Europe's inner demons

In the prologue to the Book of Job (probably fifth century B.C.) Satan appears as a courtier in the court of God, and his achievement is that he induces God to inflict suffering on a blameless man. Earlier, God would have been perfectly capable of doing this without inducement, and moreover the very idea that God could be induced or influenced to do anything at all would have been theologically intolerable. This older view pervades the story of job itself, as distinct from the prologue; in this ancient folk-tale Job has no hesitation in ascribing his misfortunes to Yahweh, and he knows nothing of Satan. A similar development can be observed if one contrasts a story in the Second Book of Samuel, which may date from as early as the tenth century B.C., with the same story as it is told in the Book of Chronicles, which is no older than the fourth century B.C. II Samuel 24 tells how the Lord tempted David to number the people, and with what results. Any census was regarded as an infringement of divine power because it made a human being conscious of his own power. So, to punish David for carrying out the census, the Lord sent a plague to reduce the population; after which the Lord “repented him of the evil”. Six or seven centuries later such behaviour was felt to be incompatible with the divine nature. In I Chronicles 21, the same story is told, and in exactly the same words, save for one vital difference: the responsibility for tempting David is transferred from God to Satan.

This story in Chronicles seems to be the one instance in the whole of the Old Testament which in any way suggests that Satan exists as a principle of evil; it is also the one instance where the noun “Satan”— meaning “adversary”—is used without an article, so that it becomes a proper noun. No longer a function of the divine personality, Satan emerges here as an autonomous being, a power which tempts men to sin against God. It was indeed a turning point; for during the following three centuries the Jews produced a new, complex and comprehensive demonology. From the second century B.C. to the end of the first century A.D. there grew up a body of literature which is sometimes called apocalyptic, because it is full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future, and sometimes apocryphal, because the separate works carry spurious attributions ascribing them to such Old Testament figures as Enoch, Ezra and Solomon. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world.⁽⁵⁾

Although such a notion is quite foreign to the Old Testament, it had somehow to be sanctioned by the authority of the Old Testament. This was achieved by invoking a couple of sentences in Genesis 6: “And it came to pass. . that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. . There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” This mysterious passage seems to reflect a popular legend concerning giants and their origin; and considerable ingenuity must have been required to relate it to evil spirits and their

origin. But the Apocrypha manage it.

The Book of Enoch, or

I Enoch, tells how the angels, led by Semjaza and Azazel, fell from heaven through lusting after the daughters of men; from their miscegenation came the evil and destructive race of giants. Impiety spread through the earth until, in an effort to restore order, God sent the Flood to destroy most of mankind and at the same time chained the angels in the dark places of the earth — there to await the Last Judgement, when they will be cast into fire.⁽⁶⁾

But the giants themselves remained on earth, and in due course they produced evil spirits. Just how this happened is unclear, but the point is immaterial; what matters is that the evil spirits “rise up against the children of men and against the women”.⁽⁷⁾ In other words they are demons, who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods⁽⁸⁾ — a role which was to persist under Christianity, as one of the main and most sinister activities of demons.