Abaddon

The fifth trumpet sounds and a star falls to earth. It is given a key, a shaft is unlocked, and smoke rolls up out of the ground like the smoke of a great furnace, thick enough to darken the sun and the air. Out of the smoke come locusts. They are shaped like horses made ready for battle, with something like gold crowns on their heads, faces like men’s, hair like women’s, teeth like lions’, breastplates of iron, and wings that sound like chariots charging. The stings are in their tails. They have a king, and the Book of Revelation gives his name twice, once for each language its readers might need: in Hebrew, Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.

That is nearly everything Revelation says about him. He is the angel of the bottomless pit and he reigns over the swarm. He does not speak, does not fight, and never appears again under that name. The whole biblical career of Abaddon as a person fits inside a single verse, Revelation 9:11, and every later picture of him has been built on that one line and on the word inside it.

The word is much older than the angel. In Hebrew, abaddon means destruction, and in the Hebrew Bible it is not a someone but a somewhere. It turns up only six times, all in the wisdom books: three times in Job, once in the Psalms, twice in Proverbs. Nearly always it stands beside Sheol, the pit of the dead. Sheol is naked before God, Job says, and Abaddon has no covering. Proverbs sets the two side by side as things that are never full, like the eyes of a man. A psalm asks whether God’s faithfulness is declared in Abaddon, and expects the answer no. In Job 31 a sin is a fire that burns all the way down to Abaddon and eats the roots of a man’s harvest.

Even there, the place has a mouth. In Job 28, where the poet goes hunting for wisdom through mines and deep waters, Abaddon and Death speak together and admit they have only heard a rumour of it. The 1911 Britannica notes that later rabbinic writing used Hades and Abaddon almost as personal names. The step Revelation takes, from a realm of ruin to a king of that realm, was a short one. Nobody in the Hebrew Bible calls Abaddon an angel.

Jewish tradition kept the place. In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Eruvin 19a, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi gives seven names for Gehenna, and Avadon is the second, proved from that same psalm. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 summed up the rabbinic picture as the second department of Gehenna, almost a synonym for Sheol. The realm had compartments. The crowned king at the head of an army belongs to the Christian apocalypse.

Who that king is, Revelation never says. It calls him an angel, not a devil, and does not say whether he is the fallen star that was handed the key. Christian readers have split ever since. A long Protestant line of commentary made him Satan, or one of Satan’s servants. Others point to Revelation 20, where an angel comes down from heaven holding the key of the bottomless pit and uses it to chain the dragon, and read the keeper of the pit as God’s own officer carrying out a sentence God has allowed. His army works under strict orders. The locusts may not touch grass, any green thing or any tree, only the people without God’s seal, and even those they may torment but not kill, for five months. In those days, the text says, men will seek death and death will run from them.

Egypt gave him a life story. A Coptic homily falsely attributed to Timothy, archbishop of Alexandria, survives in one Sahidic manuscript copied in 981, now British Library Or. 7025, first published by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1914. God needed clay from Eden to make Adam. Six of seven angels refused to fetch it, because the clay warned them of the sins the man would commit. One angel, Muriel, went. For that obedience he was made Abbaton, the angel of death, set against Satan’s revenge on humankind to save the righteous and punish the wicked, and feared by every creature with a body and every creature without one. He had a feast day, the thirteenth of Hathor. The Coptic Encyclopedia adds that his prayers won a promise that people who honoured him in life might be saved, and that on the Last Day he will lead the souls to the Valley of Josaphat. A wall painting at Tebtunis in the Fayum showed a gigantic armoured figure with wings and clawed feet, captioned as Lord Abbaton, the angel of death, who respects not persons. Scholars trace his name to Revelation’s angel of the pit, but this Abbaton is a loyal servant of heaven, a different creature wearing the same name.

English Protestants gave him a body. In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, the pilgrim Christian meets Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation. He is clothed in fish scales, which are his pride, with a dragon’s wings, a bear’s feet and a lion’s mouth, and fire and smoke pour out of his belly. He claims Christian as a runaway subject, since the City of Destruction is his country and he is its prince and god. When argument fails he straddles the whole width of the road, hurls darts as thick as hail, and wounds Christian in the head, hand and foot. The fight lasts above half a day. Christian’s sword flies out of his hand; he snatches it back as Apollyon rears for the last blow, and a deadly thrust sends the monster off on his dragon’s wings. For generations of English readers that roaring, scaly thing on the road was what Abaddon looked like, although every scale of it is Bunyan’s.

What Abaddon commands is a plague that refuses to finish its work. His army blots out the sun with pit smoke, stings like scorpions, and turns the wish to die into a torment of its own. As a place he is the bottom of everything, the destination that swallows and is never filled. His limits are written into the same verses. He moves at the sound of a trumpet he does not blow, out of a pit someone else unlocks, for five months and no longer, and he cannot touch anyone who carries God’s seal. Even Sheol and Abaddon lie open before the Lord, Proverbs says, so nothing down there is hidden from above. Bunyan’s Apollyon flees a single thrust from a wounded man who would not stay down. And by Revelation’s own reckoning, when Abaddon’s hour is over, only the first woe has passed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Abaddon in the Bible?

Abaddon is the angel of the bottomless pit in Revelation 9:11, the king who rules the army of locusts released when the fifth trumpet sounds. Revelation gives his name in Hebrew as Abaddon and in Greek as Apollyon. That single verse is the only place in the Bible where Abaddon appears as a person.

What does the name Abaddon mean?

Abaddon is a Hebrew word meaning destruction, and in the Hebrew Bible it also means the place of destruction, a name for the underworld beside Sheol. Its Greek counterpart, Apollyon, means Destroyer. Revelation gives both names for the same angel.

Is Abaddon a place or a being?

Abaddon is both, at different stages. In the six Hebrew Bible passages that use it, in Job, Psalms and Proverbs, Abaddon is a realm of the dead, and the Talmud lists Avadon as one of the seven names of Gehenna. Only in the Book of Revelation does Abaddon become a person, the angel who is king of the bottomless pit.

Is Abaddon a demon or an angel of God?

Revelation calls Abaddon an angel and never says whose side he is on. Many Protestant commentators identified him with Satan or a servant of Satan, while others read him as an angel of God carrying out a judgment, pointing to the heavenly angel who holds the key of the pit in Revelation 20. In Coptic tradition the angel of death Abbaton, whose name scholars trace to Abaddon, is a loyal servant of God.

What does Abaddon look like?

The Bible does not describe Abaddon, only his locusts. The best-known image comes from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress of 1678, where Apollyon has fish scales, dragon’s wings, bear’s feet, a lion’s mouth and fire and smoke coming from his belly. A Coptic wall painting at Tebtunis in Egypt showed the angel of death Abbaton as a gigantic armoured figure with wings and clawed feet.

Related Entries

Sheol, Satan, Lucifer, Antichrist, Samael, Azazel, Azrael, Michael, Angels, Tartaruchi, Leviathan, Grim Reaper, Hades, Tartarus