In Rev 9" Abaddon is not merely personified in the free jjoetic manner of Job 28--, but is used as the personal designation in Hebrew of a fallen angel described as the king of the locusts and ' the angel of the abyss,' whose name in the Greek tongue is said to be Apollyon. In the LXX 'cibhaddon is regularly rendered by dirdbXeia ; and the personification of the Heb. word by the writer of Rev. apparently led him to form from the corresponding Gr. verb (dvoWvw, later form of d7r6XXi//aO a Gr. name with the personal ending uv. Outside of the Apocalj-pse the name Abaddon has hardlj^ any place in English literature, while Apollyon, on the contrary, has become familiar through the use made of it in the Pilrjrini's Pro- gress by Bunyan, whose conception of Apollyon, however, is entirely Iiis own. Abaddon or Apoll- yon was often identified with Asmoditjus, ' the evil spirit ' of To 3® ; but this identification is now known to be a mistake.
LiTERATiRE.— Theartt. s.vv. in HDB andEBi; art. 'Abyss' in EUE ; ExpT xx. [1908-09] 234 f. J. C. LAMBERT.
ABBA. — Abba is the emphatic form of the Aram, word for 'father' (see Dalman, Aram. Gram. p. 98, for ax and its various forms ; also Maclean, in DCG, S.V.). It is found only in three passages in the NT, viz. Mk U^\ Ro 8'S Gal 4« ; in each case 6 irar-qp is subjoined to 'A/3^a, the whole expres- sion being a title of address. [The use of 6 naTr^p,
nominative with the article, as a vocative, is not a Hebraism, as Lightfoot thought, but an emphatic vocative not unknown to classical Greek and com- mon in the NT : ' nearly sixty examples of it are found in NT ' ; see Moulton, Gram, of NT Greek, Edinburgh, 1906, p. 70.]
Lightfoot on Gal 4'' argues that the bilingual expression is a liturgical formula originating with Hellenistic Jews, who, while clinging to the original word which was consecrated by long usage, added to it the Greek equivalent ; but he supports an alternative theorj- that it took its rise among Jews of Palestine after they had become acquainted with the Greek language, and is simply an expression of importunate entreaty, and an examjile of that verbal usage whereby the same idea is conveyed in ditierent forms for the sake of emphasis. As illustrations of this repetition, he quotes Rev 9'^ ('AttoXXi/wj', 'A/3a55a)j') 12''^ 20^ CZaravas, AtdjSoXos). Thayer, in HDB [s.v.], points out that, though de- votional intensit.y belongs to repetition of the same term {e.g. Kvpie, Kvpie), it is also expressed by such phrases as I'at dpi-qv, ' Hallelujah, Praise the Lord,' where the terms are ditt'erent. The context of each passage where 'Abba, Father' is found appears to prove that the Greek addition is not merely the explanation of the Aramaic word, such as, e.g., St. Peter might have added in his preaching — a custom to be perpetuated bj^ the Evangelists, as suggested by the passage in Mk. ; but is rather an original formula, the genesis of which is to be souglit further back, perhaps in the actual words used by our Lord Himself. Thus Sanday-Headlam on Ro 815 (/(7(7^ 19Q2) remark :
' It seems better to suppose that our Lord Himself, using- familiarly both lan^ua^es, and concentrating into this word of all vvords such a depth of meaning, found Himself impelled spontaneously to repeat the word, and that some among His disciples caught and transmitted the same habit. It is signifi- cant however of the limited extent of strictly Jewish Christi- anity that we find no other original examples of the use than these three.'
Thus, the double form is due to the fact that the early Christians were a bilingual people ; and the duplication, while conveying intensity to the ex- pression, ' would only be natural where the speaker was using in botli cases his familiar tongue.' F. H. Chase (TS I. iii. 23) suggests that the phrase is due to the shorter or Lucan form of the Lord's Prayer, and that the early Christians repeated the first word in the intensity of their devotion, coupling a Hellenistic rendering with the Aramaic Abba. He argues that the absence of such a phrase as 6 icrnv, or 0 eoTt fj.edeppL-rivevonei'ov, in Mk 14^^ is due to the familiarity of the formula ; and that, while the Pauline passages do not recall Gethsemane, they suggest the Lord's Prayer as current in the shorter form. Moulton (op. cit. p. 10), combating Zahn's theory that Aramaic was the language of St. Paul's prayers — a theory based on the Apostle's 'Abba, Father ' — remarks that ' the peculiar sacredness of association belonging to the first word of the Lord's Prayer in its original tongue supplies a far more probable account of its liturgical use among Gen- tile Christians.' He mentions the analogy (see footnote, loc. cit.) of the Roman Catholic 'saying Paternoster,' but adds that ' Paul will not allow even one word of prayer in a foreign tongue with- out adding an instant translation ' ; and further refers to the Welsh use of Pader as a name for the Lord's Prayer.
It seems probable (1) that the phrase, 'Abba, Father,' is a liturgical formula ; (2) that the duality of tlie form is not due to a Hebraistic repetition for the sake of emphasis, but to the fact that the early Christians, even of non- Jewish descent, were familiar with both Aramaic and Greek ; (3) that Abba, being the first word of the Lord's Prayer, was held in special veneration, and was quoted