THE ABYSS — without bottom (a-, negative + byssos, 'depth'), the Greek Old Testament's own word for the primordial deep, Hebrew tehom, over which darkness lay before the first day (Genesis 1:2, already on this shelf). ⚠ By the New Testament it has narrowed into a specific place: a sealed confinement for chaotic, destructive power, opened only by permission. It surfaces seven times in the New Testament, all in Revelation (9:1, 2, 11; 11:7; 17:8; 20:1, 3, only the first of them yet translated), tracing one arc across the book — a shaft opened here to release torment, later the place the beast rises FROM, and finally where Satan himself is shut in for a thousand years. Outside Revelation it appears twice more: demons beg Jesus not to send them there (Luke 8:31, not yet on these pages), and Paul borrows it to replace the sea in a quotation from Deuteronomy, asking rhetorically 'who will descend into the abyss?' (Romans 10:7, not yet on these pages) — by then already shorthand for the realm of the dead. → first discussed at Rev 9:1