Abaddon began as a place and only later became a destroying angel
In the Hebrew Bible, Abaddon is not a being at all but a realm of ruin, paired with Sheol, the resting place of the dead. Only in the Book of Revelation does the word step out as a figure: an angel of the abyss who commands a locust army, and whose loyalties readers still dispute.
The Hebrew word means destruction or doom, an intensive form of a verb root for perishing that turns up 184 times in the Hebrew Bible. Abaddon itself appears only six times in the Masoretic Text, in Job, Psalms and Proverbs, usually beside Sheol. Proverbs says the two can never be satisfied, just as human eyes are never satisfied, and Job says Abaddon lies uncovered before God. In a few lines it and Death are personified and even speak, but it remains essentially a location.
Later Jewish texts kept that sense. The Thanksgiving Hymns among the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947, describe the torrents of Belial breaking into Abaddon, and other traditions make it one compartment of Gehenna, a region of fire and snow that Moses was said to have visited.
Revelation 9:11 gives the first known portrait of Abaddon as an individual. The angel is king over nightmarish locusts, and the text supplies a Greek equivalent, Apollyon, meaning destroyer; the Latin Vulgate adds Exterminans. Who this angel serves is contested. Matthew Henry in 1708 saw the Antichrist, and later commentators saw Satan, while the Methodist Interpreter's Bible argues he is God's agent carrying out destruction on command, and Jehovah's Witnesses identify him with the risen Jesus.
The name travelled far. In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress of 1678, the pilgrim battles the demon Apollyon for more than half a day. The Gnostic Acts of Thomas uses Abaddon for a demon or the devil, and Mandaean scriptures speak of upper and lower Abaddons in a world of darkness. A Coptic homily attributed to Timothy of Alexandria tells a gentler story, in which the angel, first named Muriel, gathered the earth from which God formed Adam.
Source: Abaddon
