“IS ‘TARTARUS’ HELL?”

Hugo McCord

God has “tartarized,” sent to Tartarus (tartaroo, 2 Peter 2:4), some disobedient angels. A question has come, “Is ‘Tartarus’ hell?” The question calls for a more comprehensive inquiry: “Where are the dead?”

But, biblically, the dead are not dead! The corpses of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were buried “in the cave of the field of Machpelah” (Genesis 49:29). Muslims and Jews and Christians respectfully visit that site in present day Hebron. But long since the dead bodies of the patriarchs have returned to “dust” (Genesis 3:19).

However, after Abraham had been dead 330 years (Galatians 3:17; Genesis 12:4; 25:7), Isaac for 225 years (Genesis 17:17; 35:28), and Jacob for 198 years (Genesis 25:26; 47:28), God told Moses (believed to be in 1446 B.C.) that “I am,” not “I was,” the “God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). Jesus said that we should learn from that announcement that God is not the God “of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). If Jesus was right, there is something about every human being that never dies.

We learn then that man is a dual being, one visible and one invisible. The visible, the physical, started when “God formed (yatsar, Genesis 2:7, mold, as of a potter) man from the dust of the ground, and the man became a living soul.” But the translation “soul” in Genesis 2:7 does not mean the invisible part of man’s duality, though in other passages the word “soul” does refer to the second part of man (as in Matthew 10:28; James 5:20; 1 Peter 1:9).

In Genesis 2:7, the translation that “the man became a living being” is better, referring only to his physical nature, for the same two Hebrew words (nephesh hayyah) in Genesis 2:7 in Genesis 1:20, 24 refer to fish and cattle and wild beasts. However, man is more than a physical being like animals, and we go to another passage to learn what that extra is, the second part of his duality.

Man was made in the “image” of God (Genesis 1:26), and animals are not. What is there in a human being that is the image of God? “God is spirit” (John 4:24), and a spirit being “does not have flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39). As God is a spirit being, and is “the Father of spirits” (Hebrews 12:9), so he “forms the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:1), something like himself!

At the time that a man’s sperm fertilizes a woman’s egg (ovum), the Father of spirits sends from a heaven a new spirit into that new human living cell, for a “body without the spirit is dead” (James 2:26). At the moment of conception, that living cell (called a “zygote”) is not a potential human being, but a human being with much potential. How the Father unites spirit with flesh is mysterious:

Just as you do not know how the spirit enters the bones in the womb of a pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things (Ecclesiastes 11:5, NASV margin). You do not know how a pregnant woman comes to have a body and a living spirit in her womb; nor do you know how God, the maker of all things, works (Ecclesiastes 11:5, NEB).

After a person dies, his “spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Out in God’s domain the released spirit knows what is going on back in the world he has left. After “Samuel had died” and was “buried in Ramah” (1 Samuel 28:3), his spirit did not relish a call back to this world, for he asked, “Why have you disturbed me?” (1 Samuel 28:15). The spirits of Moses and Elijah came from God’s domain some 1500 years and 800 years to a mountain top in Palestine, and talked with Jesus (Luke 9:31).

The “buried body” of “a certain rich man” knew nothing, for in the grave “there is neither working nor planning, nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 9:10; Luke 16:19-31). But the spirit of that “certain rich man” was very much alive in a place called “Hades,” and exclaiming, “I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:23-24).

His spirit remembered a man named Lazarus craving “crumbs” from his table (Luke 16:20-21). Also, the spirit of the rich man remembered that his five brothers back on the earth were not living right (Luke 16:28). The spirit of the beggar Lazarus, when he died, left the starvation agony of his body, and was “comforted” in “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22, 25).

Thus the spirits of two men, on leaving their bodies, were both alive and conscious, though in different places. One was in Hades, a place of flaming torment, while the other was “comforted” far away from Hades, in Abraham’s bosom, with “a great gulf fixed” between them (Luke 16:22, 25, 26). Abraham’s bosom is not a subdivision of Hades, but separated by a “great gulf” (Luke 16:26).

The words “Abraham’s bosom” imply loving and watchful care:

No place of toil; no burning heat; no piercing cold; nor are any briers there; but the countenance of the fathers and of the just, which they see always, smile upon them, while they wait for the rest and eternal life in heaven, which is to succeed this region. This place we call the bosom of Abraham (Josephus, born 37 A.D.).

It is likely that “Abraham’s bosom” is just another name for “Paradise,” where the spirits of Jesus and of the penitent thief went the day they died (Luke 23:43). Then, on the third day, when the spirit of Jesus returned from Paradise to his body, he told Mary Magdalene that he had “not yet ascended” to heaven where his Father was (John 20:17). Thus Paradise, where the spirit of the penitent thief still is, is not heaven where the Father is, but, for some reason, Paradise is called “the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2-4).

Very likely three names for the same place, where saved spirits await the day of judgment, are Abraham’s bosom, Paradise, and “the third heaven.” Similarly, likely three names describe the one place where unsaved spirits (human, angelic, and demonic) are awaiting the day of judgment. One is called “Hades.” Another is the “abyss,” the home of evil spirits called “demons,” a place they do not enjoy (Luke 8:30-31). The third is “Tartarus,” where disobedient angels in “chains of darkness,” are jailed waiting “judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). Unless God has three jails for unsaved human spirits, for demons, and for disobedient angels, he uses three names to describe one prison.

Tartarus among “the ancient Greeks” was “the abode of the wicked dead, where they suffer punishment for their evil deeds,” and “answers to the Gehenna of the Jews” (Thayer). One lexicon says that to “tartarize” means to “cast into hell” (Abbott-Smith).

However, the Tartarus described by Peter is not the “hell fire” that Jesus described (Matthew 5:22; 18:8-9; 25:41; Mark 9:47). Instead, the New Testament Tartarus is an intermediate, temporary prison where disobedient angels are held captive waiting “for judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). Jude does not use the word “Tartarus,” but his description of an intermediate, temporary prison for disobedient angels matches what Peter wrote:

Also, angels, who did not keep their own dwelling, but deserted it, he [the Lord] has kept in eternal chains, under darkness, for the judgment of the great day (Jude 6).

It appears, therefore, that God has one temporary, intermediate place of comfort (under three names: Abraham’s bosom, Paradise, and “the third heaven) and one temporary, intermediate place of suffering (under three names: Hades, abyss, and Tartarus), from which the spirits of all men and angels, and demons will “appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

From Jesus’ judgment seat “many” (Matthew 7:13; 20:16) will go away “into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his agents” (Matthew 25:41), and “few” (Matthew 7:14; 20:16) will go “into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46), to “an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven” for them (1 Peter 1:3-5).