Precisely why the Valley of Hinnom (or, as it was also known, the Valley of Hinnom’s Sons) had by Christ’s time become a name for a place of judgment, punishment, and purification (usually after death) is difficult to say. It is a real place geographically speaking, as it happens, lying to the south and west of Jerusalem. Its terrain is not particularly inviting, but neither is it particularly infernal. There is an old tradition that it was here that the Tophet—the site of child-sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and Ba’al, as attested in Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah, and
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