Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 113
more in the New Testament, in the Letter of James. If there is
any word in the text that comes near to having something like
the meaning we tend to attach to the word "hell" today, this
would be it.
Even here, however, we must always keep in mind how
immense a cultural and historical chasm separates the world
of Jesus of Nazareth from our own. Precisely why the Valley
of Hinnom ( or, as it was also known, the Valley of Hinnom's
Sons) had by Christ's time become a name for a place of judg-
ment, punishment, and purification (usually after death) is
difficult to say. It is a real place geographically speaking, as
it happens, lying to the south and west of Jerusalem. Its ter-
rain is not particularly inviting, but neither is it particularly
infernal. There is an old tradition that it was here that the To-
phet-the site of child-sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch
and Ba'al, as attested in Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah,
and Jeremiah-was located. From well before the Christian
period, it was associated with obscene sacrificial practices and
evil gods. But, to this point, no significant archaeological find
has located a precise place where such things were done. At its
southwest boundaries, the valley may also have been a place
of Judaean tombs, and perhaps of Roman crematory grounds
during the period of occupation, but the evidence to that effect
is inconclusive. There is also an uncorroborated tradition from
the Middle Ages that says that the valley was used for the dis-
posal and burning of refuse, and perhaps included charnel pits
for the disposal of animal and human carrion. If nothing else,
this would seem to correspond quite neatly to the description
of Hinnom's Valley in Isaiah 66: 24 as a site of undying worms
and inextinguishable fires (both figures being of course hy-
perbolic, but also perhaps literal descriptions of the disposal
of carrion and refuse). Christ himself borrowed this imagery