Abyss

The Abyss is a sealed realm whose opening and closure shape two sharply different episodes in the book’s end-times visions. At the fifth trumpet, it releases a plague of locusts under a command that limits whom they may harm; later, an angel shuts Satan inside it for a thousand years. The same place thus functions both as a controlled source of suffering and as a barrier against deception.

Definition and Narrative Function

The text also calls the Abyss the bottomless pit. It supplies no map or physical description that would locate it in ordinary geography. Instead, the realm is defined by its threshold: it can be opened with a key, its contents can emerge, and it can be shut and sealed. Access is granted to particular agents, and the effects of opening it are bounded by specific commands. The place matters less as a landscape than as a point of controlled passage between confinement and the world above.

The book’s commentary identifies the pit with hell when discussing the fifth trumpet. That interpretation accompanies a vision in which its opening darkens the sun and air with smoke. The darkness marks a change in the scene before the locusts appear, while the key makes clear that their emergence follows an authorized opening rather than an unregulated breach.

The Fifth Trumpet and the Locusts

When the fifth angel sounds the trumpet, a star that has fallen from heaven to earth is given the key to the Abyss. The star opens it, smoke rises as from a great furnace, and the sun and air are darkened. Locusts come out of the smoke. Their release makes the Abyss the immediate source of one of the trumpet judgments, but their power is not presented as unlimited.

They are forbidden to harm the earth’s grass, green plants, and trees. Their target is instead people who do not have God’s seal on their foreheads. They are not permitted to kill those people; the punishment is torment lasting five months. The passage says that those afflicted will long for death, but death will elude them. These limits give the episode a defined duration and a specified human target, while the exemption for sealed people distinguishes those protected from those exposed to the judgment.

The locusts are described as having a king, identified as the angel of the Abyss. His Hebrew name is Abaddon and his Greek name is Apollyon. The ruler’s titles and the swarm’s restricted assignment connect the opened place to an organized power, not merely to a mass of creatures escaping at random. In the book’s later commentary, the creatures are characterized as scorpion-like and their commander as satanic; the account also stresses the five-month duration as evidence that this judgment is not brief.

The Abyss as a Place of Confinement

A later scene gives the Abyss a different role. An angel descends from heaven carrying its key and a great chain, seizes the dragon—also named as the ancient serpent, the Devil, and Satan—and binds him for a thousand years. The angel casts him into the Abyss, shuts it, and sets a seal over him. Here the realm does not release a judgment upon people; it confines the figure whose deception of the nations is to cease during the stated period.

The confinement is explicitly temporary. Satan is to remain shut away until the thousand years are completed, after which he must be released for a little while. The seal therefore signifies a restriction with a stated term, not an ending without qualification. The text does not say that this later angel is the same figure as the angel who rules the locusts, nor does it equate the two episodes’ agents. What links them is the Abyss itself: in one scene it is opened to let a destructive force out, and in the other it is shut to keep Satan in.

Place in the Book’s End-Times Structure

These contrasting episodes make the Abyss an instrument through which authority is expressed. At the fifth trumpet, access allows a bounded judgment to reach the unsealed; in the later scene, closure restrains Satan and interrupts his deception of the nations. In both cases the place is governed by an opening, a limit, and a specified consequence. Its significance lies in that repeated pattern rather than in any elaborated description of its interior.

The episodes also show why the Abyss cannot be reduced to a single narrative function. Its opening produces a period of torment with a five-month limit, while its closure imposes a thousand-year restraint followed by a brief release. The same threshold accommodates different agents, durations, and purposes. As a result, the Abyss links judgment and confinement within the book’s vision of the end times, while leaving its physical nature largely undescribed.