The Hinnom Valley is a ravine below the Old City of Jerusalem that Shmuel Ash and Atalia cross on their way toward Mount Zion. Set beside the mined no-man’s-land separating Israeli- and Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem, it gives the city’s political division a physical route and, through Shmuel’s remark that they are in Gehenna, a charged name.

Setting and Boundaries

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the route descends from Yemin Moshe toward the road around the Hinnom Valley, then climbs toward Mount Zion. The walk passes dark, closed stone houses and gives way to a steep path beside the Old City walls. Rusted barbed wire marks the no-man’s-land between the two parts of Jerusalem; Mount Zion itself is described as Israeli territory surrounded on three sides by Jordanian territory.

The valley is therefore not merely a landmark between neighborhoods. It lies within a landscape where walls, wire, mines, and exposed approaches shape where people can go. In another account of Jerusalem’s outskirts, warning signs at the border caution against mines, crossing into no-man’s-land, and exposure to enemy snipers. These hazards define the surrounding city as a place of restricted movement and uncertain passage.

The Night Walk

Shmuel and Atalia descend toward the valley after walking through Yemin Moshe. A stray dog follows them for a time, but stops before the climb toward Mount Zion, hesitates, and turns back. The pair continue uphill without it. The path’s steepness strains Shmuel, who worries that his asthma might trouble him, while Atalia moves ahead more easily. He fears losing sight of her in the darkness near the exposed border.

The crossing links the valley to Shmuel’s vulnerability and to the walk’s uneven pace: Atalia leads, while he struggles to keep up. The journey proceeds amid the silence of the night and the presence of the nearby frontier. The valley’s position makes the climb toward Mount Zion feel like a movement through a dangerous edge zone rather than an ordinary walk between districts.

Gehenna and Narrative Significance

As they approach the valley road, Shmuel murmurs that they are in Gehenna. Atalia answers that they are used to it. The brief exchange turns the place-name into a dark figure for the conditions surrounding them, while her reply treats those conditions as familiar rather than exceptional. The biblical resonance belongs to the characters’ conversation; the passage does not present the valley as a supernatural place.

The ravine’s role is sharpened by the contrast between naming and geography: the conversation invokes Gehenna, but the scene remains grounded in a real route through a divided city. The path leads onward to Mount Zion and the building called David’s Tomb, where a soldier blocks their way. The Hinnom Valley thus forms part of a connected landscape of borders and guarded access, making Jerusalem’s political division present in the characters’ movements through the night.