Valley of Hinnom

The Valley of Hinnom is referred to in different ways in the Old Testament: the Valley of Hinnom and the Valley of Ben-Hinnom (“the son of Hinnom”). These names refer to the original owners of the valley, the Hinnom family.

It used to be assumed that the valley was situated to the east of Jerusalem, but since the 19th century it is thought that the Valley of Hinnom was situated to the south-west of biblical Jerusalem, outside the city walls of that time.
The Valley of Hinnom served — probably since the time of King Hezekiah — as a place to bury the dead. Archaeological excavations show this. Among other things, family graves have been found here, which were in use for centuries.

The Valley of Hinnom gained a very bad reputation in biblical times, because a form of worship took place that aroused the indignation of the biblical writers. This cult is associated with the name Molech.
The precise nature of this cult is disputed, as also is the name Molech itself. Molech may originally have been the name of a ritual in which children were sacrificed, as in Carthage. The biblical writers, however, took Molech as the name of the god of the Ammonites (1 Kings 11:7).
The customary description of the ritual is “burning your son or daughter as a sacrifice to Molech” (2 Kings 23:10). In that case, this would be the bringing of child sacrifices to the burning site, Tophet, on the grounds of the cemetery in the Valley of Hinnom.

King Josiah took action against the cult by desecrating the sacrificial site (2 Kings 23:10). This evidently had a lasting effect, as the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel still express fierce opposition to the child-sacrifice cult (for instance Jeremiah 7:31-32 and Ezekiel 23:37-39).
After the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, there is no further mention of this kind of sacrifice, but the memory of it remains.

Because of the negative significance that the Valley of Hinnom had gained in the Old Testament, in the Hellenistic period the abbreviated Aramaic form of this name (“Gehenna”) was used as a reference to hell. This happens, for instance, in the Apocryphal book of Enoch. The reference to “Gehenna” occurs in the New Testament as well, for instance in Mark 9:43 (ESV).
At that time Gehenna was situated to the east of Jerusalem, in the vicinity of the Mount of Olives. This was later adopted by Islam as well.