to torment or be tormented; to inflict or undergo severe suffering in body, mind, or under judgment
The word began as a metalworker's term. A touchstone was a dark stone that showed whether gold was pure, and from testing metal the family of words moved to testing a person. In Greek courts, where a slave's testimony counted only if it was extracted under torture, the sense slid toward "to torture," and from there into the general "to torment, to cause severe pain." By the time of the New Testament the testing idea is gone: the verb simply means suffering.
What kind of suffering depends on the sentence. The same verb describes a sick servant in agony, sailors battered by a storm, a woman in the pains of childbirth, a righteous man inwardly sickened by the evil around him, demons dreading punishment, and the wicked under God's judgment. No single English word carries that whole range, which is why translators rotate among "torment," "torture," "distressed," "straining," "in labor," and "in agony."
When the New Testament wants to speak of testing or proving a person, it deliberately reaches for other words, most notably the testing-and-tempting word (πειράζω), never this one. Reading a "God is refining you" idea into this verb reverses its actual history: by the first century it had kept the pain of the touchstone and lost the proving.
The heaviest uses cluster in Revelation, where the torment is God's judgment. Whether that torment is unending or the language pictures a final, irreversible destruction is one of the sharpest debates in the book. The verb itself names the pain, not how long it lasts.
Nuances
Whether the torment of Revelation 14:10-11, and by extension 20:10, denotes unending conscious suffering, or the finality and irreversibility of destruction, or is apocalyptic imagery not meant to settle the question.
- majorityIt teaches eternal conscious torment: the smoke rising forever and the absence of rest day or night describe unending suffering.; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1999), 495-96, and in Hell under Fire, ed. Morgan and Peterson (Zondervan, 2004); D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Zondervan, 1996), 524-36
- minorityIt teaches final destruction (conditionalism): the imagery is drawn from Genesis 19 and Isaiah 34, which describe completed ruin, and the same rising-smoke formula is applied to Babylon, which is found no more.; Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 3rd ed. (Cascade, 2011); Ralph Bowles, "Does Revelation 14:11 Teach Eternal Torment?", Evangelical Quarterly 73.1 (2001), 21-36
- minorityThe language is conventional apocalyptic imagery meant to warn and move readers to repentance, and should not be pressed into a systematic doctrine either way.; David Aune, Revelation 6-16, WBC 52B (Word, 1998), 528-30; Craig Koester, Revelation, AYB 38A (Yale, 2014), 460-63