We have now considered almost all the words translated as “hell” in common translations. The last one we need to discuss is Tartarus. This Greek word appears only once in the New Testament.
2 Peter 2
4 For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but threw them into Tartarus with cords of darkness and delivered them to be reserved for judgment…
hell, abyss, and underworld
Only the Statenvertaling (KJV) translates Tartarus as “hell.” The other translations opt for abyss (Revised Statenvertaling, NBG) and underworld (NBV). God threw angels who sinned into Tartarus to reserve them there for judgment. Nowhere in the Bible are people referred to as angels. This refers to a repository for spiritual beings.
Peter had already written about these spiritual beings and their identity in his first letter:
1 Peter 3
18 …He (=Christ), who was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit,
19 in whom He also went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison,
20 who had once been disobedient during the longsuffering of God in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.
the origin of unfaithfulness
When Christ was raised from the dead, He went to these spirit beings in Tartarus to proclaim His victory. These spirits are those who had been disobedient in the days of Noah. They are the sons of God we read about in Genesis 6:2. They took for themselves “the daughters of man” (Gen. 6:3) and did not remain in their original state (Jude 6). This mixing of spirit beings and humans was the direct cause of the Flood (Gen. 6:3-7). They are the ones reserved for judgment in Tartarus