A post on Tartarus from our very own Leolaia : "
Yeah, that Tartarus reference is an interesting one. That allusion in 2 Peter 2:4 represents a reworking of the very Enochic allusion in Jude 6 (as delineated above); the priority of Jude over 2 Peter is especially apparent in how the Petrine author blurred or omitted altogether the allusions to 1 Enoch and the Assumption of Moses. The reference to "Tartartus" (actually it is a verb here, tartaroun"cast into Tartarus") however is quite in keeping with 1 Enoch, where "Tartarus" appears in 1 Enoch 20:2although it appears in the LXX as well (Job 40:20, 41:24 LXX, Proberbs 30:16 LXX). The verbal form doesn't occur in the LXX or the Greek version of 1 Enoch but is solely restricted to pagan references to the Tartarus myth. And it is also very interesting that there is a probable allusion to the Tartarus myth in the original version of the text in Jude 6. There the author says that the imprisoned angels are kept "under nether blackness" (hupo zophon). The Enochic texts use skotos "darkness" to refer to the gloom of the angelic prison, although zophos does occur elsewhere in 1 Enoch, specifically in ch. 17, where it refers to the "place of black darkness" (zophódé topon) at the extremities of the world, near where the gloom of "the great darkness" (tou megalou skotous) is found (v. 2, 6). But we find both "under nether blackness" (hupo zophon) and "chains" (desmois), the two expressions found in Jude 6, used together in Hesiod in his classical telling of the Tartarus myth:
"[They] overshadowed the Titans with their missiles, and buried them beneath the wide-pathed earth, and bound them in bitter chains (desmoisin) when they had conquered them by their strength for all their great spirit, as far beneath the earth to Tartarus.... There by the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds, the Titan gods (theoi Titénes) are hidden under black darkness (hupo zophó), in a dank place where the ends of the huge earth meet" (Hesiod, Theogonia 715-730).
The Society ignores all this and metaphorically refers to a "spritual state of debasement" of the fallen angels. The reason for this interpretation is their identification of the demons with the fallen angels and not the souls of the drowned Nephilim, as in Enochic and subsequent literature (including the NT). If the fallen angels were bound and imprisoned in an abyss (just as the Devil is supposed to be at the end times, according to Revelation), then they wouldn't be around possessing and bothering people. Rather the ancient Jewish-Christian belief was that the demons look for fleshly bodies to dwell in because they lost their original bodies in the Flood when the Nephilim drowned (which is why the legion of demons proceed to drown themselves when they possess a herd of swine in Mark 9).
