HistoricalChristian.Faith

2 Peter's "Tartarus" (ταρταρόω) as a Greek/Titanomachy borrowing

Type: lexical/intertextual argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — the core is sound: 2 Peter 2:4's verb tartaróō ("cast into Tartarus") genuinely carries Greek-underworld / Titan freight, and choosing it where Jude 6 had only "chains and darkness" is a deliberate Hellenization; but the stronger claim it serves — that 2 Peter consciously maps the Watchers onto the Titans, fusing the two myths — outruns the specialists, who route the word through Jewish-apocalyptic mediation (Greek 1 Enoch already set the fallen angels in Tartarus), so it is coherent and not ruled out but short of demonstrable · advanced by Dr. Taylor Marshall

Related arguments: the Titans and the Watchers — see also the Watcher legend as a coded Maccabean allegory · the Titanomachy as a garbled memory of Genesis 6

The claim

It's not only this direct quotation of 1 Enoch by Jude, but Jude (and 2 Peter) allude to the fantastical events of 1 Enoch, namely the sexual encounters of fallen angels with human women, which gives birth to the nephilim or "giants."

— Taylor Marshall, Angels having Relations with Humans within Jude and 2 Peter and 1 Enoch (2018), taylormarshall.com, where he notes that 2 Peter 2:4 "explicitly uses Enoch's word 'Tartarus'" (the verb tartaróō) for the imprisonment of the fallen angels. In the 2023 podcast he presses the point further: the word is not Hebrew or Aramaic but Greek — drawn from Homer's Tartarus ("as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth") and the Titanomachy (Zeus casting the Titans into Tartarus) — so its use in 1 Enoch and 2 Peter signals a deliberate "blending" of the Greek Titan-myth into the Hebrew Watcher legend: the New Testament writers consciously map the rebel Watchers onto the Titans, reading Yahweh-vs.-the-Watchers through Zeus-vs.-the-Titans.¹

Who advances it

Marshall is the proponent we ingest, but the connection is a commonplace of the commentary tradition and its most energetic modern promoter is Michael S. Heiser (Reversing Hermon; the "Divine Council" school), who presses the Rephaim → Titans → Tartarus links hard. The sober end of the same observation is old and mainstream: it appears in Richard Bauckham's standard commentary and, before him, in the lexica. The argument therefore has to be split in two — a modest, well-grounded form and a maximal, contested one — because the proponents blur them.

The evidence for

The word is distinctively Greek, and its mythic home is the Titans' pit. tartaróō is a New Testament hapax legomenon — 2 Peter 2:4 alone — the denominative verb of τάρταρος, and its cognate katatartaróō is the standard verb for casting the Titans down (Sextus Empiricus: ho Zeus ton Kronon katetartárōsen, "Zeus cast Kronos down to Tartarus"). Tartarus is, in Homer (Iliad 8.13–16) and Hesiod (Theogony 717–735), the sub-Hadean gulf "as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth" into which Zeus hurls the defeated Titans; and Liddell–Scott–Jones lists the whole verb-family at only four witnesses across a millennium — Acusilaus (5th c. BC), 2 Peter, Joannes Lydus, and a Townley scholion on the Iliad (on the gods "below with Kronos") — while A. T. Robertson notes it is found "here alone save in a scholion on Homer," and BDAG glosses it "hold captive in Tartarus." So the connotation the proponents hear is really there: this is not the neutral Jewish word for the grave (Sheol/Hades) but the Greek word for the prison of rebel gods.²

The commentators grant the Greek coloring. Bauckham's Word Biblical Commentary reads 2 Peter 2:4 against "early Greek theogonic myths, in which the ancient giants, the Cyclopes and Titans, were imprisoned in Tartarus, the lowest part of the underworld." Jerome Neyrey (Anchor Bible) judges the verse tailored "to evoke a reminiscence of the Greek story of punishment of the Titans in Tartarus," and Bradly Billings argues 2 Peter appropriates "the particular language of Graeco-Roman mythology" to build a "linguistic bridge" into a Hellenistic audience.³

Jude's non-use is the sharpest internal control. Jude 6 — the near-identical parallel from which 2 Peter almost certainly worked — keeps the fallen angels "in everlasting chains under darkness," pure Enochic imagery, and never says Tartarus. 2 Peter substitutes the Greek mythological verb at exactly that point. On the majority view that 2 Peter used Jude, the Tartarus-word is 2 Peter's own editorial choice — a deliberate reach for a Hellenized register his source lacked. That is the single best argument that the Greek connotation is intended, not accidental.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The modest form of the interpretation is well-grounded and, at the level of connotation, near-consensus: tartaróō is a genuinely Greek, genuinely Titan-associated word, and 2 Peter's swap of it for Jude's "chains and darkness" is a deliberate Hellenization. Moreover, Second Temple Judaism had already begun assimilating its own giants to the Greek ones, so the instinct behind the reading is not invented: the Septuagint renders the Nephilim gígantes (Gen 6:4) — a Gigantomachy word — and elsewhere the translators render the Rephaim Titânes outright (2 Samuel 5:18 LXX, "valley of the Titans"), while Judith 16:6 sets "the sons of the Titans" in synonymous parallel with "lofty giants." Egyptian-Jewish Sibylline Oracles 3 (2nd c. BC) weld Hesiod's Kronos-and-the-Titans onto the Genesis primeval history, and a later Sibylline stratum has the archangel Uriel lead "the shapes of Titans born of old, and giants, and all whom the deluge whelmed" up to judgment; the Greek text of 1 Enoch 20:2 already stationed that same Uriel "over Tartarus." So a Hellenistic Jew mapping Watchers and giants onto Titans is a real, attested move — the raw material for Marshall's fusion genuinely existed.⁵

What is overstated. That same pre-existing stock is exactly what keeps the maximal claim from being pinned on 2 Peter. Because Greek 1 Enoch had already located the fallen angels in Tartarus — though only with the noun τάρταρος; the loaded verb is 2 Peter's own touch — 2 Peter can inherit "Tartarus-as-angel-prison" as ready-made Hellenistic-Jewish vocabulary without staging any fresh Titanomachy allegory, and the careful specialists take just this route: Bauckham judges the term reached 2 Peter "through the mediation of Jewish apocalyptic," not fresh from Hesiod. And the commentators stop well short of Marshall's conclusion. Neyrey's "evoke a reminiscence" and Billings's "linguistic bridge" are claims about rhetorical register and connotation, not about the author holding, as a considered belief, that the Watchers are the Titans. The restrained mainstream (Kelly, Schreiner, Davids, Green) treats tartaróō as borrowing the current Greek word for the deepest hell while carrying none of the myth's freight as doctrine — "by no means" implying the author "believed in the mythological stories about Tartarus." No specialist asserts the conscious, worked-out equation of the two myth-complexes that Marshall's "blending" requires; that maximal form lives chiefly in the popular Divine-Council literature. And the Jewish sources cut both ways: in the Sibyllines the Titans are often a distinct, post-flood generation, not simply the pre-flood Watchers — so the "equation" is real but loose and inconsistent, not the stable one-to-one map the strong thesis needs.⁶

Assessment

Plausible. Marshall is right at the core, and more defensibly here than in his Maccabean-allegory reading: tartaróō really is a Greek Titan-word, and 2 Peter's choice of it over Jude's Enochic "chains and darkness" is a deliberate, audience-facing Hellenization — that much is sound, and it strengthens (not weakens) the case that 2 Peter 2:4 is about the Enochic Watchers. What outruns the evidence is the distinctive step that makes his version a thesis rather than a truism: that the New Testament writers consciously mapped the Watchers onto the Titans, fusing the two myths. That is coherent and not ruled out — Hellenistic Judaism had already blurred giants and Titans — but it cannot be demonstrated from 2 Peter, since the word could reach him pre-loaded through Greek 1 Enoch, and the specialists who grant the connotation (Bauckham, Neyrey, Billings) decline the fusion, preferring Jewish-apocalyptic mediation and rhetorical register. So: trust the borrowing and the Greek coloring; treat "the NT deliberately maps Watchers = Titans" as a conjecture that overreaches the connotation it rests on. The overstatement is flagged on Marshall's page.

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