The king of the locusts loosed from the Abyss, named twice in one breath — once in Hebrew, once in Greek (Revelation 9:11). Abaddon ('ruin, destruction') is not a proper name anywhere else it appears in the Hebrew Bible: it stands beside Sheol as a near-personified word for the realm of the dead, a place even God's own gaze reaches (Job 26:6; 28:22; Psalm 88:11; Proverbs 15:11; 27:20 — none yet on these pages). John supplies his own Greek equivalent, Apollyon, 'Destroyer,' built from the ordinary verb apollymi, 'to destroy.' ⚠ It is also a near-homophone of Apollōn, the god Apollo — who carried the cult title Parnopios, 'the Locust-God,' at Athens (a bronze statue there, recorded by the geographer Pausanias, credited him with driving locusts from the land), and whom some scholars think the emperor Domitian, likely John's own contemporary, liked to be seen as. If the pun is intended, crowning the locusts' king with a name that sounds like the empire's own patron god is a coded jab: the protector unmasked as the destroyer. The text never says so outright — it hands the name to whoever can catch it.