Tartarus: What Do the Letters of Peter and Jude Say About the Imprisonment of the Fallen Angels?

Tartarus: What Do the Letters of Peter and Jude Say About the Imprisonment of the Fallen Angels?

One word in the entire New Testament appears only once, just once. From the first chapter of Matthew to the last line of Revelation, it was written by one man in a letter, in one verse, after which he disappears and never returns. The word is Tartar, and the strangest thing is not its rarity. The strangest thing is that Peter, a Jewish fisherman from Galilee, a man raised hearing the Hebrew scriptures in the synagogue, chose precisely a word that came from Greek poetry, a word that Homer used, a word that any educated Greek of the first century would recognize instantly because it was in the stories he heard as a child.

Peter took this word, placed it within a Christian letter, and did something with it that almost no one notices because translations unintentionally erase this detail. He didn’t write that the angels are in Tartarus, nor did he write that God sent them to Tartarus. In the original Greek, Peter transformed the word into a verb. He wrote something that, translated literally, would be: God tortured them. It is a verb, something God made, not an address where someone lives. And this difference, which seems small, is the gateway to one of the most discussed and poorly explained passages in the Bible.

Three words carry this text: Tartarus, chains, darkness. The three appear almost together in two short letters written by two different men, and here is the problem. The three are often treated as if they were synonyms, as if they were three ways of saying the same thing, but they are not. Each of these words means something specific, each one answers a different question, and when separated, the resulting picture is far more accurate and far more disturbing than the summarized version that circulates.

This is the verse: If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartarus, delivering them to darkness, reserved for judgment, second Peter, chapter 2, verse 4. Twenty and a few words in Greek, and within them, a prison. Start with the verb, because everything depends on it. In Greek, the form that Peter uses is tartarosas, a participle, which is simply the technical name for a verb form that indicates an action already completed, done before the main action of the sentence. Translating this into everyday conversation, Peter is saying that God has already done that; it is done. It is not a future plan, it is not a threat hanging in the air, it is the past.

It happened, and the subject of the sentence is God. It is not the devil, it is not destiny, it is not any spiritual force; it is God who makes the word happen. These angels didn’t fall into a hole, they didn’t slip, they weren’t victims of a cosmic accident; they were placed there by divine decree, and Peter constructs the sentence in a way that leaves no room for doubt about who made the decision. So, where does that word come from? In ancient Greek literature, Tartarus was a well-defined concept, not an ordinary world of the dead.

The common underworld had another name, Hades, and Tartarus was located below Hades. In the oldest Greek poems, the distance between heaven and earth was described as equal to the distance between the Earth and Hades, and Tartarus was even deeper, on a separate level, closed off with bronze gates. The important detail here in the Greek imagination is that Tartarus was not for ordinary people, not the place where men who died went, but a prison for beings of another order. The Greeks believed that the Titans, powerful beings defeated in a divine war, had been imprisoned there, meaning it was a maximum security prison for creatures that were not human.

Peter knew that, and this is where many people get confused and conclude that the apostle was importing mythology into Christianity, which he was not. Peter did something that Jewish writers of that time frequently did by taking a word that already existed in the public’s vocabulary and filling it with biblical content. It is the same type of movement we make today without thinking when someone says that a person carries a cross, as no one imagines wood on their back. The word survived and the meaning was repurposed.

And it wasn’t Peter who started it, since the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, made by Jews centuries before Christ, already used the word Tartar in at least one passage of the book of Job to refer to the depth of the abyss. Jewish writings from the period between the two testaments also used it. When Peter wrote that word, it was already circulating in Jewish circles for generations. What Peter does is choose the strongest term available in the language he was writing in to say something very specific: the confinement of these angels is not the same confinement as that of dead humans, but rather another level, another category, another type of prison.

And that is why Peter’s Tartarus is not the hell of preaching. Note that many translations use the word hell there, and the intention is good because the reader needs to understand that this is a place for judgment. However, the Greek word for the final destiny of condemnation, the one Jesus uses in the Gospels when speaking of fire, is different, namely Gehenna. Gehenna came from the name of a valley next to Jerusalem, a real place with a real history of horror. Jesus uses this name dozens of times, but Peter doesn’t use Gehenna here, choosing Tartarus instead, and saying in the same sentence that those angels are being kept, reserved for judgment.

If they were already serving their final sentence, there would be nothing left to reserve. The word reserved only makes sense if the judgment has not yet arrived, so this is the picture: it is not a sentence being served, it is pre-trial detention. Remember this expression, because it organizes everything else. Pretrial detention. They are being held pending a date. The date exists. The sentence, in principle, has already been decided. But full compliance has not yet begun. So why is Peter talking about angels in a pastoral letter?

This question completely changes the interpretation, and almost no one asks it. Chapter 2 of the second letter of Peter is not a chapter on demonology, it is not a lesson on the invisible world, it is a warning against false teachers. Peter is concerned about people who have entered Christian communities, selling false information, denying the Lord’s authority, turning faith into a business, and Christian freedom into an excuse to live however they want. His argument is legal. He constructs a case, and the case is built with three historical examples fitted together in order, one after the other.

First, the angels who sinned. Second, the ancient world was destroyed by the flood, with Noah and seven other people saved. Third, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, reduced to ashes, with Lot taken out from within. Three trials. And the conclusion that Peter wants the reader to draw is simple to state and uncomfortable to swallow: the Lord knows how to deliver those who fear God, and he knows how to reserve the unrighteous for the day of judgment. The angels’ point within this reasoning is the highest rung of the argument.

It is as if Peter were saying that if celestial beings, stronger than any human being, more ancient, with direct access to God’s presence, did not escape when they rebelled, then no sharp-tongued preacher will escape by being good at speaking. High position has never been a shield. This is the heart of the text, and it is here that the first question that has divided scholars for centuries appears: Which angels are these? There are two main readings, and it is worth knowing both before choosing a side. The first reading says that Peter is talking about the original rebellion, that ancient fall in which a celestial being rises up against God and drags others along.

In this reading, Peter’s angels are those who fell at the beginning of everything, even before human history began. The second reading looks at the order of the examples and notes something difficult to ignore. Peter places the angels, then the flood, then Sodom. This is exactly the sequence of the book of Genesis. And right before the narrative of the flood, in Genesis chapter 6, there appears that short and strange passage about the sons of God who saw the daughters of men, took wives for themselves, and also the Nephilim who were on the earth in those days.

Those who defend this second reading argue as follows: If Peter is following the timeline of Genesis, the angelic sin he cites is precisely that of Genesis 6 and not an earlier fall that the Genesis text does not even mention. Jude reinforces this argument in an even more direct way, and we will get there shortly. Both readings have serious defenders, people who have studied Greek and Hebrew their entire lives. Honesty dictates that the verse alone doesn’t settle the matter. Peter writes assuming that his reader already knew what he was talking about. He doesn’t explain, doesn’t define, he releases the information, like someone citing a famous case that everyone knows.

And that’s where the question lies. Which side are you on? Do you think these imprisoned angels are those who fell in the original rebellion or those of Genesis 6? Write below, because this discussion generates more discussion in the comments than anywhere else. The second part of this study delves into a detail that completely changes the reading of Jude. It is worthwhile to pause the narrative here and look at the two letters from the outside before continuing to delve into their text. The second letter of Peter is one of the shortest books in the New Testament, with three chapters and sixty-one verses in total, and can be read aloud in just over ten minutes.

Unlike almost everything Paul wrote, it is not addressed to a specific church in a specific city, opening instead by speaking to those who have received an equally precious faith. It is an open letter, which is why it belongs to a group that scholars call general letters or universal letters, along with James, the letters of John, and Jude. The tone of this letter is one of farewell. In chapter one, the author says that he knows he will soon leave this body and that he wants to record what he has taught so that the community will remember him after he is gone.

If the authorship is by the apostle Peter, as the letter states right at the beginning, this places the text close to the end of his life, probably in Rome, sometime in the sixties of the first century. And it’s necessary to state clearly something that the early Christians were already debating, which is that this was one of the most debated letters when it came to compiling the canon, the official list of books accepted as scripture. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, records that the second letter of Peter was considered disputed by some churches.

It was eventually recognized, but the path to recognition was longer than that of other books. One of the reasons for the debate is the style. The Greek of the second letter of Peter is different from the Greek of the first; it is more elaborate, has a rarer vocabulary, and uses words that do not appear anywhere else in the New Testament. Tartarol is one of these, and when a word appears only once in an entire set of texts, scholars call it a hapax legomenon, a Greek expression meaning said only once. The second letter of Peter is a champion in this, concentrating an impressive number of unique words for its size.

Now, the letter of Jude is even shorter, consisting of just one chapter and twenty-five verses. The author presents himself as a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, and ancient Christian tradition understands that he is one of Jesus’ brothers mentioned in the Gospels. There is a relationship between these two texts that any attentive reader notices when reading them consecutively, because they are too similar. Chapter two of the second letter of Peter and the core of the letter of Jude deal with the same false teachers, use the same examples of judgment, follow almost the same order, sometimes with practically identical expressions.

This has generated one of the oldest technical discussions in the study of the New Testament. Some understand that Jude wrote first and Peter used his material, others understand the opposite, and still others propose that both were using warning material that was already circulating in the communities. There is no consensus, and this is one of those issues where being honest about the doubt is worth more than feigning certainty. One difference, however, is quite clear. Jude openly quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch, while Peter does not.

The text quotes Jude speaking of Michael disputing over the body of Moses, an episode not found in the Old Testament, but Peter omits this. Jude is more liberal in his use of Jewish traditions outside the canon, whereas Peter is more restrained. Two short letters written by different men dealing with the same danger contain almost everything the New Testament says about imprisoned angels. Let’s return to the text. Jude, verse 6, is the second piece of the puzzle, and it adds information that Peter does not provide. Jude writes that the angels who did not keep their principality, but abandoned their own dwelling place, he has kept in eternal chains, under darkness, for the judgment of the great day.

Notice the wordplay Jude employs, because in the Greek it is even more evident than in the translation. They did not keep, therefore now they are kept. The verb is the same, inverted. They failed to keep one thing and now they are being kept, representing justice with symmetry. Jude describes the crime with two technical terms that should be opened. The first is arche, which means dominion, sphere of authority, the position someone occupies. Each of these angels had a function, a range of authority received, but they did not keep it.

The second is oiketerion, which means dwelling, abode, someone’s own place. It is the same word that Paul uses in a letter to the Corinthians speaking of the celestial body, the dwelling that the Christian will receive. Jude says that these angels abandoned their own dwelling. Put the two together. The sin described is not just disobedience to an order, it is crossing a boundary, leaving the place that God determined for their kind of creature and entering a place that is not theirs. And the verb used for abandoned has the force of leaving behind, abandoning for good, which is not a stroll but a change of address.

This, for those who defend the reading of Genesis 6, is the strongest argument that exists, because the following verse of Jude, verse 7, begins with a comparison. In the same way, or similarly, Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighboring cities corrupted themselves by going after other flesh. The word that connects verse 6 to 7 is a word of comparison, meaning Jude is saying that the sin of the angels and the sin of those cities belong to the same category of crossing a boundary that God established between types of creatures.

Those who defend the other reading respond that the comparison may only be in destiny, in judgment, and not in the exact type of sin, which is a legitimate counter-argument that leaves both positions standing. Now, regarding the chains, here lies one of the most interesting details of the whole matter, appearing only to those who look at the text closely. Jude writes in Greek desmois aidiois, where desmois means bonds, shackles, chains, and aidios is the adjective eternal, eternal chains.

This adjective aidios is very rare in the New Testament, appearing only twice. One is here in Jude, and the other is in the letter to the Romans, chapter 1, where Paul speaks of the eternal power of God visible in creation, meaning the same word that describes an attribute of God is used to describe the bonds of these angels. It’s not a temporary bond, not a rope that will rot with time, and that’s precisely why these chains cannot be made of iron. Think about it calmly. Iron rusts and metal wears out. A physical chain, however thick, exists within the material world and obeys the laws of the material world.

Jude is talking about beings who, according to the letter itself, are spiritual, beings who had a heavenly dwelling and abandoned it. You don’t bind a spirit with metal. What Jude describes is a restriction imposed by decree, a sentence that functions like a chain. It is the authority of God operating as a shackle, where nothing holds them there except the word that placed them there, which is stronger than any metallic alloy ever manufactured. There is a manuscript detail that reinforces this and almost never leaves the academic sphere.

In the verse of Peter, chapter 2, verse 4, the ancient Greek copies do not agree on one word. Some have seirais, which means chains, while others have a very similar word in the writing, tourois, which means ditches, pits, underground silos, or holes dug in the ground to store grain, representing a one-letter difference and two different portraits. If the original word is chains, the portrait is of shackles in darkness; if it is pits, the portrait is of dark wells and containment holes. That is why some translations render abysses of darkness and others render chains of darkness, which is not carelessness on the part of the translators, but a real difference between the ancient manuscripts requiring a choice.

The interesting thing is that both options say the same thing at the heart of it, which is containment. Whether tied up or in a well, the being is prevented from leaving, and in either of the two readings there is an element that never changes: darkness, the third word, zophos in Greek. This word deserves attention because it is not the common word for darkness. The common word, the one that appears when the Gospel of John says that the light shines in the darkness, is skotos. Zophos is different. Zophos is thick, dense darkness, a heavy, oppressive darkness, the kind that seems to have texture.

In ancient Greek poetry, zophos was used for the twilight of the underworld and for the darkness of the west where the sun sets. Zophos appears very little in the New Testament, being in Peter twice in chapter 2, in Jude twice, and in Hebrews chapter 12 in the description of Mount Sinai covered in darkness and storm. Apart from that, silence, meaning practically all occurrences of this specific word in the New Testament are concentrated in these two short letters speaking of this same subject. Peter and Jude are using a shared vocabulary, a closed set of terms belonging to a specific way of talking about this theme.

Now comes the point that almost everyone misses: there is no fire in this description. Read it again, slowly. Peter speaks of Tartarus, of restraint, of darkness, of being reserved for judgment. Jude speaks of eternal chains, kept for the judgment of the great day. Neither of them mentions flame, neither of them mentions burning, neither of them mentions heat. And that’s not carelessness, because the same authors know how to speak of fire when they want to. Jude himself, a few verses later, describes the ancient cities suffering the punishment of eternal fire. He has the word and uses the word, but he doesn’t use it for the imprisoned angels.

The current state of these beings, as these two letters describe it, is one of total darkness and immobility, without light, without movement, without end in sight, waiting. And if we think about who they were before, this is almost worse than fire. Beings made for the presence of God, which is described in the Scriptures as light, beings who, according to Jude’s own language, had a position of authority and a celestial dwelling, creatures of brilliance, of movement, of mission. The punishment is exactly the opposite of all that. Those who had light were left in darkness, those who had movement were imprisoned, those who had a position were left without any function, and those who had a dwelling were left in a place that the Bible doesn’t even bother to describe properly.

The punishment is the inverted mirror of privilege. And then something appears that hurts to look at head-on. The sin promised them expansion, promising to surpass limits, to go beyond what was designated, to experience what was not yet permitted. What was delivered in the end was the exact opposite of what was promised: a space without dimension, without light, without an exit, for an indefinite time. Every time Scripture shows rebellion against God’s limits, this pattern repeats itself in some way, where the promise is always too much and the delivery is always too little.

The strangest part of this story is still missing, and it’s the part that the original readers of Peter and Jude had at their fingertips, but that most modern readers have never heard of. Because this image of bound angels, darkness, a deadline, and a marked day of judgment did not originate with Peter; it already circulated in Jewish circles, with details, numbers, and names. There was an ancient text that described exactly this, and it even gave the duration of the sentence: seventy generations. This number is written and is in a specific chapter, and comparing it with what Peter and Jude wrote reveals how much the apostles were speaking within a conversation that already existed.

After that, there is still the question that almost no one asks, which is perhaps the most important of all: If there are imprisoned angels, the text is implying that there are rebellious angels who are not. Who are these? Where does the Bible show one of them? And why does Revelation present a figure linked to the abyss who does not appear chained within it, but rather with authority over it? That’s where the second part begins. Seventy generations. The number is written and is in a book that is not part of the Bible of most churches, but which the first readers of Peter and Jude knew well.

The text is the book of Enoch, in chapter 10. The scene is a celestial judgment where God gives orders to his messengers about what to do with the beings who descended and corrupted the earth. The order that appears there in verse 12 commands that those beings be bound for seventy generations under the hills of the earth until the day of judgment, until the final sentence is fulfilled. Bound under darkness, with a deadline and judgment marked at the end. Compare this with what Peter wrote about being cast into Tartarus, delivered into darkness, reserved for judgment.

Compare this with what Jude wrote about being kept in eternal chains under heaven for the judgment of the great day. These are three texts, two of them biblical and one not, using the same set of images: bondage, depth, darkness, waiting, and a date at the end of the line. This is no coincidence, and it doesn’t mean that Peter and Jude were copying the Book of Enoch as one copies a scripture. It means something else, simpler and more interesting: that was the Jewish way of speaking about this subject in the first century, the available vocabulary, and the mental framework of the reading public.

When Peter writes about the angels who sinned without explaining which ones, without telling the story, without naming anyone, he is doing what we do when we tell the story of the golden calf, where there’s no need to detail because the listener already knows. Jude does the same, speaking of angels who abandoned their own dwelling place and moving on without stopping to explain, leaving his readers to fill in the gaps themselves. And what filled that gap in the mind of a Jew of that time was precisely the tradition that the Book of Enoch organizes, involving celestial beings descending, an oath made between them on Mount Hermon, marriages that should not exist, children who should not be born, forbidden knowledge taught to men, the corrupted land, the rising clamor, and in the end, the order to arrest.

In that text, one of the leaders of the rebellion, named Azazel, receives a sentence described in a very visual way: to be thrown into an opening in the desert, covered in darkness, with rough stones on top, and remain there until the great day of judgment. Darkness and immobility, the same two things that Peter and Jude describe, in other words, about the seventy generations. It is worth understanding what this number communicates, because it is not random. Seventy in Jewish tradition was a number of fullness, of a complete set, like the seventy elders with Moses, the seventy years of exile in Babylon, or the seventy weeks in Daniel.

When a Jewish text says seventy, it is almost always saying an entire period is closed, determined by God, meaning the message is not mathematical but rather that there is a deadline decided up there and non-negotiable, which is exactly what Peter communicates with the word reserved. Here a detail appears that needs to be said clearly because many people gloss over it: Jude quotes Enoch in the letter, in verses 14 and 15, where he speaks of a prophecy announced by Enoch, the seventh from Adam, about the Lord coming with his thousands of holy ones to execute judgment.

This quotation exists, it’s direct, and the corresponding text appears at the beginning of the book of Enoch, but quoting is not canonizing. This is worth repeating in other words: the fact that a biblical author uses a book does not automatically transform that book into scripture. Paul, in his speech in Athens, quotes Greek poets, but no one understands from this that Greek poetry became the Bible; Paul was simply using a reference that his audience knew to prove a point. Jude makes a similar move by using a tradition known to his readers to reinforce a warning.

It’s worth pausing here and talking a little about this book itself, because much confusion arises from people not knowing exactly what it is. It’s a collection, a set of ancient Jewish writings gathered under the name of Enoch, the character who appears in Genesis chapter 5, the one who walked with God and was not found because God took him. The attribution to him is literary, in the same way that other writings from that period were placed under the names of venerated ancient figures. In the form that has come down to us, this collection has five main parts.

The first and most famous is called the Book of the Watchers and goes from chapters 1 to 36, containing the narrative of the descent of the giants, the cry of the earth, and the imprisonment. Then come the parables or similitudes, followed by a book about the movements of the stars and the calendar, a book of dreams and visions, and finally, the final part of exhortations, sometimes called the Epistle of Enoch. For many centuries, the Christian West only knew of Enoch through scattered quotations in ancient authors, as the complete text was lost to Europe and survived intact in a single place in the world, Ethiopia, preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in an ancient language called Ge’ez.

The Ethiopian Church is to this day the only major Christian tradition that treats this book as part of the Scriptures. In 1773, a Scottish traveler named James Bruce brought Ethiopian specimens back to Europe, which is how the text began circulating again in the West, with the first complete English translation published at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then came the confirmation that changed the level of the discussion between 1947 and the following years, when thousands of fragments of ancient Jewish manuscripts were found in the caves near the Dead Sea, especially in cave four, where pieces of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic appeared, dating back much earlier than the birth of Christ.

This resolved an old question, proving that material was not a late Christian invention, but was Jewish, ancient, and circulating in the period preceding the New Testament. The reasons that scholars point to for its exclusion from the official canon are numerous and cumulative, as the Jewish community did not include it in the list of sacred Hebrew books, and the text was not in Hebrew in the form in which the authorship attributed to Enoch was most widely circulated. Some of the content, with its details about celestial beings and alternative calendars, bothered both rabbis and Christian leaders concerned with establishing the boundaries of what the church should interpret as the word.

Some early Christian writers used the book naturally, and it’s honest to say that without drama, as it wasn’t a kidnapping or a mysterious disappearance, but a long, documented process with arguments from both sides. The value of this book for those who study the Bible lies elsewhere, functioning as a window into the mind of the first-century listener by showing what those people already had in mind when they opened Jude’s letter, explaining why Peter was able to write a twenty-word sentence about imprisoned angels and be understood immediately.

Let’s return to the point that was left hanging at the end of the first part: If some rebellious angels are being held captive awaiting judgment, then the very logic of the text compels one conclusion, which is whether there are others who aren’t. And that’s half the story that almost no one tells. Start with the most obvious thing. In the book of Job, chapter 1, there is a scene of a heavenly court in which the sons of God appear and the adversary appears among them. He speaks, he moves, and he says that he was circling the earth and walking around on it.

This is not the speech of someone chained in the darkness. In the Gospels, the same adversary appears in the desert conversing with Jesus, making propositions, quoting scripture, and leading people from one place to another, after which it disappears for a while but remains active in the narrative. Peter himself, in his first letter, chapter 5, verse 8, commands the church to be vigilant and watchful because the adversary prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Walking around and searching are verbs of movement.

Paul, writing to the Ephesians in chapter 6, speaks of a struggle that is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, and spiritual forces in the heavenly realms, describing this as a present reality of Christian life, not as a memory of a war that has ended. Add it all up. The Bible presents two groups simultaneously in different situations: rebellious beings who are restrained and rebellious beings who are free. And that’s why vocabulary distinction matters so much, because when someone lumps all the terms together, they lump the information together.

These are four different words, and none of them is a perfect synonym for the others. Hades is the Greek term for the place of the human dead, the equivalent of the Hebrew word Sheol, appearing quite frequently in the New Testament. Gehenna uses the phrase final destiny of damnation linked to fire, coming from the name of a valley next to Jerusalem. The abyss appears in the Gospel of Luke when unclean spirits ask Jesus not to send them there.