Exorcising Demons

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Pazuzu…Lamashtu…Khatyu…Sheseru…Sasam…Lilith…Asmodeus…Beelzebub…. Names to conjure with. Literally. Years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, my teacher Frank Moore Cross raised a puzzling question: Why do demons—so prominent in the greater Near Eastern world, in the New Testament and in the postbiblical world of Judaism and Christianity—play such a minor role in the Hebrew Bible? I never forgot his offhand comment.

Throughout the ancient Near East, demons were thought to be the agents of bad fortune, including disease. Only professional sorcerers and exorcists knew how to repel them.¹ Similarly, in the New Testament, one way that Jesus and his disciples establish their credibility is by expelling demons, thereby curing dumbness, deafness, blindness, lameness, and epilepsy.²

The first-century C.E. Jewish historian Josephus describes King Solomon as an accomplished demonist who composed medical 016incantations and invented exorcistic procedures,³ while later talmudic^a literature discusses the demons that Solomon employed to build the Temple.⁴ Postbiblical rabbinic literature, particularly from Babylonia, teems with invisible demons that lurk all around, outnumbering humanity, gathering in bands at night.⁵ Furthermore, dozens of mid-first-millenium C.E. incantation bowls from Babylonia bearing Aramaic inscriptions largely concerned with repelling demons attest to the popularity of postbiblical Jewish demonism.⁶

In the Arab Middle East, the jinn are a staple of popular belief. “They are of both sexes and have big eyes extending to the corners of their mouths,” writes Czech explorer and Arabist Alois Musil, in his 1928 book The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins. “The food they prefer is raw meat … and fresh blood is their favorite drink … They live in high mountains, inaccessible ravines, and old ruins. They never have tents. Their dens are situated underground in rock crevices, caverns, and vaults of deserted buildings.”⁷

But in the Hebrew Bible, demons are insignificant.⁸ It isn’t that they don’t appear. For example, we come across the śə’îrîm—literally, “the hairy ones”—in Leviticus (17:7), 2 Chronicles (11:15) and possibly Isaiah (13:21, 34:14). We also encounter a being named Lilith (from the Akkadian demon lilītu) in Isaiah 34:14,^b and an evil spirit or desert demon called Azazel, to whom Aaron must send a live scapegoat in an act of purification (Leviticus 16:8, 10, 26).⁹ And yet, these demons play no explicit role in the Bible’s conception of how the world came to be and how it still operates.¹⁰ Absent are the exorcisms of ancient Near Eastern tradition. Not even foreign sorcerers such as Balaam attempt to channel demonic power. The Bible suggests that demons do not linger among us. They lurk in the wilderness, far from civilization.

And yet we may find in the Bible many examples of demonic behavior, what we may call pseudo-demonism—in particular, the assumption of demonic qualities by Yahweh and his servants.¹¹ In Amos 3:6, we see Yahweh’s capacity for causing trouble: “Is there harm/bad (ra’) in a city, and Yahweh did not make it?” The prophet Isaiah elaborates upon this sentiment: “I, Yahweh, and none other; molding light and creating dark, making wellbeing and creating harm/bad—I, Yahweh, make all these” (Isaiah 45:6b–7). Yahweh’s violent, erratic behavior when he attacks Moses or his son (Exodus 4:24–26, the text is ambiguous) at the latter’s circumcision has long been likened to that of a demon. Likewise, the angel Jacob wrestles with in the fords of the Jabbok River behaves like a river demon—somewhat like the troll under the bridge in Scandinavian folklore. When Saul suffers from what we now easily recognize as bipolar disorder, we are told that “a bad spirit from Yahweh” possesses him (1 Samuel 16:14–15, 23).

In 2 Samuel 24, an angry Yahweh tempts David into taking a census of all the people of Israel. In many cultures, ancient and modern, the act of taking a headcount attracts demons—the greater the population, the more plentiful the victims. After David takes his count, he realizes immediately that he has done wrong. As a consequence of his sin, God—behaving just like a demon—sends a pestilence to Israel, destroying many of its people.

The most striking biblical example of pseudo-demonism is the Paschal (or Passover) ritual of Exodus 12. The Israelites are commanded to slaughter a lamb or kid and place the blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses; in this way they can be recognized—and spared—by “the Destroyer,” apparently an aspect of Yahweh, who will wreak havoc on Egypt. This ritual, the Pesaḥ, bears a strong similarity to the popular Arabic rite known as fidya or fedu, meaning “redemption,” in which a lamb’s or goat’s blood is applied to 018persons, things or doorways to protect them from demons, especially during transitional periods of life, such as births, circumcisions, marriages or the building of new homes.¹²

One of God’s servants is particularly demonic: the Adversary, or Satan, in the Book of Job. This Satan is not the Devil of Christianity, though he is most assuredly a devil—that is, an afflicting spirit. With divine permission, he volunteers to torture the innocent Job to test his piety. Unlike later conceptions of Satan, this character is not inherently evil; he just enjoys his work. According to 1 Chronicles 21:1, it is this Satan, and not Yahweh, who tempts David into counting the people of Israel.

Pre-Israelite and post-Israelite literature is rife with demons, and yet they are nearly absent from the Hebrew Bible. To explain the continuity, I would infer that the Israelites themselves acknowledged demons’ existence, hence their occasional appearance in Scripture. But why does the Bible attribute demonic behavior to 019Yahweh and his servants, instead of real demons?

Sociology and anthropology tell us that people throughout history have sustained and been sustained by a belief in multiple invisible powers. According to almost all religious traditions, the ether is populated by spirits of considerable intelligence and power, disposed to work us either good or harm. The Greek term for such a being is daimon; the Latin term is genius. We like to think that the benevolent spirits are more powerful than the malevolent, and we call them the gods. But we are not sure that the kindly spirits are always thinking of us, whereas the hostile spirits assuredly are, since we are, so to speak, their livelihood.

Why have almost all people who have ever lived believed in these spirits?

Demonism, or the belief that Someone is out to get us and we can do something about it, reflects both our pervasive paranoia and our incurable optimism—equally necessary for survival in a harsh world. But demonism also appeals to speculative thought. It provides a satisfying explanation for why bad things happen—to good and bad alike. Better, surely, to live in a cosmos infested with hostile beings than to inhabit an utterly senseless universe.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the possibility of a cultural gap between the ancient Israelite masses whose villages we excavate, on the one hand, and the literate, urban elite that wrote the Hebrew Bible, on the other. If the intellectuals who wrote the Bible largely ignored the existence of demons, then they must have had another way to account for and control fortune and misfortune.

This was, of course, the covenant.¹³ Most biblical authors shared a belief that God had not just a social but a legal relationship with Israel. God is suzerain; Israel is vassal. But God is no arbitrary despot. He has bound himself to a mechanical mode of behavior. If Israel is good, he must bless; if Israel is evil, he must curse (see expecially Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28). Under the covenant, demons, the causes of misfortune, are literally converted into sins, as we see in Genesis 4:7: “Sin is the demonic croucher at the doorway; his lust is for you, but you can master him.”¹⁴ One marvels at the chutzpah of the Israelite theologian who thought that up. It potentially made God Israel’s servant, the jinnī in the lamp. But only potentially.

The beauty of the system was that it was hard to falsify. The covenant was so complicated and demanding, and yet so vague, that someone, somewhere, could always be found in violation of it. An entire profession, the prophets, undertook to prove to society that the 020covenant explained their experiences, good and bad. As prophecy flourished, demonism languished. So did healing in general, for as is well known, the Bible is extremely suspicious of medicine: “If you listen well to the voice of Yahweh your God, and do what is right in his eyes, and pay heed to his commands and observe all his rules, then all the diseases that I set in Egypt I will not set upon you. Rather, I, Yahweh, shall be your healer” (Exodus 15:26). King Asa of Judah (911–870 B.C.E.), by consulting doctors, is said to have rejected God (2 Chronicles 16:12).¹⁵

Over time, however, Jews became disillusioned with the old-style covenant. In particular, the extinction of first the Northern Kingdom of Israel (722 B.C.E.) and then the southern Kingdom of Judah (587 B.C.E.) seemed vastly disproportionate to any sin the people or their ancestors may have committed. In postbiblical Judaism, the covenant was no longer a way of controlling God; it was a way of controlling Israel. In other words, Jews no longer behaved in a certain way so that God would bless them. They behaved in a certain way because God had blessed them. Recompense for current actions was postponed to the afterlife or the 021messianic age, a theme carried over into Christianity. No surprise, then, that in the second half of the first millennium B.C.E., especially under the influence of Persian religion, with its richly textured cosmos of good and bad spirits, demonology regained its intellectual credibility. For ultimately, demonology is a manifestation of the hope, however forlorn, that against the odds we can master our destiny.

Today, in the West, demonology is once again in decline. Though many—or shall I say most—Americans believe in Satan’s maleficence, few actively try to control demons. And they don’t tend to blame demons for their misfortunes. Why not?

The main misfortunes of life have to do with disease. Confronted with the progressive paralysis of a limb or the loss of mental coherence, we turn to medical diagnosis and treatment, not to sorcery and exorcism. All are venerable techniques, but the former seem to be more efficacious and, above all, intellectually satisfying, even if many syndromes resist classification and treatment.

Where have all the demons gone? We have again learned not to see them. The Bible replaced them with sins. We have replaced them with bacteria, viruses, traumas, defective chromosomes and mental maladies. We don’t see our jinn anymore. But they lurk within us, in our blood and in our bones.

Pazuzu…Lamashtu…Khatyu…Sheseru…Sasam…Lilith…Asmodeus…Beelzebub…. Names to conjure with. Literally. Years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, my teacher Frank Moore Cross raised a puzzling question: Why do demons—so prominent in the greater Near Eastern world, in the New Testament and in the postbiblical world of Judaism and Christianity—play such a minor role in the Hebrew Bible? I never forgot his offhand comment. Throughout the ancient Near East, demons were thought to be the agents of bad fortune, including disease. Only professional sorcerers and exorcists knew how to repel them.1 Similarly, in the New Testament, one way that Jesus and his […]