Demonic · Infernal Court · c. 400 BCE
Abaddon
Also called Apollyon, The Destroyer
A place-name in the Hebrew Bible — 'destruction', a synonym for the grave — that Revelation personifies as the king of the locusts of the pit.
Well sourced
In Job and Proverbs, *abaddon* is a location, paired with Sheol: the place of ruin. Revelation 9 turns it into a title: the locusts released from the bottomless pit have a king over them, 'whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon' — both meaning destroyer. What is unresolved, and has been argued since the patristic period, is whether this figure is a demon or an angel executing a divine commission. The text does not say, and ColossiansOne records him as disputed for that reason.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Hebrew *avaddon*, from the root '-b-d, 'to perish'. BDB (1906) glosses it as the place of destruction and records that it belongs to the Wisdom literature alone, standing parallel to Sheol, to death and to the grave — a region inside the underworld rather than a person in it. Revelation 9:11 is where the word becomes somebody's name, and the Greek there supplies its own rendering alongside it, *Apollyon*, 'destroyer'.
Where it was actually worshipped
None. A place before he is a person — the Hebrew word means destruction, and the underworld it names is not somewhere anyone built anything.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Rank
- Angel of the Abyss
- Order
- Infernal Court
- Base of operations
- None. A place before he is a person — the Hebrew word means destruction, and the underworld it names is not somewhere anyone built anything.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Jewish
- Placed in
- The Nine Infernal Orders
Traits
- Domain
- The abyss, destruction, the locust host
- Traditional form
- King over the locusts of the pit
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Abaddon, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial2
- malefic1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Abaddon, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 480 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Abaddon, Abaddon / Apollyon
- Rank: given as A place, not a person; Angel of the bottomless pit
Named alongside Sheol as the region of destruction.
King over the locusts loosed at the fifth trumpet, who torment for five months.
“They had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Bunyan gave him the fight. In The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian meets Apollyon — the Greek name Revelation supplies alongside the Hebrew Abaddon — in the Valley of Humiliation, and the combat that follows was one of the best-known scenes in English Protestant reading for two centuries. The result is that a figure who appears in scripture as the angel of the abyss with a name meaning destruction is chiefly remembered as a personal opponent in single combat, which is a considerable narrowing and a very effective one.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Abaddon?
Is Abaddon the same as Hades?
What rank is Abaddon?
How else is Abaddon spelled?
What is Abaddon said to do?
How old is Abaddon?
Nearest in the corpus
If Abaddon is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Asherah
Mother of the Gods · Deliverance tradition
Consort of El at Ugarit and mother of the gods, whose cult objects stood in the Jerusalem temple itself for long stretches — and who disappears from English Bibles behind the word 'grove'.
Azazel
Chief Watcher · The Watchers
The scapegoat's destination in Leviticus, and the Watcher who taught weapons and cosmetics in 1 Enoch. Translators cannot even agree whether the word is a name, a place or an abstraction.
The Etemmu
The Dead Who Return · Mesopotamian
The Mesopotamian ghost of a person, and a problem of neglect rather than of malice: the etemmu that troubles the living is usually a spirit nobody buried and nobody remembers.
Behemoth
Beast of the Land · Infernal Court
Job's land-beast, paired with Leviathan — presented there as a creature of God, not an enemy of him.
Samael
Prince of Accusers · Chief Princes
Both an archangel and an adversary. Jewish tradition makes him the accusing angel, the angel of death and the guardian prince of Rome; all three are offices he was assigned, not verdicts on his character.
The Ifrit
Class of Jinn · Jinn
A powerful class of jinn — and jinn, crucially, have free will, so an ifrit may be Muslim, hostile, or neither.
The books behind Abaddon
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
New Testament
Various · c. 50–110 CE · Koine Greek
Read New Testament in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.