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Mark 9:47-48: And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell (gehenna), [48] ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’
- The word translated “hell” is gehenna, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew term “gehinnom”—that is, the Valley of the Son of Hinnom. In Jeremiah 7:31-33, we read that this valley was to be renamed the “Valley of Slaughter, for they will bury [in it], because there is no room elsewhere. And the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth, and none will frighten them away.” By the term “gehenna,” then, Jesus was evoking in the minds of his Jewish listeners a gruesome image of death, not of eternal torment.
- The phrase, “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” is a quote from Isaiah 66:24, according to which it is, again, dead bodies that will be subject to these things after the wicked have been slain (cf. Isa. 66:15-16), not immortal people. Similar again to the Jeremiah passage, the worm (or maggot) that “does not die” and the fire that “is not quenched” are consuming agents (cf. Job 24:20; Isaiah 30:33), as are the birds of the air and beasts of the earth whom “none will frighten away” from feasting on the dead bodies. In 2 Samuel 21:10, Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, after her two sons were hanged, “did not allow the birds of the air to come upon them by day, or the beasts of the field by night” because it was dishonoring for a dead body to not be given a proper burial but instead be consumed in the open for anyone to see. All it means for the worm to not die and the fire to not be quenched is that neither of them will be prevented by those things from consuming the corpses; it doesn’t mean the worm will never die, or that the fire will never go out. In Proverbs 23:13-14, the same Hebrew phrase (לֹא מוּת) translated “does not die” in Isaiah 66:24 is used this way: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die (לֹא מוּת). If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” Obviously, this does not mean that the child will never die, but simply that he will not do so prematurely. As for fire that is not quenched, it refers to fire that is not prevented from consuming that which it burns (cf. Jer. 17:27; Ezek. 20:47), not fire in which the unrighteous will burn forever.
In short, Mark 9:47-48 teaches that the impenitent will be slain and shamefully devoured by maggots and fire which, respectively, will neither die nor go out before the corpses are consumed as planned.
