I have a question. In Revelation 9 it speaks of the abyss (niv) what is the literal greek for this abyss?
Sir ~
the word is spelled with the Greek letters alpha-beta-upsilon-sigma-sigma-omicron-upsilon.
“abussou”. (maybe)
Well most version (all but NIV) call it the “bottomless pit”.
That’s why I am asking.
“Bottomless Pit” seems to be a pretty literal translation. I wonder if Abyss is the same as Tartarus from mythology… anyone have any thoughts on that?
See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarus
Sonia
“Bottomless pit” is a good translation so far as Greek religion is concerned; in Jewish thought, though, they connect it more with the swirling depths of chaotic primal water upon which the earth (they thought) was founded; and so by extension any dangerously large body of water. But especially dangerously large bodies of salt water–there was just something perverse (to them) about water that was poisonous for a man to drink.
This is why when I translate Biblical Greek and get to Abyss, I always use “swirling depths”. That still retains the basic Greek thought while giving it a more Jewish coloring.
(There’s a highly amusing ironic use of the term in the exorcism of the mob of demons into the pigs: they beg to not be sent back into the swirling depths, but into the herd of pigs instead. Jesus gives them permission, and then the pigs–either insane or, I like to imagine, heroically self-sacrificial, rush off a cliff into Galilee Lake to drown. So the demons end up literally as well as metaphorically returning to the swirling depths after all. 
)
Tartaroo only shows up once in the NT (2 Pt 2:4); I haven’t been able to track down the etymology of the word, but apparently it amounts to the same poetic imagery, “lower part”.
But what do the words mean in their literal meaning JP? If the greek words translate as “fire” and “pit” then it might mean hell. If the word translate as “chocolate” and “pie” then maybe it means they’re going into a Marie Calander’s chocolate cream pie. OK OK, I’m being silly. I simply want to know the literal meaning of the gree word(s) that make up this phrase and why the NIV translates it different then everyone else.
“Abyss” in Greek does literally mean “without bottom”.
I still haven’t been able to run down an entymology for Tartarus. (I thought the Tartars might provide a clue, but apparently they were nicknamed that because they were like demons or titans from below hades… 
)
Literal meaning of abyss[os]? Bottomless sea (maybe?). Further details below.
Way over half of the [English] translations that I’ve interacted with actually, just like the NIV, say “the abyss” (and half of these make it like a proper noun, with a capital “A.”) See Rev. 9:11 in ABiPE [Aramaic Bible in Plain English], ASV, DBT, ESV, GNB, HCSB, NASB, NET, LITV, TLV, WEB & YLT. (The last of those is incidentally called Young’s Literal Translation.) Additionally there are 2 other English translations which, from what I’ve found, actually are unique. The one is the 1965 BBE [Bible in Basic English], which renders the term as “the great deep.”
The other is Phillip Goble’s OJB [Orthodox Jewish Bible], which uses the Hebrew noun “Tehom,” the same word for one of the four portions of the universe mentioned in the 1st 2 verses of the Book of Genesis:
- haš-šāmayim [the skies]
- hā-ārets [the land/earth]
- tehōm a proper noun since it doesn’t seem to be accompanied by the definite article {“the”} like all the other 3 portions?] &
- ham-māyim [the waters]
The Ancient Greek translation of the Tanakh [the so-called Old Testament] uses the same word from Rev. 9 to translate “tehōm,” i.e., abyssos, from which we get this English “abyss” and which seems to derive from bythos, “depths,” but specifically of the watery (& in particular marine, or as Jason puts it, salty) variety. There’s clearly some sort of connection between tehōm and “the waters” of Gen. 1:2. Perhaps “abyss” should therefore denote bottomless sea. Or better yet, a closer to “literal” translation would be “depth-less” in the sense of “so deep that it’s practically meaningless to say that it consists of depths at all.” In case that concept sounds kinda nonsensical it might help to think of it in the same terms as the sky, which, for cultures the world over, has always baffled people in terms of how to describe its limits, or the lack thereof. In modern Western cultures this unfathomable quality is referred to by the virtually inane term “space.”
All this does indeed parallel with the “mythological” concept of Tartaros/Tartarus, since Tartaros was, in some Greek cosmologies, the deepest part of the Underworld, and was equal to an upside-down version of Ouranos/Uranus [the sky/ heaven]. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article posted by Sonia, for Homer and Hesiod, the distance between heaven and earth was the same as the gap between our world and Tartaros down below. From what I’m gathering about the cosmologies of ancient Greece and of the ancient Near and Middle East, I’m inclined to think that tehōm/abyssos actually corresponds much better to the primordial Greek Khaos [Chaos] rather than to Tartaros.
Khaos, which apparently (and very aptly) means “Void,” “Gap” or “Chasm” [cf. Norse [i]Ginnungagap], is just as mysterious and difficult to define or describe as Tehom. In both Greek and Hebrew cosmologies Khaos and Tehom are the original or part of the original state of the universe. Both (debatably?) appear to be a mishmash of all the elements contained in the universe and so are composed of sky, earth and sea in an indistinguishable compound. The accounts of creation both in the ancient Greek mythographers and in the Bible describe a process of differentiating/dividing this compound into the separate constituents that make up the structure of the universe we now know and love/hate. Nonetheless, in both, it’s as if the universe, like a bubble, is still contained inside or surrounded by this primordial “soup” from which it originated but because there never was an up, down, sideways, solid or fluid anything about Khaos/Tehom, it’s sort of impossible to describe its precise location in relation to the universe, like it’s both everywhere and nowhere.
Thus, in Greek myth, Khaos is the inexplicable origin of Ouranos [Heaven], Gaia [Earth], Nyx [Night{-time}] and other components of our existence, including Tartaros, going by one interpretation of Hesiod’s Theogony. According the Latin writer Hyginus—who even gives us a female version of Tartaros, namely Tartara—this realm/entity is the son of Earth. Anyway, point being that, unlike Khaos, Tartaros is a definable part of a particular section of the kosmos (the section which came to be known as Haïdes [Hades]).
In his book The Greek Myths Robert Graves claims that Tartaros is a Cretan word, and he speculates that it might mean “Far West.”
Bringing it back to the Bible, I’ve also heard that there’re ancient rabbinical interpretations associating tehōm with še’ol [translated into Greek as [i]hades] and that in ancient Hebrew thought (to perhaps link with what Jason says a coupla posts back) the sea represents death. E.g. after Gen. 1:2 the next 2 times “the abyss” is mentioned (see Gen. 7:11 & 8:2), tehōm is threatening to collapse the entire structure of the universe so that the dome (or sheet, according to 1 translation) which forms the skies cracks open and the waters which had submerged the land in Gen. 1 now revert to that previous positioning, and in so doing they cause the death of “all the dry [things] that had the Breath of the Wind of Lives in the nostrils.”
Oh, hey, nice connection of the abyss to the Flood more directly! – I knew there was a conceptual connection in Jewish poetical thought (translated into Greek of course), but I hadn’t noticed the direct terminological connection!
Wow, I hadn’t before appreciated that Luke 8 employs the use of the same word in that Gadarene swine story as is used in Rev. 9 when the daimones are begging not to be assigned to your “swirling depths” 
So that irony of these entities ending up in a location similar to that which they’d been striving to avoid had also previously been lost on me.
I wonder how significant it is, however, that Luke says that the pigs ended up in “the lake” rather than, as per Mark and Matthew, “the sea.” (I take it the terms are fairly synonymous with each other…?) Do I also remember correctly there being some cool “scholarly”?] controversy about whether the accounts of these three writers are of the exact-same event (i.e. as opposed to two or even three different ones)? I’m guessing this is due to the fact there’re certain other quirks of uniqueness that each writer places into his narrative, especially from the NU-Text’s point of view.
Making no mention of an abyssos, in Mark 5 the “unclean breath(s)”[size=150]*[/size] beg(s) Jesus not to send it/them out of the country/region/territory. In Matthew 8 the daimones simply say “If you expel us–” and then they make their request for the swine. Matthew also has the most dramatic idiosyncrasy among the three accounts by stating that there were two demoniacs. The most popular English translations presume that these are necessarily men even though the ancient manuscripts of the book seem to contain no such term. (Are the pronouns employed here masculine ones?) In Matthew the location is also the most differently named - Gergesenes - in answer to Luke’s and Mark’s “Gadarenes.” The NU-Text complicates this all slightly further by having only Matthew’s location as the Gadarenes while Luke’s and Mark’s stories have us among the Gerasenes.**
- Curiously referred to in the singular both by the narrator and Jesus as well as even by it\him(?)-self in vv. 2 & 7-8 before suddenly becoming a multiple horde (like a… “Legion”
) as far as the narration is concerned. But perhaps that’s just so’s the story flows sensibly, and is sans a spoiler(?)…
** Do we assume “Gergesenes” is a reflection of the ancient Galilean Aramaic rendition of the toponym? The Pešitta (so far as Assyrian/Syriac is related to Galilean) seems to disagree since it has Gāḏrāyē, and the Vulgata is even less help since it says “Gerasenorum” in Matthew 8, thus contradicting both Ancient Greek manuscripts [M- & NU-Texts].
But AHEM! Getting back to the story after that rabbit-trail: particularly if we consider lake and sea to be mere synonyms, your irony point does strengthen the connection between “the abyss” and “the [salty] waters/deep/depths.” For whatever it’s worth, there’s an additional connection between the Tartaros discussion and the language of Mark and Matthew. These two say that the pigs plummeted into the thalassa. In Greco-Roman myth Thalassa was a female personification and goddess of the sea, and according to Hyginus she was a half-sister of the Abyss .
Ah, I didn’t know the familial connection there between Thalassa and the Abyss in some Greek sources.
That may be somewhat coincidental, though; the linguistic difference in the (translation of) the accounts (into Greek) probably amount to regional habits expected by the authors for their audiences: Luke doesn’t think his audience would understand a mud-thatch roof for a house that can be dug into, so he makes a trivial shift to something a northern Mediterranean audience would recognize better, namely shingles. (Though strictly speaking both might have been true, some light shingles being borrowed from Hellenic techniques to protect the thatch roof better. That was apparently Jesus’ house, and the biggest “artisan” or carpentry project near Nazareth when He was growing up in would have been Sepphoris, being built to Hellenic specifications as a new ‘modern’ city. Heavier shingles wouldn’t have worked, but it would be natural for Jesus and maybe other brothers to try some helpful construction innovations on their own family house.)
Regardless of the terms used in any of the three Legion accounts, the underlying concept in Jewish poetic typology would remain.
Re the different town names, my harmonization notes from several years ago indicate Gadara can’t be right. But the other two could both work.
project"]Gergesa is a town on the southeastern shore of Lake Galilee; known now as Khersa. This was part of the Decapolis (‘Ten Town’) region, overlapping the region known more formally as Perea, east of the River Jordan and somewhat south of Galilee Lake.
One town in the Decapolis confederation was Gerasa; about sixty miles inland southeast of Galilee Lake in the center of the Decapolis region (thus easily lending its name to the region). A small river flowed from there to Galilee Lake, and could have been claimed as part of the town’s inherent territory, a treasured access to the Lake. Not only could both thus have some claim to the shore area (a steep bluff unique to the area can reportedly be found a quarter-hour’s walk south along the shore from ancient Khersa, as well as limestone caves and rock chambers for the dead), but the similarity in names may have led to a confusion between them impossible now to sort out. It is also possible that the shore town was regarded as being part of the inland city via connection by the river territory, so that politically there was no distinction at all. The concept would be similar to the port-suburb Bethsaida for Capernaum, being itself thus occasionally called Capernaum even though the town itself resided back up away from the Lake; the difference would be in the extended distance between Gergesa and Gerasa.
Copies of GosMatt sometimes refer this story to the town/region of Gadara. There was a Gadara in southeast Syria, rather north of this region, but it doesn’t seem likely to have been connected to the Decapolis. Possibly another town even further south of Gerasa may have been named Gadara, capital of the Perean region which naturally overlapped somewhat with the loose Decapolis group. The town now known as Umm Qays, considerably closer to Lake Galilee than Gerasa (about ten miles southeast of the lake, past the river Yarmuk), has sometimes been identified as Gadara.
Obviously, there is some dispute about what exactly GosMatt (or some of its copyists) meant by Gadara, since geographically it’s the odd name out. Did a town in the region a few generations later pick up the name, and so copyists were attempting contemporary clarity? Does the name mean something similar in a Syriac dialect to one of the other two local names? – and if so, would that be a transliteration by the Disciple originally or by later copyists?
All textual witnesses of the Synoptic Gospels are mixed as to naming the region, in fact, probably due to later copyists trying to make clarifications to general information given in the original documents. The loose naming conventions of the time factor into this; especially if the authors (and/or subsequent copyists) expected different audiences to know of the region according to different names. Add to this the confusion caused by variant spellings – I commonly misspell and mispronounce Gerasa myself (I keep wanting it to be Gesara)!
The basic event is, so far as I recall, generally conceded across scholarly opinion (at least narratively if not historically for more sceptical scholars); any dispute is over whether one or more authors combined a more minor account with it (accidentally from confusion in the oral tradition, or on purpose as a narratively convenient way to include a bit more of the tradition being passed on). As you expected, a lot of that comes from the hashy town/region name transmission; some of it comes from the presence of that second demonaic on the scene. I think it’s more likely he was dropped from the narrative because he wasn’t the guy who went on to act as an evangelist for the region, much like how the transmission of the healing of blind bar-Timaeus near Jericho has gotten hashed in its timing cues (before going in or while going out?) due to a second blind man being part of the story – but Bartimaeus is the guy the audience is already familiar with. (Again, Simon of Cyrene is only important as the father of Alexander and Rufus to people who personally know Alexander and Rufus! To other audiences their inclusion doesn’t matter, so can be dropped.)
I have to do some ‘work’ work (and late breakfast), so I’ll get back later to posting my educated guess of how the second guy originally fit into the story.
Yes, N. T. Wright convinced me in his Jesus and the Victory of God that oral and written accounts of the sayings and actions of Jesus would tend to be simplified and shortened over time as the audiences got further removed from personally knowing the particulars. Here’s a made-up example to illustrate:
The Apostle Thomas said, "One day Jesus was walking by old Jonas’s woodshop, and up to Him walks Miriam and her sister, the daughters of Zacharias. You remember Zacharias, the one with a beard that was almost yellow? Miriam then said in that high voice of hers, “Jesus, have mercy on me.”
Ultimately, as this story was told to audiences who knew nothing of Jonas, Zacharias, or of Miriam or her sister, it would become:
"One day Jesus was walking, and a woman approached and said to Him, “Jesus, have mercy on me.”
Yep, that’s the process. From a different source critical direction, details could also be added back in when passing along programmatic material, whether to just flesh out an incident in trivial details for color, or to clarify what certain things implied, or to connect the programmatic form (the scribal notes being passed around among the chief disciples so that everyone’s on the same page in what they’re teaching) back to details the audience would be specially familiar with.
So it’s a bit of an open question, going back to the example of Simon of Cyrene, whether Alexander and Rufus were dropped out as irrelevant over time, or whether they weren’t there in the original “keygma” narrative but were added in because of local historical connections in the audience. Both alterations from previous source material might be true: the common apostolic source notes didn’t mention A & R, but Mark mentions them (or Peter does and Mark passes that along) because the audience knows them, and then Matthew and Luke having Mark as reference leave them off again – perhaps because they aren’t even working from Mark but from the apostolic source, or perhaps they have both at hand and just omit the reference as unnecessary and unoriginal, or perhaps they only have Mark (and other sources? Luke references many) but just drop the irrelevant information.
Now for my test harmonization of the Synoptic Legion story.
Giving Matthew the benefit of the doubt, about there being two men, solves an interesting problem in GosMark and GosLuke: it would explain why the Legion doesn’t seem to leave after the first command – a curious detail simply reported and passed over by Mark and Luke, who may not have known about a second man, while Matthew includes a second man and not the apparent failure of a command. Thus a stereoscopic answer can be pieced together from the disparate narratives – a strong sign of a larger more coherent story (or history) the authors are working from.
That’s a pretty neat example you’ve offered there, Geoffrey: thank you 
@Jason: I’ve been checking out your King of Stories project>> Mind = Blown!!! I’m really enjoying the chapters I’ve read so far. You done gone and created your own Diatessaron [complete with jet engines]! (& this was just for chillaxation/fun, do I see you saying somewhere in its Intro?)
Pertaining to our Swine in the Drink episode, what d’you think of the following theory? The second of the story’s two demoniacs is a woman, possibly a relative of the first, perhaps his wife or another member of his nuclear family, unmentioned by Mark and Luke in the same way that—as Matthew seems to be careful in pointing out in Ch. 14 v. 21, when Jesus gives the sign of fish and bread at Bethsaida—of those who partake of this feast, neither women nor children are enumerated.(1) It so happens, pertaining to the typhloi, “blind [ones]” (again, as far as I can tell, just like in the account of the two demoniacs in Ch. 8, the word “men” appears nowhere in this story, apart from English translations[2]), that it’s the same author (Ch. 20) who gives us two of these characters instead of the [seemingly] solitary one in the other “Synoptics.” Maybe, therefore, Bartimaios’ compatriot is a female [relative?] who, like with the demoniac, is unmentioned by Mark and Luke because, together with her [kins?]man, they are counted as one by default (which would make especial sense if they’re each other’s spouses, i.e. “one flesh”).[3]
There’s a prophecy in Micah 7:18-19 which appears to be relevant to the Swine in the Drink incident:
In Romans 10:17 there’s direct confirmation of a connection the like of which you pointed out between the abyss and the sea: “Who will descend into the abyss as though to fetch Khristos [Christ] up out of the dead?” Here the epistle-writer is quoting Deuteronomy 30:13, in which Mosheh [Moses] is saying to Yisra’el [Israel] that the direction-sign [mitzvah] which he is issuing him is neither hidden nor distant. “It is not beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will pass through the sea on our behalf and bring it to us, that we might recognise and adhere to it?’ For the Word Dāḇār](4) is intimate with you, in your mouth and in your heart(5), that you may adhere to it.”
This doubtless was said in order to remind Yisra’el that forty years prior to this, before the Direction-Signs of the Torah had been issued to him, he had walked through the sea in a most unusual manner, passing from the threat of destruction to salvation, from the king who intended him harm on the one side of the sea to the place where the people received the special “holy”] directions on the other.
But Paulos goes fathoms deeper with all this by bringing us back to our aforementioned analogy between the sea and the netherworld. If the nekrōn [dead], out of Whom Khristos is to be fetched up, are located in the Abyss, the implication is that the Abyss is either the abode of the dead or at least a “place” through which they somehow pass (insofar as they possess an actually substantial existence).[6] Another saying of Paulos would further augment the link between the sea and the Abyss (whatever the Abyss actually is) on the one hand with the better-fleshed-out terms Še’ol and Hades (and by extension their controversial English [anti-]counterpart Hell) on the other hand.
In Acts 13:35 Paulos quotes the 2nd half of Psalm 16:10, which he points out was written by King David, seemingly about David but in actuality, prophetically, rather, about Jesus, that He “will not see decay/corruption.” In the first half of the Psalm verse [the Son of] David says that He-Who-Exists will not abandon His nephesh * in She’ol, commonly translated as “You will not leave my soul in Hell.”
[size=85]1. This flows with typical patriarchal custom—which is by no means exclusive to the culture(s) presently in view [nor indeed restricted to the era in question, as it’s still the dominant custom of the world today]—of families being represented by their men, whether by naming or by numbering. Notwithstanding this, and considering in particular the degraded status of women in the region’s culture at the time [as still in many if not most regions and cultures today], women do receive remarkably special eminences in the overall saga of this section of the Bible.
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I’ll admit that it’s fair to naturally expect that male[/size] persons are indicated by the masculine nouns used here (for the blind and the demonised), although, as many of us [might] know, gendered nouns in many languages (especially ancient ones like Greek and Hebrew) were more inclusive and less specific when referring to groups of people consisting of both males and females, so that, e.g. huioi and adelphoi should in fact, in many of their occurrences, be translated “offspring/children” and “siblings” respectively, rather than “sons” and “brothers/brethren.”
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Pertaining to the mentions of obscurer female personages, Matthew stands apart among the four scrolls of fame in that he is the only one of them to point out that Kephah had a wife, moreover that his mother-in-law lived in his house (Ch. 8, v. 14) and that Pontius Pilatus had a wife too (Ch. 27, v. 19).
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The Hebrew name of this book, Dāḇārim (plural form of Dāḇār), means “Words.”
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The heart in ancient Hebrew and Greek analogy is the source of thought, equivalent to the modern English expression “the mind.”
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Or, better yet, perhaps it is through Khristos’ having been inside them (and among them as One of them) that the nekrōn become substantial and are dragged upwards in the train of His robe, from the place of decaying into nonbeing, to be seated in the skies together with Him. *