Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 115
he taught that, once their penance had been completed, those
imprisoned there would be released and taken up to paradise.
Hillel, by contrast, is reputed to have had considerably greater
trust in God's power to save the reprobate from their destruc-
tion or damnation, as far as ultimate numbers go; at least, he
seemed to think that only a very few might be beyond rescue.
But he apparently also thought of the Gehenna as a place of
final punishment and annihilation of the bodies and souls of
those too depraved to be regenerated. Needless to say, certain
of the images employed by Christ to describe the final judg-
ment would have accorded perfectly well with the teachings
of either school, though perhaps perfectly with neither. As for
what became the dominant view of later rabbinic tradition -
that no one can suffer in the Gehenna for more than twelve
months - this can be traced back at least to the teachings of
Rabbi Akiva (c. 50-135), not long after the time of Christ. It
may go back further than that, however. Certainly no one now
can say with confidence precisely what Jesus's understanding
of the Gehenna's fire was (no matter how adamant the infer-
nalist party may wax in their assertions to the contrary), or
what duration he might have assigned to those subjected to it,
or even how metaphorically he intended such imagery to be
taken. It is obvious that metaphor was his natural idiom as a
teacher, and that he employed the prophetic and apocalyptic
tropes of his time in a manner more poetic than precise; so it
would be foolish to presume that his language of the Valley of
Hinnom should be taken any more literally than the imagery
of incinerary ovens or seasonal harvests or threshing floors or
the closed doors of feasts. Nor does later Christian usage help
us much in this matter, given how great a diversity of views the
early church accommodated.
So we really cannot know whether Jesus viewed the Ge-