a scripture term which has given some pain to the critics. It occurs in St Matthew, v. 22. 29. 30. x. 28. xviii. 9. xxiii. 15. 33. Mark ix. 43. 45. 47. Luke xii. 5. James iii. 6.

The authors of the Louvain and Geneva versions retain the word gehenna as it stands in the Greek; the like does M. Simon: the English translators render it by hell and hell fire, and so do the translators of Mons and Father Bobhurs.

The word is formed from the Hebrew gehinnom, i.e. "valley of Hinnom." In that valley, which was near Jerusalem, there was a place named Tophet, where some Jews sacrificed their children to Moloch, by making them pass through the fire. King Josias, to render this place for ever abominable, made a cloaca or common sewer thereof, where all the filth and carcases in the city were cast.

The Jews observed farther, that there was a continual fire kept up there, to burn and consume those carcases; for which reason, as they had no proper term in their language to signify hell, they made use of that of gehenna or gehinnom, to denote a fire unextinguishable.