Pit

The pit in Scripture is first a literal hole — a hewn cistern, a hunter's snare, a lions' den, a dungeon sunk in mire — and then, by short metaphorical reach, a figure for the trap a wicked man digs for his neighbor, the descent into Sheol, and at last the sealed abyss of Revelation. The same word covers Benaiah killing a lion in a snowy pit, the proud digging pits for the psalmist, the dust that cannot praise Yahweh from below, and the smoking shaft from which Abaddon's locusts ascend. The movement of the topic, then, is downward: from cattle cisterns and mountain dens up to the surface, and from the surface down to the grave, and beyond the grave to the abyss.

Hewn Cisterns and Hollow Places

In an arid country the pit is, in the first instance, infrastructure. Uzziah "built towers in the wilderness, and hewed out many cisterns, for he had much cattle; in the lowland also, and in the plain" (2Ch 26:10). The Assyrian envoy promises the people of Jerusalem that, if they surrender, every man will "drink⁺ every one the waters of his own cistern" (2Ki 18:31) — the cistern standing for ordinary domestic peace. Sirach remembers a hewn reservoir as a public work: "In whose generation a reservoir was dug, A water cistern like the sea in abundance" (Sir 50:2). Ecclesiastes turns the same fixture toward death, marking the body's collapse by "the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern" (Ec 12:6).

Cisterns can also be the wrong kind of work. Yahweh through Jeremiah charges, "For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (Jer 2:13) — a cistern is only as good as the rock it is cut in.

Alongside the cistern stands the den: a natural hollow used by beast or fugitive. "Then the beasts go into coverts, And stay in their dens" (Job 37:8). When Midian oppressed Israel, "the sons of Israel made for themselves the dens which are in the mountains, and the caves, and the strongholds" (Jg 6:2). Hebrews remembers the prophets and martyrs as those "of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves, and the holes of the earth" (Heb 11:38). Jesus reuses the image to indict the temple: "Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your⁺ eyes?" (Jer 7:11). The den, like the cistern, is neutral until use makes it sanctuary or hideout.

Pits as Snares

Once the pit is a hole one can fall into, it lends itself to the moral image of the trap. Proverbs presses the figure repeatedly: "Whoever digs a pit will fall in it; And he who rolls a stone, it will return on him" (Pr 26:27). "Whoever causes the upright to go astray in an evil way, He will fall into his own pit; But the perfect will inherit good" (Pr 28:10). Ecclesiastes makes the same observation about ordinary work: "He who digs a pit will fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall, a serpent will bite him" (Ec 10:8). The wisdom literature treats the seductress along the same lines: "For a whore is a deep ditch; And a foreign woman is a narrow pit" (Pr 23:27).

The Psalter takes the figure into prayer. The psalmist watches the wicked recoil into his own snare: "He has made a pit, and dug it, And has fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief will return on his own head, And his violence will come down on the top of his own head" (Ps 7:15-16). "They have prepared a net for my steps; My soul is bowed down: They have dug a pit before me; They have fallen into the midst of it themselves. Selah" (Ps 57:6). "The proud have dug pits for me, Who are not according to your law" (Ps 119:85). Jeremiah generalizes the pattern in his oracle against Moab: "He who flees from the fear will fall into the pit; and he who gets up out of the pit will be taken in the snare" (Jer 48:44).

Cast Into the Pit

When the pit is not metaphor it is still violence. Benaiah's exploit shows the literal sense at its boldest: "he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow" (2Sa 23:20). Daniel's enemies pass a royal statute that "whoever will ask a petition of any god or man for thirty days, except of you, O king, he will be cast into the den of lions" (Dan 6:7); the king himself is then made to enforce it: "Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions. [Now] the king spoke and said to Daniel, Your God whom you serve continually, he will deliver you" (Dan 6:16). 1 Maccabees records the same instrument turned to political slaughter: "And Bacchides removed the camp from Jerusalem, and pitched in Bethzecha: and he sent, and took many of those who had fled away from him, and some of the people he killed, and threw them into a great pit" (1Ma 7:19).

Down to the Pit

The longest line of pit imagery in the Old Testament is the line that runs underground. "The pit" stands as a near-synonym for Sheol, the realm of the dead, and "those who go down into the pit" become a settled phrase for the dying. David prays, "To you, O Yahweh, I will call: My rock, don't be deaf to me; Or else, if you are silent to me, I will become like those who go down into the pit" (Ps 28:1). The argument from corpse to praise is direct: "What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it declare your truth?" (Ps 30:9). The sufferer of Psalm 88 has already been numbered with the dead: "I am reckoned with those who go down into the pit; I am as an [able-bodied] man without strength" (Ps 88:4); compare "Don't let the floodwater overwhelm me, Neither let the deep swallow me up; And don't let the pit shut its mouth on me" (Ps 69:15) and "Hurry to answer me, O Yahweh; my spirit fails: Don't hide your face from me, Lest I become like those who go down into the pit" (Ps 143:7).

Job's three friends and Elihu use the same vocabulary for the boundary God's hand can hold a man back from: "He keeps back his soul from the pit, And his life from perishing by the sword" (Job 33:18). Hezekiah, recovering from sickness, gives thanks in the same idiom: "Look, [it was] for [my] peace [that] I had great bitterness: But you have in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption; For you have cast all my sins behind your back" (Isa 38:17). The other side of that prayer is the Davidic confidence, "He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay; And he set my feet on a rock, and established my goings" (Ps 40:2).

The same descent is invoked as judgment. Isaiah taunts the king of Babylon: "Yet you will be brought down to Sheol, to the uttermost parts of the pit" (Isa 14:15). Ezekiel announces the same fate over Tyre and Egypt: "then I will bring you down with those who descend into the pit, to the people of old time; and will make you to dwell in the nether parts of the earth, like places that are desolate of old, with those who go down to the pit, that you are not inhabited; but I will make glory in the land of the living" (Eze 26:20); "Son of Man, wail for the multitude of Egypt, and cast them down, even her, and the daughters of the majestic nations, to the nether parts of the earth, with those who go down into the pit" (Eze 32:18).

The Pit of the Abyss

Revelation gathers up the older imagery and seals it. The pit there is no longer a grave dug horizontally beside Sheol but a vertical shaft locked with a key. "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven fallen to the earth: and there was given to him the key of the pit of the abyss. And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit" (Rev 9:1-2). Out of that smoke comes a swarm under a king: "They have over them as king the angel of the abyss: his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek [tongue] he has the name Apollyon" (Rev 9:11).

The abyss is also where the antagonist beast originates and to which he returns. "And when they will have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will make war with them, and overcome them, and kill them" (Rev 11:7). "The beast that you saw was, and is not; and is about to come up out of the abyss, and to go into perdition" (Rev 17:8). At last the same pit is shut on the dragon himself: "And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss, and shut [it], and sealed [it] over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years should be finished: after this he must be loosed for a little time" (Rev 20:1-3).

The cistern, the den, the snare, the descent of the dying, and the sealed shaft of the abyss are not five unrelated images but one image stretched across the canon: a hole in the ground that, depending on who is in it and who holds the key, is shelter, trap, grave, or prison.