Endnote 9 – Exorcising Demons

The best discussion of demons in the Hebrew Bible is by Theodor H. Gaster in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville/New York: Abdingdon, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 817–824. In addition to the foregoing, Gaster suggests that demons lurk within various biblical idioms: e.g., “cramp seized me” (2 Samuel 1:9), “the destruction that wastes at noonday” (Psalm 91:6), etc. These and other bogeys also inhabit the pages of the best-selling Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1999).