You Can Find Hell on a Map

George Jochnowitz writes about “gehenna,” an English synonym for “hell” that comes, via Greek and Latin, from the Hebrew word gehinnom. This in turn derives from gey ben hinnom, “the valley of the son of Hinnom” (or simply “the Valley of Hinnom,” as it is known in English), which is the biblical name of a wadi in Jerusalem that is indeed remembered by Mr. Jochnowitz as being, on his first visit to Israel in 1974, “as hot as hell.”

No doubt it was, though probably no hotter than other places in Jerusalem on a broiling summer day. Any of you who have been in Jerusalem for even a day or two have surely been in, or overlooked, Gey Ben-Hinnom. More of a ravine than a valley, it cuts downward between the western, Ottoman wall of the Old City with its Jaffa Gate, on one side, and the posh Jewish neighborhood of Yemin Moshe and Jerusalem’s Cinematheque building, on the other, before dipping in a southeasterly direction past the neighborhood of Abu-Tor and into the Judean desert.