apolluō

When the word is used of one person or power acting on another, it means to do away with them: to kill, to wreck, to finish off. The force is total. It is not merely to harm or weaken but to bring to an end.

The range runs from ordinary violence (plotting to kill Jesus, a king destroying murderers) to God's final judgment, where the same word names the ruin of both body and life in the age to come. The thread holding these together is one agent deliberately bringing about the end of another.

The New Testament also turns this around as a warning: clinging to your life destroys it, while losing it for Jesus saves it. The destroyer there is the person's own grasping.

In its other form the word turns inward: the subject is not destroying someone else but is itself coming to ruin. It covers dying in a storm or a plague, being swept away in judgment, food or containers spoiling, and a thing slipping out of someone's keeping and going missing.

The two strongest New Testament uses pull in opposite directions. One is the lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son, where to be lost is not to be annihilated but to be out of place and grievable, waiting to be found. The other is final perishing, set directly against eternal life: not to perish but to have life that never ends.

What unites the shades is that something reaches its undoing on its own account, whether that undoing is death, decay, going missing, or final loss before God.