Biblical Demonology: Part 7i – Demons and Daimones

In this part we explore the concepts of demons and daimones, in particular their differences in what the ancient writers intended, and what we moderns understand by the terms. Yes, okay, I admit that it’s a bit strange getting to part seven of a series on Biblical Demonology before ever exploring the entities known as “demons”. This is due to conflation of the term demons to mean evil spirits or fallen angels, notions that have been fuelled by nearly two thousand years of Christian writing on the subject, and which needed unpicking before beginning to reassemble a coherent understanding of the subject matter. In this part, we lay further foundations of our understanding by recognising how the word has been used throughout time.

Introduction

When the word “demon” is brought up in conversation, modern people have the idea of an entirely evil, non-human spirit. Imagery ranges from films such as The Exorcist and a plethora of similar movies, to TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with their ugly-faced humanoid beings and red eyes. Medieval images of cloven hooved devils with pitchforks also feed into our modern understanding of demons. We must remember these were not the understood imagery that original writers of biblical texts had in mind.

To study this subject properly, rather than read our anachronistic ideas about demons back into the various biblical texts, we need to peel away the accrued layers of prejudicial thinking, seeking to read and understand the Scriptures through the eyes of the original writers and readers of the works. What comes from studying the material through this particular lens may be shocking, but then the Bible wasn’t written to us it was written for us. It was written to various people groups in ancient cultures, and we need to understand those cultures to understand what the intention of the writers of the passages meant.

Demons and Daimones – An Evolution in Thinking

For many Christians, the term demon has generally been equated with Fallen angels and / or evil spirits during discussion of encounters with spiritual entities other than “heavenly” (or “good”) angels This is exemplified by the reference for Demons [1] which states: ‘The Gospels use a variety of terms, often interchangeable, for the Devil [a fallen angel] and evil spirits.’ and then goes on to explore the terms Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, The Evil One, Demons, Spirits, Legion and Demon Possession as subheadings.

Kuemmerlin-McLean [2] states: ‘The most generally accepted understanding is of demons as ―evil spirits who live in ruins and the desert and are responsible for illness and natural disasters. However, more neutral, anonymous, or positive demons have also been identified.’

Unger [3] exemplifies Kummerline-McLean’s statement, saying, ‘Satan in his apostasy involved a great host of angels, who, like him, “abode not in the truth” (John 8:44) is assumed as a well-known fact of revelation by the New Testament’.

Before going further, it is important to realise that any demons mentioned in the Old Testament are not the same as in Second Temple / New Testament times. Scriptures of the earlier times were written against a background of Egyptian and Babylonian / Assyrian cultural influences. Scriptures of the latter times were written against a complex background of Greco-Romano-Judeo influences. The word we translate as “demon” in our modern bibles comes from the Septuagint and New Testament writers’ usage of the word daimones. The confusion comes when we read the word demon in the biblical texts and interpret them using our modern understandings of that word. We shall explore daimones in the Old and New Testament in later articles in this series.

Kittel, Friedrich and Bromiley [4] define daimones within the Greek and Hellenistic understanding, stating that they could be gods, divine powers, protective deities, personal intermediaries, messengers, can be evil as well as good, and that ‘daímones are a. spirits of the departed, b. shades [ghosts] which appear especially in lonely places at night.’

For the remaining articles in this series, we shall work with Kittel, Friedrich and Bromiley’s framework, but use the taxonomy provided by Walton [5] for daimones, based upon descriptions from ancient literature spanning both Old Testament to New Testament times. Daimones are thus split into three classes:

• Class I – gods. Those who receive various sacrifices.
• Class II – intermediary beings – consisting of various spirits which didn’t fit into the other two categories, but did not have temples, nor receive food and drink offerings, or sacrifices as per Class I beings. They could include guardian beings and evil spirits. In Assyrian and Egyptian thinking, they could be corporate groups or individual beings [6]. Some had a relationship with Class I beings, including acting as messengers between them and humans. However, as time went by, some were elevated to Class I status by various cultures.
• Class III – ghosts, those who were human in origin.

Daimones was a term without a morality or good/evil allegiance weighting to it – they could be benevolent or malevolent, sometimes both [7]. The Greeks had the concept of eudaimonia and Romans had genius s positive daimons, going against much that Christians have inherited in our teachings on the subject of demons. It can be a shock to someone when you suggests that demons may not actually be evil, non-human beings, and often provokes a visceral reaction including being informed that you’re teaching “doctrines of demons” (this is known as prooftexting and bad hermeneutics).

Whilst we may have no problem with the first two groups being called “demons”, it is important to know that the third class of beings known as daimones included the dead. We shall explore this in detail in the next part of this series, together with some possible implications for biblical interpretation that fall out of this possibility for interpretation.

Evil Spirits – A Subset of Class II Daimones

It would be fair to say that what are termed “evil spirits” (spirits of the deceased giants, roaming the earth until the judgement day, not locked up in tartarus like the fallen Watchers) are a small subset of Class II spirits. Not all daimones are evil spirits of “the bastards”. Regarding the origins of these spirits, Wright [8] suggests the term “giantology” rather than “demonology” would be better used in discussions of the spirits of the giants, for ‘nowhere in [1 Enoch] chs. 6-16 are the angels, giants, or their spirits explicitly identified as demons.’

Heiser [9] seemingly equates the terms evil spirits into the category demons (using the modern term demon rather than daimones), stating: ‘First Enoch connects this to demonology in that, when a giant was killed, its “Watcher spirit” is referred to as a demon. Hence in Gen 6 divine-human cohabitation is the answer to where demons come from in Second Temple Jewish thinking.’ Heiser assumes the catch-all term demon to mean evil spirit, whereas the Greek translation of 1 Enoch 15:8-9 [10] clearly drills down through Class II nomenclature, calling them specifically πονερά πνεύματα (ponera pheumata) wicked / evil spirits, and not δαιμόνια (daimonia) or demon.

The Šēdîm – Class I Daimones / Gods of the Nations

Heiser’s appeal to Dead Sea Scroll 4Q510 [11] to justify his above argument also seems to confuse terminology, for there is no equating of demons (often translated from the Hebrew šēdîm) with evil spirits (“spirits of the bastards” – 1 Enoch 10:15 Greek) in the DSS texts. Rather, in 4Q510 there is a listing of various beings, which includes ‘demons’ (šēdîm or šdym), but note – they’re understood to be different from the spirits of the giants (“the bastards”, mamzêr):

And I, the Master, proclaim the majesty of his beauty to frighten and ter[rify] all the spirits of the destroying angels <ml’ky ḥbl> and the spirits of the bastards <rw ḥwt mmzrym>, the demons <šdym>, Lilith <lylyt>, the <owls and jackals, (‘hym wṣ‛yym)> they who strike suddenly to lead astray the spirit of understanding…’.

DSS 4Q510 [12].

In fairness, this particular list of beings are all perceived by the writer of 4Q510 as destructive to human life and the manuscript itself is part of a psalm of exorcism (similar to Psalm 91). Heiser’s use of demon is therefore a catch-all term which can cause confusion if you’re unaware of the nuances of this word.

Heiser has subsequently released an in depth study of demons [13], and drills into the šēdîm further, spotting the links with the Akkadian šēdū(m), noting that they seem more like “territorial spirits” than purely “evil spirits”. Walton [14] notes that the šēdîm received sacrifices, therefore are are Class I daimones, the gods (bene ha’elohim), that were assigned over the various nations as per Deuteronomy 32:8,9 and where, in verse 17, we are shown the šēdîm were interpreted as daimones by the Septuagint translators, who only recognised Yahweh as being the only valid God:

They sacrificed to demons [šēdîm], not to God,
To gods they did not know,
To new gods, new arrivals
That your fathers did not fear.

Deuteronomy 32:17 (NRSV)

Similarly, in Psalm 106:37 they rendered the šēdîm as daimonia, which became “demons” in the NRSV and “false gods” in the NIV.

They sacrificed their sons
    and their daughters to the demons;

Psalm 106:37 (NRSV)

Yahweh’s anger with Israel was roused whenever his chosen portion (Deut 32:9) went off and worshipped the “sons of God” which had been assigned to look after the other nations (before they fell and accepted worship themselves).

Heiser’s paper on this particular verse examines the wider context of the ANE’s (Ancient Near East) wider Semitic cultures and concludes that: ‘The Shaddayin are explicitly called … (“gods”).’ [15]

As such, we can update Fig. 1 to include the šēdîm as separate entities to the mamzêr, but within Class I daimones:

Conclusion

The conflation of categories of daimones by modern authors has not always been the case within Judeo-Christian demonology. This has evolved over time, pulling together various ontologically separate beings into one overall word to mean beings opposed to the flourishing of human life. Whilst these characteristics certainly fit the description of the spirits of “the bastards” (evil spirits), the LXX translators and the writers of the New Testament were very aware of the nuances involved in the term daimones. Whilst the evil spirits of the giants / “bastards” could be called daimones in Walton’s Class II category, not all daimones were evil.

It can be very confusing to know when a person uses the term demon, whether they mean the rich term used by the original writers, daimones, or do they mean evil spirits of “the bastards”, or do they even mean fallen angels?

Because of the messiness of the terminology used, some of which is lost in translation from the Hebrew to Greek in the Septuagint, but also the cultural changes of the usage of this term, demons have a confusing history, which is not as clear cut as we modern Christians like to think. There’s only one real way of knowing what may well have been in the mind of the writer of a particular passage, and that’s to explore the cultural context of that individual passage, rather than apply a blanket understanding across the entire Bible, which leaves one open to a lot of incorrect exegesis of passages.

We should remember that what is translated today as demon may not necessarily be a non-human spirit – but it just may be, as we shall next see.

Demons and daimones – not necessarily one and the same thing. So now you know why we spent so long laying the foundational understanding of fallen angels and the “evil [bastard] spirits” of the giants!

Next Time: We shall look at how ancient writers used the term daimones to describe Class III spirits – the spirits of deceased humans.

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Bibliography

Fröhlich, I (2010), Theology and Demonology in Qumran Texts, in Henoch 32. pp. 101-139.

Green J.B., McKnight S., Marshall I. H. (1992), Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press.

Heiser, M. S. (2008), ‘Does Deuteronomy 32:17 Assume or Deny the Reality of Other Gods?’, in The Bible Translator, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 136-145.

Heiser, M. S. (2015), The Unseen Realm, Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

Heiser, M. S. (2020), Demons: What the Bible Really Says About The Powers Of Darkness, Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

Kittel, G., Friedrich, G. and Bromiley, G. (1989), Theological dictionary of the New Testament – Abridged in One Volume. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Kuemmerlin-McLean, J. K. (1992), ‘Demons: Old Testament’, Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 2, pp. 138-140.

Lucarelli, Rita, 2010, ‘Demons (benevolent and malevolent)’, in Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles.

Luck, G. (2006), ‘Arcana Mundi: Magic and Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds’, Baltimore, Maryland:The John Hopkins University Press.

Swete, H. B. (1894). The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint, Vol. III: Hosea – 4 Maccabees. Cambridge: University Press.

Unger, M. F. (1994). Biblical Demonology: A Study of Spiritual Forces at Work Today. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.

Walton, J. H. and Walton, J. H. (2019), Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context, Eugene, OR: Cascade.

Wright, A. T. (2015). The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Footnotes

[1] Green et al, 407.

[2] Kuemmerlin-McLean, 139.

[3] Unger, 16.

[4] Kittel, Friedrich and Bromiley, 123.

[5] Walton and Walton, 56-60.

[6] Lucarelli, 3-4, Walton and Walton, 58.

[7] Walton and Walton, 56.

[8] Wright, 4 n.7.

[9] Heiser, 2015:99.n16.

[10] Swete, 801.

[11] Heiser, 2015:99.n16.

[12] Vermes, 451. <> are my insertions and are transliterations from the Hebrew original in Fröhlich, 102. Vermes himself unhelpfully prefaces this passage by telescoping these separate categories of beings into the category demons, ‘The first fragment preserves an interesting list of names of demons.’

[13] Heiser, 2020:22,23.

[14] Walton and Walton, 61.

[15] Heiser, 2008: 138.