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. Jesus chose that place on purpose. Once you know its story, the word he used stops sounding like a threat from God. It sounds 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 into a deep valley. In Hebrew, the old language of the people there, it was called Ge-Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom. The gospels were written in Greek, and in Greek the name became γέεννα (geenna), which we say as Gehenna. Centuries later, English Bibles put a different word in its place, and the real valley dropped out of sight.
Down in that valley was a burning place called the Tophet. There, the old history books say, children were passed through the fire for a god named Molech. People went to him when they were sure that only the gift of a child would be enough.
The kings who did it
Jerusalem was the capital of Judah, the small kingdom in the south. About seven hundred years before Christ, its king was a man named Ahaz. Armies from the north were closing in on him, and he was afraid. So he made his own son pass through the fire, the way the kings around him did. He believed a god would only save his city for a price like that.
His great-grandson Manasseh ruled Judah for fifty-five years. He did the same thing to his own son in the valley of Hinnom. Then Manasseh's grandson Josiah became king. He tore down the altars of every god but his own. He killed the priests of the hilltop shrines on their own altars. He made the Tophet unclean, so that no father could bring a child there again. So even the end of the burning came with killing.
It happened far beyond Jerusalem
Across the Jordan River to the east, Mesha, the king of Moab, lost a battle. So he took his oldest son up on the city wall, where both armies could see, and burned him as an offering.
Far to the west, on the coast of North Africa, stood the great city of Carthage. It was built by sailors from Tyre, a city on the coast just north of Israel. Outside its walls, diggers have found thousands of clay jars full of the burned bones of babies. Stones above them say a child was given to Baal Hammon and Tanit, the father god and mother goddess of the city. Judah, Moab and Carthage prayed to three different gods, and they did the very same thing.
The old fire came back
After Jesus, the old fear came back through men who wrote books and preached. About two hundred years after Christ, a church writer named Tertullian lived in Carthage. He wrote that one joy of heaven would be watching the enemies of the faith burn. Two hundred years later Augustine, a bishop in a town on that same coast, taught that babies who died before baptism would be punished after death. The children were back in the fire, and now people said the Father kept them there. 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, and you lay awake at night, scared. If so, you were told about a god much older than Jesus, the god of the valley that frightened people gave their children to.
The Father Jesus showed never wanted a single child given to the fire, and that includes the child you once were. Jesus came so that people would stop giving their children to frightened gods, and bring them home to a Father who wants them.
Read the full teaching
This is the heart of the fourth lesson in the series Many gods before and after Jesus. The full teaching tells the whole story, and the next lesson follows Jesus through the eleven times he named the valley.