h, like a stream of
brimstone, doth kindle it." The prophet thus portrays, with the
dread imagery of Gehenna, approaching disaster and overthrow. A
thorough study of the Old Testament shows that the Jews, during
the period which it covers, did not believe in future rewards and
punishments, but expected that all souls without discrimination
would pass their shadowy dream lives in the silence of Sheol.

Between the termination of the Old Testament history and the
commencement of the New, various forms of the doctrine of future
retribution had been introduced or developed among the Jews. But
during this period few, if any, decisive instances can be found in
which the image of penal fire is connected with the future state.
On the contrary, "darkness," "gloom," "blackness," "profound and
perpetual night," are the terms employed to characterize the abode
and fate of the wicked.

Josephus says that, in the faith of the Pharisees, "the worst
criminals were banished to the darkest part of the under world."
Philo represents the depraved and condemned as "groping in the
lowest and darkest part of the creation. The word Gehenna is
rarely found in the literature of this time, and when it is it
commonly seems to be used either simply to denote the detestable
Vale of Hinnom, or else plainly as a general symbol of calamity
and horror, as in the elder prophets.

But in some of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases of the Hebrew
Scriptures, especially in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, we
meet repeated applications of the word Gehenna to signify a
punishment by fire in the future state.7 This is a fact about
which there can be no question. And to the documents showing such
a usage of the word, the best scholars are pretty well agreed in
assigning a date as early as the days of Christ. The evidence
afforded by these Targums, together with the marked application of
the term by Jesus himself, and the similar general use of it
immediately after both by Christians and Jews, render it not
improbable that Gehenna was known to the contemporaries of the
Savior as the metaphorical name of hell, a region of fire, in the
under world, where the reprobate were supposed to be punished
after death. But admitting that, before Christ began to teach, the
Jews had modified their early conception of the under world as the
silent and sombre abode of all the dead in common, and had divided
it into two parts, one where the wicked suffer, called Gehenna,