Abaddon, comes from abad, [1] to destroy. This is the name that Saint John gives in Revelation [2] to the king of the locusts, [3] the angel of the abyss, the exterminating angel.

1. This Semitic root can mean “to destroy” as a transitive verb and “to perish” as an intransitive verb; it occurs some 184 times in the Hebrew Bible.

2. “A king, the angel of the bottomless pit; whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek Apollyon; in Latin Exterminans” (Revelation 9:11, Douay-Rheims Version).

3. In the vision of John of Patmos described in the Book of Revelation, after the opening of the seventh seal (Revelation 8:1) seven angels with trumpets stand before God; the sounding of these trumpets bring on the various disasters of the Apocalypse. After the first trumpet sounds, hail, fire, and blood destroy a third of the trees on earth, as well as all the grass; after the second trumpet, a burning mountain is cast into the sea, which becomes one-third blood; after the third trumpet, a falling star named Wormwood destroys one third of the earth’s rivers; after the fourth trumpet, one third of the sun, the moon, and the stars are darkened. In Revelation 9, the fifth trumpet sounds, a star falls to earth, and the angel opens the bottomless pit, whence issue strangely shaped locusts endowed with the power of scorpions that proceed to torment for five months (but not to kill) men who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. Abaddon, the “angel of the bottomless pit,” is king over these strange animals. (The term Abaddon also appears in the Hebrew scriptures, where it signifies a place rather than a supernatural being.)