President Trump, it would seem, has his contacts in the infernal regions. How else could he be so certain, as he has repeatedly threatened since January 7, two weeks before his inauguration, that “all hell will break loose” if Hamas does not do his bidding and release the remaining Israeli hostages held by it?

It’s unlikely that the president has been reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is where this English expression comes from. If he had been, he would know that should Hell ever break loose, it will not be because the Supreme Commander, whether Jehovah or POTUS, opens wide its gates, but because Satan and his cohorts storm them in an assault aimed at reconquering the heavens from which they were driven.

Paradise Lost, of course, is Milton’s great 17th-century poetic epic about the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden. Starting in the first of its twelve chapters or “books” with an account of a great battle between Satan’s rebel and God’s loyalist angels that ends with the rebels’ crushing defeat and casting into Hell, the poem moves on in Book II to an assembly held by Satan’s forces to assess their situation. The first speaker is Satan himself. Proclaiming that his followers have but lost the first round, and that having fallen from Heaven they will rise again “more glorious and more dread” than before, he calls for a debate on what is the “best way,/ Whether of open Warr or covert guile” to achieve such a reconquest.

The floor is taken by Moloch, the pagan deity known in the Hebrew Bible as Molech, “the strongest and the fiercest Spirit/ That fought in Heav’n.” He urges “open Warr” against God in which, “Arm’d with Hell flames and fury all at once,” he and his comrades will “O’er Heav’n’s high Towrs force resistless way,

Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear
Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage.

Moloch concludes his speech, frowning with “Desperate revenge and Battel dangerous,” and is followed by Belial, who counsels the opposite course, that of “covert guile.” Not, he tells the assembly, that he is against war in principle. In practice, though, it is doomed to fail, since Heaven is too well-defended by God’s forces. Its towers brim

With armed watch that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bordering Deep
Encamp their Legions, or with obscure wing
Scout farr and wide into the Realm of night,
Scorning surprize.

Moreover, Belial argues, even should a surprise attack succeed in breaching Heaven’s defenses, God is ultimately too powerful to be overcome, so that

. . . could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise
With blackest Insurrection to confound
Heav’n’s purest light, yet our great Enemy
All incorruptible would on his Throne [be] . . .
Victorious.

Belial’s counsel carries the day and it is decided to wage the battle of “covert guile” by concentrating on God’s most vulnerable target, the human race newly created by Him. Although this is the first time in Paradise Lost that Hell’s inhabitants talk of breaking out of it, the trope of “all Hell breaking loose” is not found in Book II. It occurs in Book IV, in which Satan clandestinely exits Hell’s gates, journeys to the Garden of Eden, and squats “like a toad” by the ear of the sleeping Eve, “Assaying by his Devilish art to reach/ The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge/ Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams.” Apprehended by angelic scouts, he is brought before the archangel Gabriel, who asks why he has stolen out of Hell. “With contemptuous brow,” Satan answers:

Gabriel, thou hadst in Heav’n th’ esteem of wise,
And such I held thee; but this question askt
Puts me in doubt. Lives there who loves his pain?
Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,
Though thither doomd?

Thinking that Satan has fled Hell because he cannot stand his suffering there, and puzzled why he is unaccompanied, Gabriel asks:

But wherefore thou alone? wherefore with thee
Came not all Hell broke loose? Is pain to them
Less pain, less to be fled, or thou than they
Less hardie to endure?

Satan replies that it is a leader’s duty first to run a risk himself before exposing his followers to it, and from this exchange the expression “all hell broke [or “will break,” “has broken,” etc.) loose” entered the English language, in which it is unattested prior to the 18th century. Paradise Lost was widely read and acclaimed (as well as criticized) from the moment of its publication in 1667, and Milton, partly because of his innovativeness and partly because of his popularity, contributed more new words to English than any other author, Shakespeare included. Among the over 600 neologisms coined by him are “complacency,” “earthshaking,” “fragrance,” “lovelorn,” “enjoyable,” “pandemonium,” “slow-motion,” “terrific,” and “sensuous.”

In point of fact, however, while it was undoubtedly Milton who gave English “all Hell broke loose,” he was not the first to use the phrase. Word sleuths have traced it farther back to the little-known English poet Samuel Nicholson, who published a work of verse titled Acolastus: His After-Witte in 1600. A lengthy dialogue between the sage shepherd Eubulus and Acolastus, a young rake who has ruined his life with drink and dalliance, the poem has the latter say as he launches the relation of his woeful history, “O give me leave to sigh a little while/ Before my hell of foule mishap breake loose.”

Whether Nicholson was thinking of the story of Satan and his rebels when he penned these lines, or whether Acolastus is simply saying, “My life has been a hell and its story is about to pour forth from me,” is unclear, just as it is unclear whether Milton ever read Acolastus. Nor, for that matter, does anyone seem to know what Donald Trump has in mind when he says that all hell will break loose if Hamas does not knuckle under to his demands. Quite possibly, no more than a battle of covert guile.