ColossiansOne

Side by side, from the sources

Abaddon vs Hades

These two are identified with one another in the record, which is not the same as being the same figure. The Greek of Revelation puts Abaddon and Hades in adjacent roles.

Demonic · Infernal Court · c. 400 BCE

Abaddon

also called Apollyon, The Destroyer

A place-name in the Hebrew Bible — 'destruction', a synonym for the grave — that Revelation personifies as the king of the locusts of the pit.

Alignment
Disputed
Rank
Angel of the Abyss
First attested
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
Named there as
Abaddon
Texts naming it
2
Powers attributed
3
55attestedChristianJewish

Deity · Greek · c. 700 BCE

Hades

also called Aidoneus, Plouton, Pluton

Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.

Alignment
Disputed
Rank
Lord of the Underworld
First attested
The Iliad · c. 750 BCE
Named there as
Aïdes
Texts naming it
4
Powers attributed
3
100attestedGreek

Where do they actually overlap?

Texts naming both

None. The two never appear in the same text in this corpus, which is worth knowing before accepting any confident claim that they are one figure.

Powers credited to both

No shared office is recorded. Where two figures are said to be the same and share no job description at all, the identification is usually doing polemical work rather than descriptive work.

Common questions

Are Abaddon and Hades the same figure?

These two are identified with one another in the record, which is not the same as being the same figure. The Greek of Revelation puts Abaddon and Hades in adjacent roles. ColossiansOne records the link rather than asserting the identity: where texts disagree about whether two names denote one figure, the disagreement is what gets shown.

Which is older, Abaddon or Hades?

Hades is the older name: first attested around c. 700 BCE, against c. 400 BCE for Abaddon. Where the two dates are far apart, that gap is the whole reason the pair is worth comparing.

Do any texts name both Abaddon and Hades?

No text in this corpus names both. That is not proof they were considered the same figure, but it is why the identification has to be traced through the scholarship rather than read off a page.