"For if God didn’t spare the angels who sinned but threw them down into Tartarus and delivered them to be kept in chains of darkness until judgment." - 2 Pet. 2:4—Holman margin)?
The noun tartarus, or tartaros, was used in Grecian mythology as the name for a dark abyss or prison in which wicked spirits were kept imprisoned and were punished. And when the Roman Catholic Church in the Dark Ages took over from the heathen the doctrines of the consciousness of the dead and the eternal torment of the wicked, it without Biblical warrant magnified the heathen idea of tartarus.
The noun form, tartarus, is not found in the Scriptures, but the verb form, tartaroo, taken from the same root, occurs one time, in 2 Pet. 2:4. This one verb, tartaroo, is by the translators of the King James Version rendered by five words, “cast them down to hell,”—thus including a verb, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a preposition and a noun. This fact properly arouses suspicion that some violence has been done in this translation of the verb tartaroo. If we keep in mind the basic idea of tartarus as mentioned above--a prison—and make a verb of it, we have the true meaning of the verb tartaroo, i.e., to imprison.
Thus the Apostle Peter by the verb tartaroo tells us that God imprisoned the angels that sinned (Gen. 6:2-4; 1 Pet. 3:19, 20), and he adds that they were delivered “into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment”; and since the Apostle Jude (6, 7) tells us that such imprisonment lasts until the judgment of the great day (into which we have already entered), and since these fallen angels as the power of the air (Eph. 2:2; 6:12, margin) are active among humans, e.g., in demonizing people, appearing in séances and other occult practices, we conclude that earth’s atmosphere is their prison (Matt. 8:28-32; 12:22-28).
