What is Tartarus?

Question 10122.

The prison of Tartarus is named exactly once in the whole Bible, in a single verb tucked into 2 Peter 2:4, and it refers to the place where God has confined a particular group of fallen angels until judgement. One verb, one verse, and a good deal of careful thinking required.

Most English versions translate it as hell, which flattens something the original keeps distinct. Peter had three words available to him and he chose the rarest one, so it is worth asking why.

The word Peter chose

The form in the text is a verb, tartaroo, meaning to cast into Tartarus. In Greek literature Tartarus was the deepest region of the underworld, lower than Hades, reserved for rebels against the gods rather than for ordinary mortals. Peter borrows the term the way a preacher today might borrow a word everybody recognises, and then fills it with biblical content.

This does not mean Peter believed Greek mythology any more than Paul believed in the unknown god when he preached at Athens. He is using a word his readers understood in order to say something they had not heard. The prison of Tartarus, in his usage, is a place of secure confinement for angels who sinned.

Notice how carefully he describes it. Chains of gloomy darkness, and the purpose clause, to be kept until the judgment. Both halves matter. It is escape-proof, and it is temporary.

Which angels are held there?

Peter says God did not spare angels when they sinned. Jude 6 runs in parallel, speaking of angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, and who are now kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness. Both writers then move straight to the flood and to Sodom, which is a clue about the sin involved.

The sequence points back to Genesis 6 and the sons of God who took wives from the daughters of men. I take that passage as describing angelic rebellion of a particular and monstrous kind, which is why the flood follows it so closely. If that is right, the prison of Tartarus holds the angels involved in that specific transgression rather than fallen angels in general.

The alternative view treats the sons of God as the godly line of Seth. I understand its appeal, but it struggles to explain why Jude links the angels to Sodom’s sexual sin, and it leaves Peter’s chains without an occasion. I set out my reasoning on that debate elsewhere, and I hold it firmly while granting that good men differ.

Why the distinction matters

Here is the practical payoff. If every fallen angel were locked in the prison of Tartarus, there would be no demonic activity in the world at all, and the Gospels would be unintelligible. Demons walk about freely in the ministry of Jesus. Paul warns of rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Satan himself is described as prowling.

So Scripture presents fallen angels in two conditions. Some are at liberty and active; some are already confined. That is exactly what we would expect if a specific rebellion drew a specific and immediate response, and it fits the demons in Luke 8 who beg Jesus not to command them into the abyss. They knew such a place existed and they had no wish to see it.

For the wider picture of what these beings are and what they can and cannot do, see my article on the biblical doctrine of hell and the related material in the angelology section of this site.

The prison of Tartarus, Hades and the lake of fire

Keep three things separate and the New Testament becomes much clearer. Hades holds unsaved human dead until the resurrection. The prison of Tartarus holds a class of fallen angels until their judgement. The lake of fire receives both, along with the devil and his angels, after judgement has been passed.

Matthew 25:41 tells us that the eternal fire was prepared for the devil and his angels, which is a startling thing to notice. Hell was not designed with human beings in mind. That anybody made in the image of God ends up there is a tragedy of misdirected choice rather than a fulfilment of original intent.

The abyss of Revelation 9 and 20 appears to belong in the same family as the prison of Tartarus, a place of restraint from which Satan is released for a season and to which he is confined during the thousand years. Whether they are the same location or two chambers of one facility, Scripture does not say, and I am content not to know.

What Peter is actually arguing

We should not lose the argument in the scenery. Peter raises the prison of Tartarus in the middle of a warning about false teachers who were troubling the churches, and his logic runs like this. If God did not spare angels, if He did not spare the ancient world, if He did not spare Sodom, then He knows how to rescue the godly and keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgement.

The confined angels are exhibit one in a case about certainty. Peter’s readers were being told that judgement never comes and that the promise of His coming has failed. His answer is to point at a group of beings who found out otherwise, and who are still finding out.

Reading a single verse responsibly

A doctrine built on one verb needs handling with care. I would not preach a series on the prison of Tartarus, and I would be wary of anyone who did. What I will do is let the verse say what it says, refuse to speculate beyond it, and refuse to erase it because it is unusual.

Scripture is not embarrassed by strange corners. It simply expects us to read them in the light of the clearer passages, which is what Scripture interpreting Scripture actually looks like in practice.

What this says about God

A God who confines rebel angels is a God who takes creation seriously. The prison of Tartarus is not petulance; it is containment. Something was let loose in Genesis 6 that threatened the line through which the Redeemer would come, and it was shut down with a firmness that has lasted several thousand years.

Read the flood narrative with that in view and it stops being an arbitrary act of temper. It is a rescue operation conducted at terrible cost, preserving one family so that a promise made in Genesis 3 could still be kept. The chains and the ark belong to the same story.

Peter puts it exactly that way. The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgement, and both halves of 2 Peter 2:9 are meant to steady a frightened church.

Do not build a mythology on it

A whole industry has grown up around fallen angels, ancient giants and secret histories, most of it drawing on the book of 1 Enoch rather than on Scripture. Jude quotes a line from Enoch, as Paul quotes a Greek poet, and neither quotation makes the source book inspired. A true sentence in an unreliable book is still only a true sentence.

So I would take what Peter says about the prison of Tartarus and stop there. Where the angels came from, what they look like, how the chains work and what the geography of the abyss might be are all questions Scripture declines to answer, and our curiosity is not an argument.

The mark of a healthy Bible reader is the willingness to leave a gap unfilled. I would rather hold one verse accurately than hold twenty speculations confidently.

Spiritual warfare in the light of it

Believers sometimes live as though the unseen realm were evenly matched, with God and the devil trading blows. The prison of Tartarus makes nonsense of that. Angels who sinned were removed from the board without a struggle, and the demons who remain at liberty do so on a lead, within limits, for a time that has already been decided.

That is why the New Testament tells us to resist the devil and expect him to flee, rather than to negotiate with him. He is a defeated enemy operating on borrowed time, and the empty cell waiting for him has already been prepared.

Where it sits in the doctrine of last things

If you are working through these topics in order, the prison of Tartarus belongs alongside the intermediate state of the human dead rather than alongside the final judgement. It is a waiting condition, and the beings held there have not yet stood before God.

That parallel is useful, because it shows a consistent pattern. Nobody, angel or human, receives a final condition at the moment of their offence or their death. My article on the intermediate state traces the same principle on the human side.

So, now what?

The prison of Tartarus tells us that rebellion against God has consequences that outlast the rebel’s confidence. Angels are stronger than we are, older than we are and better informed than we are, and it did them no good whatever.

If that is true of them, the false teacher who tells you judgement is a myth is not brave. He is uninformed. And if you are tempted to think God is slow because He has not acted yet, remember that Peter’s whole point is that the delay is mercy, not indifference. What will you do with the time He is giving you?

“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)