gehenna – מילון אנגלי-אנגלי
gehenna
n.
place or state of torture or suffering; residence of condemned souls; inferno, hell; valley of Hinnom (near Jerusalem) where propitiatory sacrifices were made to Moloch (Biblical)
Gehenna
Noun
1. a place where the wicked are punished after death
(synonym) Tartarus
(hypernym) Hell, perdition, Inferno, infernal region, nether region, the pit
Gehenna
(n.)
The valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where some of the Israelites sacrificed their children to Moloch, which, on this account, was afterward regarded as a place of abomination, and made a receptacle for all the refuse of the city, perpetual fires being kept up in order to prevent pestilential effluvia. In the New Testament the name is transferred, by an easy metaphor, to Hell.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter.
About
Gehenna
[Judaic] "Place of Torment." The Valley of Hinnom, south-west of Jerusalem, where Solomon, king of Israel, built "a high place", or place of worship, for the gods Chemosh and Moloch. The valley came to be regarded as a place of abomination because some of the Israelites sacrificed their children to Moloch there. In a later period it was made a refuse dump and perpetual fires were maintained there to prevent pestilence. Thus, in the New Testament, Gehenna became synonymous with hell.
Gei' Hinnom
Gei' Hinnom (Hebrew) Also Gai-hinnom. The valley of Hinnom, generally rendered as by the Greek Gehenna, situated south of Jerusalem, in which was Tophet where children were at one time sacrificed to Moloch (2 Kings 23:10). Later the place was used as a crematorium for the refuse of the city, perpetual fires being kept for that purpose. In the Bible it is translated as hell or hell of fire, but the Hebrew word bears no such interpretation. The Greek Gehenna "is identical with the Homeric Tartarus" (IU 2:507).
In the Zohar and Talmud, the place of purification. After death, Dumah (the Angel of Death, or the shadowy land of silence, the region of the astral dead -- She'ol, Hades, the underworld) leads the impure Neshamah to the dwelling of Gei' Hinnom, where it must be purified in order to proceed upon its journey (Zohar i 218b). Just as cities need a crematorium for purifying purposes, so has the earth a gehenna, a planet like our own which is "termed by the occultists the eighth sphere . . . on which all the dross and scorification of the cosmic matter pertaining to our planet is in a continual state of remodelling" (IU 1:328).
