Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A place or state of torment or suffering.
- noun The abode of condemned souls; hell.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In Jewish hist., the valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, in which was Tophet, where the Israelites once sacrificed their children to Moloch (2 Ki. xxiii. 10).
- noun In the Bible, the place of the future punishment of the wicked: a transliteration of the Greek word
γέεννα , which the authorized version translates hell and hell-fire, and the revised version hell of fire and hell.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- proper noun (Jewish Hist.) 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.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun In Judaism and the New Testament the place where some or all spirits are believed to go after
death .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a place where the wicked are punished after death
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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However, in the New Testament the term Gehenna is used more frequently in preference to hades, as a name for the place of punishment of the damned.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 7: Gregory XII-Infallability 1840-1916 1913
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The term Gehenna is associated in the Bible with Tofteh, which was a place of impurity not far from the Temple.
A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy Isaac Husik 1907
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"waste, decay, regret, and sorrow" [p. 125] which is why Jesus used the term Gehenna
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Gehenna is writing itself again, there in the back of my mind like the Ghost Of Christmas Stoned.
And though I bid you goodnight, there's that one last thing 2007
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Unusually, we managed to spend most of the time actually discussing the book, 40,000 in Gehenna by C.J. Cherryh.
9/25/06: Damn 2006
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As for thee, O blonde, thy colour is that of leprosy and thine embrace is suffocation; 368 and it is of report that hoar-frost and icy cold369 are in Gehenna for the torment of the wicked.
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They have examined all the existing Jewish writings where the word Gehenna was used from 300 B.C. to 300 A.
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It substitutes the word Gehenna, leaving the reader to ascertain its meaning.
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So the Rephaim came to be the wicked spirits in Gehenna, the lower of the two portions into which Sheol is divided.
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"The inhabitants of the places under the waters" are those in Gehenna, the lower of the two parts into which Sheol, according to the Jews, is divided; they answer to "destruction," that is, the place of the wicked in Job 26: 6, as "Rephaim" (Job 26: 5) to
MaryW commented on the word Gehenna
Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam Books, 2014), p. 85February 7, 2016