avaddon

Abaddon is built from the Hebrew verb for perishing and being lost, and it names not just any death but the bottom of death, the zone where things go to be utterly undone. Every time it appears it sits in poetry, almost always beside another word for the underworld, and it pushes that word further: where Sheol is the grave's wide region, Abaddon is its absolute floor, the point of no recovery.

The senses below are shades of that one idea, not different words. Most often Abaddon is the destroying depth of the realm of the dead, lined up with a spatial term so it can mark the farthest reach of that realm: nothing there is hidden from God, and even there his loyal love seems out of reach. Once it stands alone as the final destination of a self-consuming fire, the ruin that swallows a life all the way down. And once the poet lets Abaddon, together with Death, speak with a voice and listen with an ear.

That one personifying line is the seed of a long afterlife. By the time of the New Testament the word had been re-read as a name: Revelation gives it as the personal title of the angel-king of the abyss, glossed in Greek as the Destroyer. But within the Hebrew Bible itself the word is a place, not a person; the speaking and listening belong to the same kind of poetry that elsewhere lets the deep sea answer back. Scholars disagree about how much old myth lies under that personification, and that debate is recorded below.