Why was 'Tartarus' used?

[hobie]

The Greek word Tartarus appears only once in the entire New Testament. 
2 Peter 2:4
Young's Literal Translation
4 For if God messengers who sinned did not spare, but with chains of thick gloom, having cast [them] down to Tartarus, did deliver [them] to judgment, having been reserved,

Well, this explains a lot....

"There is one word in the New Testament that comes straight from Greek mythology. Not a metaphor. Not a translation choice. The actual name of the abyss where the Titans were imprisoned.

It was written by a Jewish fisherman from Galilee.

The letter is 2 Peter, composed in Koine Greek for diaspora communities spread across the Roman world in the first century CE. Verse 2:4 is about angels who sinned and what God did with them.

Most translations render the passage simply as "cast them into hell." But the Greek word Peter chose was not Hades. Not Gehenna. Not "the pit." The word came directly from "Tartaros," the deepest region of the underworld in Greek mythology, a place so far below Hades that, in Hesiod's Theogony, a bronze anvil dropped from the surface of the earth would fall for nine days before reaching it.

The verb Peter used, "tartarosas," appears nowhere else in the entire New Testament. Every other writer who needed a word for the realm of the dead reached for Hades or Gehenna. Only this one verse goes to Tartarus.

In Hesiod's account, written roughly seven centuries before this letter, Tartarus is where Zeus imprisoned the Titans after the war for Olympus. Sealed away from the rest of creation. Absolute confinement.
Peter placed fallen angels there.

He was writing for people who had grown up inside Greek cultural memory. He did not need to explain what Tartarus meant to them. He needed only to use the word, and they would already understand the weight of it.

He did not argue against the mythology. He absorbed its cosmological grammar and refilled it. The prison stayed. The inhabitants changed.
Scholars call this kind of move a recontextualization: taking the structural logic of a pre-existing concept and fitting it to new theological meaning. It is one of the more quietly stunning word choices in the entire text.

A fisherman. A word borrowed from Hesiod. One verse that most readers have never noticed, because every translation made it vanish back into "hell."....

[Hanseng]

Hobie, Very interesting. Thanks for posting that.

The word is used 3 times in the Greek OT:

Job 40:20  επελθων δε επ ορος ακροτομον εποιησεν χαρμονην τετραποσιν εν τω ̀ ταρταρὼ

Job 40:20  (LXXE) (40:15) And when he has gone up to a steep mountain, he causes joy to the quadrupeds in  the deep. 

]Job 41:32  (41:24) τον δε ̀ ταρταρον̀  της αβυσσου ωσπερ αιχμαλωτον ελογισατο αβυσσον εις περιπατον

Job 41:32  (LXXE) (41:23) and the lowest part of the deep as a captive: he reckons the deep as [his] range. 

Pr 30:16  αδης και ερως γυναικος και ̀ ταρταρος̀  και γη ουκ εμπιπλαμενη υδατος και υδωρ και πυρ ου μη ειπωσιν αρκει

Pr 30:16  (LXXE) The grave, and the love of a woman, and the earth not filled with water; water also and fire will not say, It is enough.

[Asia Joe]

On 7/28/2026 at 4:30 AM, hobie said:

In Hesiod's account, written roughly seven centuries before this letter, Tartarus is where Zeus imprisoned the Titans after the war for Olympus. Sealed away from the rest of creation. Absolute confinement.
Peter placed fallen angels there.

I have often wondered about this. Where are the evil angels now? Clearly some of them are working among us, but there must be a holding place for those not working in the world. 

Or did God allow all of them to roam and deceive the population? It seems to me, if that were the case, they might be able to overwhelm humanity.