“Gehenna”, is a reference to a valley of trash outside of Jerusalem where the Jews would burn refuse and the bodies of criminals. Its name means “lace of lamentation”, because it used to be where Israelites would sacrifice their children and burn them in reverence to the god Molech.
From Bart Ehrman’s blog (https://ehrmanblog.org/jesus-on-gehenna/):
Scholars have long claimed that Gehenna was a garbage dump where fires were burned – which is why it’s “worm never dies” and its “fires never cease”: there was always burning trash in there. As it turns out, there is no evidence for this claim; it can be traced to a commentary on the book of Psalms written by Rabbi David Kimhi in the early thirteenth century CE. Neither archaeology nor any ancient text supports the view.
Was Gehenna a Garbage Dump?
Gehenna in the Old Testament
He summarizes:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.2307/3210000 (Topography of Hell)
This article goes a small way to addressing such questions by attempting to ascertain the immediate origins of the idea of Gehenna, a key element of the doctrine of hell found in the Synoptic Gospels. In the Synoptics, Gehenna is the otherworldly location of eternal punishment for the wicked, after the last judgement. This article argues that while Zoroastrian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek ideas may have influenced Jewish and early Christian eschatology, the idea of Gehenna appears to have developed directly out of Jewish canonical and extra-canonical sources. The word Gehenna is actually the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, the name of a valley outside Jerusalem mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, the four central elements that allowed the transformation from valley to eschatological site of eternal punishment are all found in Jewish writings.
The soul, which most of us think of when we hear the word soul, as a metaphysical “thing” that exists independently of the body, does not exist in the conceptual world of the Ancient Israelites:
