114 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
(Mark 9:43-48), so perhaps the legend is correct. Then again,
one need not necessarily read any of those passages as describ-
ing a rubbish tip. The same images are equally consistent with
Jeremiah's vision of Hinnom's "valley of slaughter," a place
gorged with the corpses of the slain as a result of God's histori-
cal punishment of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon's king,
and of Israelites who had worshipped false gods and sacrificed
their infants. In the end, though, we really do not know for
certain how this valley became a metaphor for divine punish-
ment, in this world or the next. We can only speculate.
Neither do we know with any very great certainty what
connotations the term may have had for Jesus or for his listeners
in Galilee and Judaea in the early first century. Talk of the Ge-
henna was part of the common religious parlance of the Jewish
world before, during, and soon after the time of Jesus, but how
it was interpreted by the differing schools of theology is almost
impossible to reduce to a single formula or concept. Clearly
it was understood sometimes as a place of final destruction,
sometimes simply as a place of punishment, and sometimes as
a place of purgatorial regeneration. In both of the two largest
and most influential rabbinical schools of Christ's time, those
of Shammai and Hillel, it was frequently described as a place of
purification or punishment for a finite term; but both schools
apparently also taught that there would be some state of final
remorse, suffering, or ruin for souls incapable of correction.
Shammai is reputed to have been the dourer of the two great
rabbis, since he seems to have thought-at least, if the lore has
been accurately transmitted and interpreted- that a fairly sub-
stantial portion of humanity might ultimately be lost. Even so,
for him the Gehenna was principally a place of purification, a
refining fire for the souls of those who have been neither in -
corrigibly wicked nor impeccably good during their lives; and