Tartarus

“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment…”

— 2 Peter 2:4 (ESV)

Tartarus is the New Testament Greek term, occurring only once, for the place to which God confined the sinning angels until the final judgment.¹ It appears not as a noun but as a verb, tartarōsas: “God spared not the angels that sinned; but, tartarosas, ‘cast them down to tartarus,’ or hell.”² The Revisers’ marginal note on 2 Peter 2:4 states that the King James Version’s “hell” there represents Tartarus in the Greek.¹ Tartarus is distinct from both Hades, the dead’s general abode, and Gehenna, the wicked’s final punishment after judgment.¹

Confessional Witness

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession names Tartarus; the term belongs to Scripture’s own Greek vocabulary, not to the confessions’ seventeenth-century English one. The Second London Baptist Confession states that at the last judgment “the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast aside into everlasting torments, and punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.”³ The Westminster Larger Catechism supplies the wider confessional family’s fuller statement of the same doctrine, naming the wicked’s company in that punishment directly: they “shall be cast out from the favorable presence of God, and the glorious fellowship with Christ, his saints, and all his holy angels, into hell, to be punished with unspeakable torments, both of body and soul, with the devil and his angels forever.”⁴ Tartarus, on this reading, names the fallen angels’ present confinement prior to that final sentence, not the sentence itself.

Biblical Basis

Tartarus occurs in a single verse, 2 Peter 2:4, where Peter argues from the greater to the lesser: if God did not spare the angels who sinned but cast them down to Tartarus, “committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment,” then he will not spare false teachers either. Boyce reads the passage as describing “the condition of these angels before the judgement day,” a present, pre-judgment confinement rather than their final state.¹ Jude 6 describes the same fallen angels in closely parallel terms, “kept [them] in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.” Boyce reads Jude’s word for “eternal” there (aidios), paired with the “eternal fire” finally “prepared for the devil and his angels” at the last judgment (Matt. 25:41), as evidence that this punishment is already of unending duration, rather than a temporary holding that later ends.⁵ Gill draws out the same present/final distinction from 2 Peter 2:4 itself: the fallen angels “are cast down to hell, and so punished with a sense of divine wrath,” yet “though they may not be in full torments, yet they are not without them, and are reserved unto judgment, which, when over, they will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone” (Rev. 20:10).² Tartarus, like Hades before the resurrection, is a holding place; Gehenna, the lake of fire, is the sentence finally carried out.

Historical Development

Gill notes that “Tartarus” was already current among pre-Christian Greek writers before Peter used it of the fallen angels, applied there to the Titans who “rebelled against the gods,” and cast down “much in the same language as the apostle does of the angels.”² Plato, in the Gorgias and Phaedo, describes the wicked dead as cast into Tartarus, and a fork in the road of the dead where one path leads to the Islands of the Blessed and the other to Tartarus; Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid describe it as a place walled with iron gates and adamantine pillars, as far beneath the earth as the earth is beneath heaven.² The early Christian apologist Arnobius turned this parallel back on the pagan writers who mocked Christians for speaking of hell: “Does not your Plato say the same, in his book of the immortality of the soul? Does he not make mention of the rivers Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, and Periphlegeton, in which he asserts souls are rolled, plunged, and burnt?”² A. A. Hodge notes that the Greeks themselves divided Hades into two regions, “Elysium for the blessed and Tartarus for the wicked,” the wider mythological category from which the New Testament borrows the single word Peter uses of the fallen angels’ present confinement.⁶

Among the fathers, Augustine took up the question of where the fallen angels are presently confined, proposing in his literal commentary on Genesis that “the angels that sinned were thrust down into this foggy atmosphere round the earth as into a prison, where they are being kept in order to be punished at the judgment,” a reading Gavin Ortlund notes is “likely drawing from” 2 Peter 2:4 itself.⁷ Augustine repeats the same picture in The City of God, describing the fallen angels as “thrust down to the lower parts of this world, where they are, as it were, incarcerated.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 479. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VII, chap. 10, “Of the Final State of the Wicked in Hell.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩
The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 89. ↩
Boyce, 482-483. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 37, “Death, and the State of the Soul after Death,” 553. ↩
Gavin Ortlund, “Angelic Fall Theodicy in Dialogue with Tolkien, Augustine, and Aquinas,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 333, quoting Augustine, On Genesis 11.26.33, and Augustine, The City of God 11.33, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 377. ↩ ↩²