considerations: It will perhaps be more satisfactory to follow the subject onwards, till we arrive at the first clear proof of the change which we seek in the usage of the word; and by thus proceeding, we shall meet with facts corroborating some of the more important of the foregoing positions. Passing the New Testament, which falls without the line of this investigation, we go on to the next Jewish remains.

These are the works of the renowned Josephus a moderate Pharisee, and one of the most learned and accomplished Jews that Palestine could boast. It is well known that he has left several professed and formal statements of the opinions of his countrymen, besides introducing them incidentally in the course of his history; and since all his writings bear date between A. D. 70, and A. D. 100, his representations may be regarded as applicable to the very times of the New Testament. He says that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and of future rewards. and punishments, was maintained by the Pharisees and Essenes, and rejected by the Sadducees. But before we proceed to the particulars in his account, one or two circumstances deserve a separate mention: 1. Either by accident or by design, he never intimates that this doctrine existed among the Jews, till the days of Herod the Great, immediately preceding those of our Saviour notwithstanding he gives their history at large, from the time of Abraham. 2. The

1 The earliest traces of this doctrine, in his works, are in Jewish War Book i. ch. 33, 2, and Antiq. B. xviii. ch. 1, 3.

word Gehenna occurs neither in those passages in which he speaks of the state of the wicked af ter death, nor in any other part of his works. From this omission, however, no argument can be drawn ; since he sought to avoid the Hebraisms and peculiar phrases of the Jews, and to at tain the classic purity of the Greek and Roman style. Our only resource, now, is to bring forward his representation of the views entertained in Palestine, concerning future retribution, in order to see whether they were of such a charac ter as even to admit the application of the term Gehenna.

The Pharisees who were the prevailing sect, held the place both of rewards and punishments for departed souls, to be under the earth. Here they are treated accordingly as they have been virtuous or vicious in the present world. The good are happy; and in the revolution of ages, they will be permitted to live again, by entering into other bodies. But this desirable privilege is not allowed to the wicked, who are punished eternally, and forever confined to the place of the dead, as in a prison. The souls of the most abominable, such as commit suicide, are treated with the greatest severity of all, and are accordingly sent to the very darkest part of this subterranean abode. Such were the popular views. The Essenes, who may be called the monks of Judaism, were only four thousand in number; and living chiefly in deserts, they were so obscure a sect that they never appear in the history of the New Testament. On the subject in question, they differed little from the Pharisees, except that they seem to have held no reunion of souls,

good or bad, with their bodies, and that they perhaps attributed a greater degree of suffering to the state of the wicked. But we cannot discover, in Josephus, that either of these sects supposed it to be a state of fire, or that the Jews ever alluded to it by that emblem. In addition, therefore, to the absence of all proof that they had as yet named it Gehenna, we find their notions of it to have been such as would not comport with that term in its later usage.

From the time of Josephus onwards, there is an interval of about a century, from which no Jewish writings have descended to us. It was a period of dreadful change and ruin with that distracted people. Their body politic was dissolved; the whole system of their ceremonial religion had been crushed in the fall of their city and temple; and they themselves, scattered abroad, were accursed on all the face of the earth. In these circumstances, it was natural that their sentiments and usages should undergo a rapid modification; and if we may judge from the state in which we find their doctrine when their own compositions again appear in view, they adopted almost every conceit, provided it were sufficiently

2 See Antiq. B. xviii. 1, 3; Jewish War B. i. 33, 2; B. ii. 8, 10-14; B. iii. 8, 5; B. vii. 8, 7, and Against Apion, B. ii. 31, which are the only places in which Josephus introduces or alludes to the future state. The piece entitled Discourse concerning Hades,' at the end of Whiston's edition, is now universally considered the work of some Chrisian writer of, perhaps, the second or third century; and the account Of the martyrdom of the Maccabees,' which is found in some other editions of Josephus, is supposed to have been written by some Christian,

extravagant and ridiculous, that ever crossed the brain of a madman.

In this period, we meet with the first information which we received from any quarter whatsoever, that Gehenna was the place of the damned. Still, it is not from a Jew, that this earliest notice comes, but from the celebrated Christian father, Justin Martyr, about A. D. 150. He quotes the language of our Saviour, fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna,' and then adds, for the instruction of the heathens to whom he was writing, that 'Gehenna is the place where those are to be punished who have led unrighteous lives, and disbelieved what God declared by Christ.'1 This is, of course, merely his interpretation of that term, as he understood it in the New Testament; and notwithstanding he had been brought up in one of the cities of the ancient Samaria, he certainly had no acquaintance with the language, and probably none with the peculiar usages, of the Jews.

6

The next notice of the kind, is, we think, that of another Christian father, Clemens Alexandrinus, about A. D. 195. Maintaining the doctrine of a future state, he adduces the authority of the heathen philosophers: Does not Plato acknowledge both the rivers of fire, and that profound depth of the earth which the barbarians [the Jews,] call Gehenna? Does he not prophetically mention Tartarus, Cocytus, Acheron, the Phlegethon of fire, and certain other like places

1 Apol. Prim. c. xix. p. 55. Paris, 1742.

of punishment, which lead to correction and discipline ?'1 Here Clemens meant, beyond all doubt, that the Jews denominated the place of future punishment, Gehenna; but whether he spoke from personal knowledge or from presumption, is altogether uncertain. He knew it to be a Jewish, not a Greek, word; and he may have judged its usage among the barbarians, as he called them, by what he supposed its sense in the New Testament.

We come, at last, to the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel and in the latter of these, we meet, for the first time in Jewish writings, with Gehenna in the sense alleged. In the former, so far at least as the end of the paraphrase on Genesis, neither that term nor any thing else relating to our subject, occurs; and we presume that such is the case with the rest of the work, since it is nearly a literal translation, and is never quoted, by the critics, for examples in point. But in the Targum of Jonathan Ben Uzziel, Gehenna is several times used; and here, as we have already observed, it seems appropriated exclusively to scenes either of future woe, or of severe and exextensive judgments in this world: perhaps, always to the former. The author speaks of Gehenna, as the place which God hath prepared below for transgressors;' to which he will adjudge them in the day of trial;' and from which he will preserve his righteous servants.' When he redeems the captivity of his people, he will appear in his power, in order to cast all the impious into Gehenna.' It is prepared, of old, for the nations that have

1 Strom. Lib. v. c. 14, p. 700. Edit. Potter.