Gehinnom is the Hebrew name for the Valley of Hinnom (Gei Hinnom), a real geographic location on the south side of Jerusalem. You can walk there today. It is a valley. It has coordinates. When Yeshua used the word Gehenna (the Greek transliteration of Gehinnom) in His teaching, every person listening knew exactly what He was talking about. They were not picturing Dante's Inferno, medieval torture chambers, or an underground realm of eternal fire managed by a red devil with a pitchfork. They were picturing a valley they had seen with their own eyes.

The Valley of Hinnom had a horrific history. In 2 Chronicles 28:3 and 2 Kings 23:10, it was the site where children were burned alive as sacrifices to Molech. Jeremiah 7:31-32 records HaShem's judgment on it: "They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into My heart." By Yeshua's time, rabbinic tradition had developed Gehinnom into a metaphor for judgment and purification after death. But the metaphor was always grounded in the physical place and its physical history of destruction.

English translations give you "hell" (KJV, NIV) or "hell" with a footnote (ESV, NASB). The word "hell" in English carries centuries of Greek mythology (Hades), Norse mythology (Hel), medieval Catholic imagination (Dante, 1320), and Protestant fire-and-brimstone preaching. None of that is in the Hebrew. The Hebrew concept is a valley where the worst things humans ever did happened, and which became a symbol for divine judgment on human evil. Whether Gehinnom describes eternal conscious torment, age-lasting consequence, or purifying destruction is a legitimate theological debate. What is not debatable is that English "hell" has imported an entire mythology that the Hebrew text never authorized. Yeshua said Gehinnom. He did not say Hades. He did not say Inferno. He named a valley in Jerusalem and let the history speak for itself.