Tartarus: From the Titans' Prison to 2 Peter's Fallen Angels

In Greek myth Tartarus is the deepest prison, far below Hades, where Zeus locked up the Titans. In 2 Peter 2:4 the same word describes where God cast the angels that sinned.

In Greek myth, Tartarus is the deepest place in the universe, a prison far below even Hades. Hesiod's Theogony gives its depth in a famous image: "a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth; and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth."

After Zeus and the Olympians defeated the Titans, the older generation of gods, they threw them into Tartarus. Hesiod says Poseidon fitted it with bronze gates and a wall runs all around it, and the Hundred-Handed giants stand guard. Homer's Iliad has Zeus threaten any god who disobeys him with Tartarus, "as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth." In some early texts Tartarus is also a primordial being, born right after Chaos.

The word crossed into Jewish and Christian writing. The Greek of 2 Peter 2:4 says God did not spare the angels that sinned but cast them into Tartarus (a verb, tartaroo), which the King James Version renders "cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness." This echoes the Enoch tradition, where the Watchers are bound in darkness under the earth until judgment.

The parallel is what fascinates people: in both Greek and Jewish tradition, an older order of powerful beings who ruled or interfered before humans is defeated and locked underground. Scholars explain the overlap as shared Mediterranean ideas and deliberate borrowing by Greek-speaking Jewish and Christian writers, rather than two independent memories of the same event.