What Is the Bottomless Pit?

The bottomless pit is a prison for evil spirits, held shut by God's authority, out of which several of Revelation's worst figures come and into which Satan is thrown for the thousand years. That is the picture the New Testament gives, and it is consistent everywhere the term appears.

The English phrase renders one Greek word. Abyssos, from the negating prefix a-, meaning without, joined to a word for depth. Literally: without a floor. The KJV translates it "bottomless pit" every time it occurs in Revelation and "the deep" in the two places it occurs elsewhere. It is the same word English borrowed as abyss.

Every place it appears

Nine times in the New Testament. Seeing them together is more useful than any definition, because the usage is remarkably steady.

The Luke passage is the one that establishes the sense. The legion of demons in the man of the Gadarenes ask Jesus for one thing.

And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. Luke 8:31

Whatever the abyss is, demons regard being sent there as the worst available outcome, and they assume Jesus has the authority to do it. That single verse settles more about the word than the whole of Revelation does: it is a confinement, it is feared by spirits, and Christ controls the door.

What comes out of it

Revelation opens the pit twice, and both times something terrible comes up.

At the fifth trumpet a star falls to earth with the key, the shaft is opened, smoke pours out like the smoke of a great furnace, and locusts come out of the smoke with orders to torment rather than kill. They have a king.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. Revelation 9:11

Abaddon is Hebrew for destruction or ruin, and it appears in the Old Testament as a name for the place of the dead, paired with Sheol in Job and Proverbs. Apollyon is a Greek participle from apollymi, to destroy, so it means the destroyer. John gives the name twice because his readers spoke both languages, and the two words carry the same meaning.

Then in Revelation 11:7 and 17:8 the beast is said to ascend out of the bottomless pit. The point being made is about origin: whatever authority the beast wields, it comes up from the prison, and the prison belongs to God.

The Old Testament behind the word

Abyssos was not coined by Christians. It is the standard Septuagint word for the Hebrew tehōm, the deep, and it appears there over thirty times.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2

"The deep" there is tehōm in Hebrew and abyssos in the Greek translation the New Testament writers used. The same word covers the fountains of the great deep that break open in the flood, and the deep that calls to deep in Psalm 42:7.

So the term arrives in Revelation already associated with the primeval waters: the formless, unmeasured place that existed before God ordered creation and that he holds in check afterwards. By the first century, Jewish writing had shifted it toward a prison for rebel spirits, which is how Luke and John both use it. That background is why a pit can be called bottomless without the writer worrying about geology.

How it differs from the other words for hell

English flattens four distinct Greek terms into "hell", and the flattening causes real confusion here.

Hadēs translates the Hebrew Sheol and names the state of the dead between death and resurrection. Revelation 20:13 has death and hell delivering up their dead, then being thrown into the lake of fire, so hadēs is emptied and ended.

Tartaroō is a verb, used once in the entire Bible, at 2 Peter 2:4. God did not spare the angels that sinned, but "cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment". The verb behind "cast them down to hell" is borrowed from Greek mythology, where Tartarus was the deepest pit, below Hades, in which the Titans were held. Peter uses it for angels held awaiting trial, which is close to what the abyss does in Luke 8 and Jude 6.

Geenna is not Greek in origin at all. It transliterates the Hebrew gê-hinnōm, the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where children had been sacrificed to Molech and which became a byword for judgment. That is the word Jesus uses for final punishment.

The abyss is none of these. It is a place of custody, before the trial, for spirits rather than for human dead. It is also not the lake of fire: Revelation 20:10 puts the devil there after the thousand years and after his release from the pit, which means the pit and the lake are two different destinations at two different times.

Place, state, or symbol

Here the honest answer is that Christians divide, and the text supports being careful.

A literal place. The pit has a key, a shaft, a door that can be shut and a seal that can be applied. Smoke rises from it. Things come out and go back in. Readers who take Revelation's visions as depicting real events generally take the pit as a real somewhere, not geographic in the way a city is, but a location in which a spirit can be held.

A state of restraint. Others note that a spirit has no body, so a chain cannot literally hold it and a floor cannot literally be missing beneath it. On this reading the whole apparatus, key and chain and pit and seal, describes a condition rather than a place, and John gives the condition a shape you can picture.

A symbol of the sphere of evil under God's control. A third reading takes the abyss as Revelation's image for the whole domain that opposition to God comes out of, tracing the line back to the chaos-deep of Genesis 1:2. The point of every occurrence is then the same, and it is about God rather than geography: the source of evil has a lid on it, and God holds the key.

These are not three denominations. Readers in every camp take one or another, and the choice does not by itself settle anyone's millennial view.

Why the sealing matters

What does determine a great deal is what the shutting and sealing of the pit in Revelation 20 accomplishes.

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled. Revelation 20:3

"Shut him up" is ekleisen, the ordinary verb for closing a door. "Set a seal" is esphragisen, the verb used of a signet pressed into wax to certify that something has not been opened since it was closed. A seal is a legal act as much as a physical one. It says: this stays as it is, on someone's authority, until that authority breaks it.

Amillennial readers, who hold that the thousand years is the present age, take the sealing as real but limited in scope by the purpose clause that follows it. What is sealed off is Satan's power to hold whole nations in the dark, which is why the gospel now crosses every border. Postmillennial readers take it similarly, but expect the restraint to become steadily more visible as the gospel advances through history, so that the pit's effect is something the world will increasingly see. Premillennial readers answer that a chain, a pit, a shut door and a wax seal are four images of total confinement stacked on top of one another, and that nothing in the world since Pentecost matches the picture.

That argument is worth having in full, and it is set out on its own page: is Satan bound right now.

What is worth carrying away from the word itself is how little of the popular picture the Bible supplies. There is no description of the inside of the pit, no account of what is done there, and no hint of how deep it goes, because the point of calling it bottomless is that the question does not apply. What the text gives you instead is a key, and someone holding it.