So perhaps we all heard the JW story about Jesus talking to Gehenna and he was referring to a place outside the city where there was a dump burning refuse and everyone knew what it meant.
According to JW.org: Tradition relates that the Valley of Hinnom thereafter became a place for the disposal of garbage. And the Bible provides confirmation for this. At Jeremiah 31:40, for example, the Valley of Hinnom is evidently called the “low plain of the carcasses and of the fatty ashes.” There was also the “Gate of the Ash-heaps,” a gate that seems to have opened out onto the eastern extremity of the Valley of Hinnom at its juncture with the Kidron Valley.—Nehemiah 3:13, 14.
I think I heard that in the study of the Greatest Teacher book first. However recently learned that this is not at all true. There was no refuse dump that continuously burned, there is no literary, biblical or archeological reference to such place, and a place like that would leave quite a footprint you’d think. If you read the scriptures, it doesn’t refer to the Valley of Hinnom, it doesn’t even refer to a dump.
The word “evidently” is the tail wagging the dog and it is a far stretch to say that the Gate of the Ash Heap which is a JW mistranslation of the Dung Gate which was a small door and wasn’t built until the 1500s is actually what they say it was used for.
The only reference we have in the Bible to the valley of Hinnom is Jeremiah 19:2 and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate (apparently also for refuse of broken earthenware). For those that can read a map, the Potsherd Gate was on the south side of Jerusalem. The KJV translated that to East Gate and many translations used Dung Gate later to match the gate on the east. Reason being is that most Bible translations aren’t literal, they have a story and canon to uphold so major changes and contradictions in original texts are filtered out by perpetuating more changes where deemed necessary to match the story.
So where does Valley of Hinnom being a continuously burning dump come from - 1200AD Rabbi Kimchi pretty much is the person that introduced the concept to this place. Note that by this time, Judaism had already integrated Hellenistic viewpoints of Hell (Hades and Tartarus) into its theology, unlike around early Christian time where they may have heard about but the scriptures don’t quite illustrate an eternal tormenting place. The conflation of Gate of the Ash Heap or Dung Gate comes later, with “archeologists” and translators sent out in 1500s-1800s with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other, confirming archeological finds on the basis of the Bible, not realizing some things weren’t quite the originals they thought.
So even about the simplest of things, JW seemingly can’t keep it straight, using apocryphal stories and opinion from a Rabbi to support stories they have told over and over again. Given modern research, they could simply gloss over these mistakes and misconceptions and quietly leave it out, nobody would be any wiser. Instead they double down on things people can quickly find are medieval apologia.