Valley of Ben Hinnom

Valley of Ben Hinnom is the ravine that runs along the west and south of Jerusalem, curving from a point west of the present Jaffa Gate southward and then eastward around the Western Hill until it joins the Kidron Valley below the City of David. Scripture calls it the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, the Valley of the Children of Hinnom, or simply the Valley of Hinnom (Nehemiah 11:30). The name Hinnom is otherwise unknown and is generally taken to be a personal name, perhaps of an early owner. The Hebrew Ge Hinnom later passed into Greek as Gehenna.

Biblical Account

The valley first appears as a boundary marker. The northern border of Judah runs up "by the Valley of the Son of Hinnom at the southern shoulder of the Jebusite (that is, Jerusalem)" (Joshua 15:8), and the southern border of Benjamin descends "to the border of the mountain that overlooks the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is at the north end of the Valley of Rephaim" (Joshua 18:16), so the line between the two tribes ran along it, with the Rephaim valley opening to its southwest. Its later notoriety comes from the monarchy. Ahaz "made offerings in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom and burned his sons as an offering" (2 Chronicles 28:3), and Manasseh "burned his sons as an offering in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom" (2 Chronicles 33:6). The sacrificial installation itself was Topheth, which Josiah defiled "that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech" (2 Kings 23:10); Molech and Baal are both named as recipients of these offerings (Jeremiah 32:35; 19:5). Jeremiah was sent to the valley "at the entry of the Potsherd Gate" to break an earthenware flask before the elders (Jeremiah 19:1-2, 10-11), and twice announced that the place would no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom but the Valley of Slaughter, because the dead would be buried there for want of room (Jeremiah 7:31-32; 19:6, 11). After the return from exile the valley marked the northern limit of the resettled villages of Judah (Nehemiah 11:30).

Geography and Identification

Three valleys at Jerusalem have been proposed: the Kidron on the east, the Tyropoeon between the Western Hill and the Temple Mount, and the Wadi er-Rababi on the west and south. Some early Jewish and Christian writers favoured the Kidron, but the Tyropoeon lay inside the walls before the time of Manasseh and the Kidron is named separately from Hinnom in Josiah's reform (2 Kings 23:6, 10, 12), whereas Joshua 15:8 requires a valley running past the southern shoulder of the city toward En-rogel. The identification with the Wadi er-Rababi is therefore probable and has the most support today. On modern Israeli maps the wadi is labelled Gei Ben Hinnom. The Potsherd Gate of Jeremiah 19:2 is not securely located; it is usually placed on the southern wall above the valley.

Archaeology

No remains of Topheth have been found, and the valley floor has been reworked by later burial and quarrying. The southern and western slopes hold rock-cut tombs of the late Iron Age and the Second Temple period, and the ridge on its western side, southwest of the Old City where the Hinnom and Rephaim valleys meet, is Ketef Hinnom, excavated by Gabriel Barkay from 1975. There, in 1979, a burial complex of the seventh and sixth centuries BC yielded the two small silver amulets known as the Ketef Hinnom Scrolls, inscribed with the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26 and dated to about 600 BC, the oldest known copies of any biblical text. The tombs show that the valley was already used for burial in the last decades of the kingdom of Judah (compare Jeremiah 7:32).

Theological Significance

The valley stands in Scripture as the place where the kings of Judah did what the Lord "did not command, nor did it come into my mind" (Jeremiah 7:31), and its renaming as the Valley of Slaughter turns the site of Judah's sin into the site of Judah's judgment at the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. That memory of fire and judgment lies behind the later use of Gehenna as a name for the place of final punishment.