Lexicon

G1067 - geenna

Strong's: G1067 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: gheh'-en-nah Part of speech: noun, feminine Root: transliterated from Hebrew gê ben-Hinnōm (גֵּי בֶן הִנֹּם), "Valley of the Son of Hinnom," via Aramaic gēhinnām NT occurrences: 12, 11 of which come from the lips of Jesus; 1 in James 3:6

Semantic range

Geographic origin (OT), the Valley of Hinnom, a deep ravine running south-southwest of Jerusalem (now Wadi er-Rababi). Border between the tribal allotments of Judah and Benjamin (Joshua 15:8; 18:16).
Site of child-sacrifice to Molech (OT), under apostate kings Ahaz (2 Kings 16:3; 2 Chron 28:3) and Manasseh (2 Kings 21:6; 2 Chron 33:6); cursed and renamed by Jeremiah "the Valley of Slaughter" (Jer 7:30-32; 19:1-13; 32:35) when YHWH judged it via Babylon.
Intertestamental Jewish development, gēhinnām becomes the standard Second-Temple Jewish locus of eschatological judgment of the wicked (1 Enoch 27:1-4; 54:1-6; 90:26-27; 2 Baruch 59:10; 4 Ezra 7:36; Sibylline Oracles 1.103; 4.186; Targum Isaiah; rabbinic tradition through m. Eduyot 2.10, b. Eruvin 19a, etc.). Jesus' audience already understood the term without explanation.
NT use, the final-judgment fate of the unrighteous; usually paired with "fire" (to pyr tēs geennēs, "the fire of gehenna," Matt 5:22; 18:9; to pyr aionion, "the eternal fire," in adjacent contexts).

Theological force

Geenna is Jesus' word for final judgment

The first-order datum: of the 12 NT uses, 11 are spoken by Jesus himself; the only exception is James 3:6 (and James is the brother of Jesus, plausibly carrying his vocabulary). No other NT speaker uses the term, not Paul, not Peter, not John in his epistles, not Luke in Acts. The reigning NT word for "hell" comes from Jesus, not from later Hellenistic accretion.

This is a substantive point against the popular thesis that Christian doctrine of hell is a Greek-philosophical or Augustinian invention. Lexically, the burden runs the other way: hell-language enters Christianity at the earliest possible point, Jesus' own ministry, and from the most Jewish vocabulary stratum (an Aramaic transliteration of a Hebrew place-name), not from Hellenistic-philosophical Hades or Greco-Roman Tartaros.

Distinguished from Hades and Tartaros

NT eschatological vocabulary is precise:

Hades (G0086, ᾅδης), the intermediate state, the realm of the dead between death and resurrection. Appears 10× in NT (Matt 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Rev 1:18; 6:8; 20:13, 14). At the final judgment, "death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire" (Rev 20:14), Hades itself is judged, indicating Hades is not the final state.
Tartaros (verb form G5020, tartaroō; used once at 2 Peter 2:4), a holding cell for fallen angels awaiting judgment. Greek mythological loan-word; Peter uses it once with no further development.
Geenna, the final state of the wicked, post-resurrection-and-judgment. Distinct from the intermediate state.

The lake-of-fire imagery in Revelation 19:20; 20:10, 14-15; 21:8 functions as a Johannine apocalyptic equivalent of the Synoptic geenna, same referent (final-state judgment), different vocabulary.

Fire imagery, OT-rooted, not Greek

The pairing of geenna with fire (to pyr tēs geennēs) is anchored in the OT memory of the valley itself: child-sacrifice involved burning (Lev 18:21; 20:2-5; Deut 12:31; 18:10). The valley's reputation for fire predates Jesus by centuries, it is the place of unholy burning in the canonical memory. The popular medieval tradition that "Gehenna was Jerusalem's garbage dump" (perpetually-burning trash heap) is post-rabbinic and unsupported by any first-century evidence (no archaeological or textual confirmation; the tradition appears first in David Kimchi, c. AD 1200). The biblical-theological fire imagery is the Molech-and-judgment imagery of Jeremiah, not municipal sanitation.

Notable verses

Sermon on the Mount block (Matthew 5)

Matthew 5:22, "whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery geenna"
Matthew 5:29, "it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into geenna"
Matthew 5:30, parallel to 5:29 with the right hand

Body-and-soul block

Matthew 10.28, "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in geenna." Cornerstone verse against pure-soul-only annihilationism and against the materialist "death is the end" thesis. Distinct from physical death.
Luke 12:5, synoptic parallel

Severance imagery (Matthew 18 / Mark 9)

Matthew 18:9, "It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery geenna"
Mark 9:43, "to go into geenna, into the unquenchable fire"
Mark 9:45, "to be cast into geenna"
Mark 9:47, "to be cast into geenna", paired with Isaiah 66:24 ("their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched") in 9:48, the closing OT echo

Pharisee discourse (Matthew 23)

Matthew 23:15, "you make him twice as much a son of geenna as yourselves"
Matthew 23:33, "You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of geenna?"

Epistolary

James 3.6, "the tongue … set on fire by geenna", the only non-Jesus NT use; uses geenna metaphorically of the destructive fire-source of the unsanctified tongue

Patristic and scholarly note

The early church reads geenna as referring to the unending post-judgment state of the wicked:

Justin Martyr First Apology 8: "Plato said that Rhadamanthus and Minos punish the wicked … we say the same thing, but the difference is, that Christ has said that punishment will be eternal."
Tertullian Apology 47-48: extended treatment; geenna as conscious, embodied (post-resurrection), and unending.
Augustine City of God 21, defends the doctrine extensively, especially the embodied-resurrection-of-the-wicked thesis (21.2-10) and the harmonization with Matt 25:46's parallel of aiōnios kolasis and aiōnios zōē (21.23).
John Chrysostom preaches geenna directly; his "fear of geenna" themes are pastorally famous.

Modern conditionalist / annihilationist treatments (Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 1982) argue that the imagery of fire is consummative (the wicked are consumed in geenna, not eternally tormented); modern universalist treatments (Robin Parry, David Bentley Hart) argue geenna is purgative-not-final. The traditional view replies that the Matt 25:46 parallel (aiōnios applied identically to punishment and life) and the embodied imagery (worm, fire that is not quenched) make the conditionalist / universalist readings difficult, see G0166 - aionios for the lexical debate on duration. The geenna word itself is largely neutral on duration; the duration debate runs through the eternal-aiōnios adjective applied to geenna-adjacent imagery.

Apologetic deployment

Against "hell is Greek paganism imported into Christianity", the lexical data falsify the charge. The dominant NT term for hell is a Hebrew-Aramaic place-name, not a Greek mythological referent. Jesus' vocabulary is most-Jewish at exactly the point critics claim it is most-Hellenistic.
Against "Jesus didn't really talk about hell", eleven of twelve NT geenna uses are from Jesus. The "loving Jesus vs. wrathful Paul" trope is reverse to the lexical data: Jesus is the source of the hell-vocabulary, not Paul (who never uses geenna).
Against the garbage-dump myth, the popular preacher-illustration that "Gehenna was just the trash dump" is post-12th-century (David Kimchi) and historically baseless. The biblical-theological backdrop is Molech-sacrifice and Jeremiah's judgment-fire, not municipal waste. The implication for teaching: don't preach the garbage-dump line; teach the Jeremiah-Hinnom line.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here.