children. Many of the jars sit under stones with words carved on them. The words say a child was given to Baal Hammon and to Tanit, because the god heard a mother's or a father's prayer. People used that field for about six hundred years, until the Romans burned Carthage to the ground.
A Greek writer named Diodorus, who wrote down history a little before Christ, tells about one terrible year. An enemy army was camped outside Carthage, and the leaders of the city were afraid. So they gave two hundred children from the richest families to the fire.
Families in Judah, in Moab and in Carthage prayed to three different gods, and they did the very same thing. Each of them believed its god was real, and each of them believed that god wanted their children.
Jesus knew this valley's story, and the next lesson, Eleven Times He Named the Valley, follows him through the eleven times he said its name out loud.
The old fire came back
About six hundred years after Josiah ruined the Tophet, Jesus said the valley's name to warn people. After him, the old fear came back, and this time it came through men who wrote books and preached in churches. About two hundred years after Christ, a church writer named Tertullian lived in Carthage. He wrote that one of the joys of heaven would be to watch kings and enemies of the faith burn down below. He grew up in the same city where the burial field was full of children's bones. Now he put the fire in God's hands.
About two hundred years after that came Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, a town down the coast from Carthage. He taught that babies who died before they were baptized would be punished after death. He said it was the mildest punishment of all, but he still called it punishment. The children were back in the fire, and this time people said it was the Father himself who kept them there.
How the valley became a place of endless pain in people's minds is a longer story that another teaching tells. None of it came from Jesus.
What he gives you
Maybe you were told as a child that God would burn you forever if you got something wrong. Maybe you lay awake at night, scared of a fire you could not see, and you never told anyone. If so, you were told about a god much older than Jesus. You were told about the god of the valley, the one frightened people gave their children to.
The Father Jesus showed us never wanted a single child given to the fire, and that includes the child you once were. You were never meant to be handed over to anything. Jesus came so that people would stop giving their children to frightened gods and start bringing them to a Father who wants them home, and every time one person sets down that old fear, his voice reaches a little further.