The name 'Tartarus' (2 P 2^) carries us out of the association of Hebrew into the realm of Greek thought. It is the appellation given by Homer {II. viii. 13) to that region of dire punishment allotted to the elder gods, whose sway Zeus had usurped.
* Cf. the conception of the heavenly citizenship and eternal life having already begun in this world : Eph 2i9, Jn 62* 178, 1 J«
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• I will take and cast him into misty Tartarus,' says Zeus, • right far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth ; there are the gate of iron and threshold of bronze, aa far be- neath Hades as heaven is high above the earth.'
The Greek word passed into Hebrew literature, and is found in En. xx. 2, where Uriel is said to have sway over the world and over Tartarus (cf. Philo, de Exsecr. § 6). The passage in 2 Peter shows evident traces of the etiect upon it of the Book of Enoch, so it is not necessary to go further afield in order to discover the source of the word. In the Christian sections of the Sib. Or. the word is of frequent occurrence, and appears sometimes to be used as equivalent to Gehenna and at other times as the name for a special section of that region. Cf. 1. 126-129 :
• Down they went Into Tartarean chamber terrible. Kept in firm chains to pay full penalty In Gehenna of strong, furious, quenchless fire.'
With this passage should be carefully compared En. cviii. 3-6, where some exceptional features occur in the description of hell. The passage is in a fragment of the earlier Book of Noah, now in- corporated in the larger work.
• Their names,' says the seer, ' shall be blotted out of the book of life, and out of the holy books, and their seed shall be de- stroyed for ever, and their spirits shall be slain, and they shall cry and make lamentation in a place that is a chaotic wilderness, and in the fire shall they burn ; for there is no earth there. And I saw there something like an invisible cloud ; for by reason of its depth I could not look over, and I saw a flame of fire blazing brightly, and things like shining mountains circling and sweep- ing to and fro. And I asked one of the holy angels who was with me, and said unto him : " What is this shining thing? for it is not a heaven but only the flame of a blazing fire, and the voice of weeping and crying, and lamentation and strong pain." And he said unto me : "This place which thou seest — here are cast the spirits of sinners and blasphemers, and of those who work wickedness, and of those who pervert everything that the Lord hath spoken through the mouth of the prophets." '
As Charles points out in his notes on this passage, the writer has confused here Gehenna and the hell of the disobedient stars, conceptions which are kept quite distinct in the earlier sections of the book (cf. chs. xxi. and xxii.).
2. The idea in apostolic and sub-apostolic litera- ture.— We have to pass beyond the strict use of the word ' hell ' to discover the wider range of the conception in the literature of the NT that comes within the scope of our examination. There are two or three terms found in the Apocalypse, to which we must now turn.
(a) The Apocalypse of John.— {I) In Eev 9^ 'the pit of the abyss' (see Abyss) is regarded as the special prison-house of the devil and his attendant evil spirits. This conception is probably derivable from similar sources to those from which Tartarus comes, though there are peculiar andinterestingfeat- ures about it, details of which will be found in the special article devoted to its explanation. Closely connected with the idea of the abyss is its demonic ruler Abaddon (v.ii, see Abaddon), whose name figures frequently in the Wisdom-literature, and is generally translated in the LXX by d7rwXeta = ' destruction.' According to one Hebrew authority, Abaddon is itself a place-name, and designates the lowest deep of Gehenna, fi'om which no soul can ever escape (see H. B. Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John, in loco). In the Asc. Is. iv. 14 is a somewhat similar passage : ' The Lord will come with His angels and with the armies of the holy ones from the seventh heaven . . . and He will drag Beliar into Gehenna and also his armies.'
(2) 'The lake of fire' is an expression found several times in Rev. (cf. 19-*, etc.). It is described as the appointed place of punishment for the Beast and the False Prophet, for Death and Hades them- selves, for all not enrolled in the Book of Life, and finally for those guilty of the dark list of sins given in 21^. It is questionable whether the original VOL. I.— 35
imagery underlying the expression is derived from the story of the Cities of the Plain, or the Pyri- phlegethon — the fiery-flamed river — one of the tri- butaries of the Acheron in the Homeric vision of the under world (cf. Od. x. 513). Probably elements from both enter into it. A passage in the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, x. 1-6 — remarkable for the fact that hell is here set in the third heaven (see W. Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, Berlin, 1903, p. 273 n. ) — has close parallels with the passage in Rev 21^ The following extracts will show how close and suggestive the imagery is — and as it probably dates before A.D. 70, the actual connexion is not improbable.