Angels and Demons

There’s the cherubim, which are. They have four faces. An eagle face, a human face, an ox, and a lion face. It does kind of have the feel of a. Of a design by committee, doesn’t it? It kind of. It has a feel of like. Like a whole bunch of guys sitting around and they’re like, well, how are we gonna get the. The bull in there? Well, you could have the bull’s feet.

Somebody’s leaning over the shoulder of somebody on a drafting table. More eyes. Yeah.

Hey, everybody. I am Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we try to give the public more access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things today, Dan?

You know, it’s. It’s fall here in Salt Lake City. It’s gorgeous. Prettiest fall we’ve had in a long time. So I’m. I’m having a good time. So today’s show, Dan, we. We’re gonna dive into something that I’m kind of excited about. With apologies to Dan Brown, again, we are going to dive into actual angels and demons. All right, let’s launch into our. Our first segment right now. Getting angelic.

Getting angelic. That sounds wonderful. You couldn’t think of anything more clever than.

That’s all. Look, we didn’t plan anything ahead, so.

We’re just speaking extemporaneously.

Honestly, we’re off the cuff, baby. That’s all. That’s all I got right now.

I never took any improv classes. I don’t know if you have, but I’ve. I’ve never taken any improv classes and.

I literally have, but I wasn’t great at it, so there’s that. Anyway, here we are. The Bible talks about angels.

It does, hmm.

Humans talk about angels. Christians and. And Jews talk about angels. This is a. I don’t know how much Jews talk about angels. I just know that the Hebrew Bible talks about angels, but it’s confusing to me. I’ve read a lot of weird and conflicting ideas about what an angel actually is. So I think it’s time we. We dig in. We get to the bottom of what these things are and what purpose they serve. At various points in the Bible, it seems like they’re different in different places. I could be mistaken on that. So. Yeah. So let’s start off with, like, if there is an overview.

Do. Do we know what an angel actually is?

Well, we can start with the word angel in, in English, which is an English transliteration that is rooted in the Greek word angelos, which comes from a root that. That means to send. So this is a one who is sent. It’s kind of like an emissary. And the interesting thing is nothing about the word in Greek has any divine denotation. You can use that word in reference to humans. So when our word angel kind of has a lot of baggage that comes along with it. You could translate that word messenger or emissary or something like that, and it could be a perfectly fine translation of the Bible. We take all that baggage that we have accumulated over the last 2000 years and we put it back on our translations when we render angel. And the same is true of the Hebrew. The word there is malakh, which again is one who is sent, an emissary, coming from a verbal root that means to send.

And in the Hebrew Bible, you have the word used in reference to human messengers as well. So when you. It says Saul sent messengers or something like that. That’s malakhim, the word that sometimes we translate angels, and sometimes we translate messengers rather arbitrarily. We decide that one’s. That one’s more divine, that one’s probably just a human one. So it’s kind of. When we use the word angel, it’s kind of a bit of a mistranslation in that regard. There are places where we do see this concept developing of a specific type of divine messenger, but it does not have unique terminology. It uses the same terminology.

We’ve encountered this angel slash messenger thing before when we talked about Lot and the, the people that came into his city and that he took in who were messengers, who are. It’s translated as angels. But they seem to just be dudes. They seem to just be people.

Yeah. And this is, this is also something pretty important to note about the Hebrew Bible is when we have a discussion, there’s a. A narrative involving these individuals. They get confused for humans. They are referred to using words like ish, which means man. There’s no indication that they are these glorious, shiny entities that strike fear in the hearts of the people around them, or they are accompanied by harps and trumpets and have wings or anything like that. They get confused for humans. And there are even passages where God themselves seems to be confused for a human as well. So we have a trajectory developing because that’s not the case in the New Testament. And, and we’ll get to why that’s not the case in the New Testament later. But first, let’s stay in the Hebrew Bible a little bit and talk about where likely the concept of an angel came from.

Okay, so we have. I don’t know if we’ve talked a bunch about the Ugaritic literature on our.

Show yet we mentioned it, but refresh people to help us know what that is.

So Ugarit was a city, a somewhat large city state that existed between around 1500 BCE and about 1200 BCE. It was destroyed with the Bronze Age collapse shortly after 1200 BCE and it’s near the coast in Syria. And in the 1920s, I think 1929, somebody stumbled across a sarcophagus, and archaeologists descended upon the area, uncovered the city, and they were like, this is probably Ugarit. And they found about a thousand texts there that were written in a cuneiform script. However, rather than having hundreds of different signs, they only had, I think, around 30, which indicates it’s alphabetic. It is not syllabic, it’s not ideographic, but alphabetic.

And I don’t know what all of those things are. So. But yeah, we, we get what alphabetic means, right?

We’re.

We’re using sounds to build words, right?

So where each letter represents an individual sound. Yeah, right. And so they were like, ah, this is probably related to other Northwest Semitic languages that are being used in this area around this time period. They were able to decipher the language is very closely related to Hebrew. And they found receipts, they found letters, they found contracts, they found mythological texts, they found ritual texts mentioning a lot of characters that are even mentioned in the Bible. Divine figures, for instance. And this gives us a ton of information about Syria in this time period, about the development of Northwest Semitic languages, and even gives a lot of hints about what’s going on in the Hebrew Bible. Now they have messengers that are basically using the same Ugaritic version of the word from which we get the Hebrew malak, this word that we frequently translate as angel. These are divine messengers. However, in the Ugaritic literature, they are messengers going between the gods.

They’re not messengers that are sent to humans. The gods themselves are the ones who visit humans, but they send messengers between themselves. So they’re kind of framing the heavens as kind of a divine kingdom bureaucracy thing where they, you know, will send me messengers, send a message to so-and-so, and, you know, they run down the valley, they run up the hill on the other side, they get.

On a bike and they travel through Manhattan.

And, and, and, and this is probably the idea about messengers that was widespread. These specific types of messengers that were widespread. When we get the development of Hebrew, when we start to get the earliest biblical narratives. But in the Hebrew Bible, I would argue that the earliest references that we have to this messenger are. Well, the. The earliest narratives in the Hebrew Bible where we see a messenger. We see a specific kind of messenger, the Malak Adonai or the Malak Elohim, the messenger of Adonai or the messenger of God. This seems like a specific individuated messenger who is doing things that normally only God would do. So we see this in Exodus 3 where Moses comes across the burning bush. And it says in verse 2 of Exodus 3 , the messenger of Adonai called out to Moses from the flame of fire in the burning bush. And then in verse 6, that messenger says, I am the God of Israel, the God or the God? I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.

And so there’s kind of a conflated identity going on here between the messenger and God themselves. We see this with Hagar when she’s out in the wilderness. We see this with Abraham. We see this with Gideon in the Book of Judges . We see this with Manoah and his wife. These are the parents of Samson. We have a messenger of Adonai or of God, and they are confused for God themselves. And as I argued in my book, this is probably a case where the original version of these stories involved God themselves. But at some point, as they are trying to inflate God and exalt God higher over the gods of the other nations, they get a little uncomfortable with the idea that God can sit down by the campfire and enjoy a nice piece of bread with Abraham or Sarah or Manoah and his wife. And so they insert this word for messenger. And now we have this story about someone who is both divine and also some kind of distinct messenger.

And I am developing an argument that angels originate in the use of this word as a bit of an obscurant word, a way to hide the presence of God themselves in these early narratives.

Some way to put a layer. A layer between the people and God.

Yeah, we got middle management going on between the one upstairs and the ones in the trenches. And so this happens in a number of different places. But I would argue that from this we get this idea that there are these entities that kind of act as go-betweens between God and humanity. Because you don’t see. You don’t just see regular old angels in these early narratives. It’s only the angel of the Lord, the angel of God. In these early narratives, it’s in later biblical literature, Hebrew Bible literature, where we start to see these people popping up, such as Genesis 18 and 19, where we have the messengers coming into Sodom and staying with Lot. And they’re initially, they’re traveling with God themselves in Genesis 18 , when they stop by Abraham’s encampment and chat with him for a while before the two travel on to Sodom.

And there are scholars who would argue that this text has been edited and there are later layers on here, but it is probably also not an incredibly early text in and of itself. So I would argue that that is a likely origin for the concept of some kind of divine messenger. And so in contradistinction with the way these messengers operate in the other literature of that time period, they don’t have a lot of stories about communication between the gods in the Hebrew Bible. And so instead they’re going to use this messenger as a way to mediate communication between God and, and humans.

Okay. I mean there are moments where we have God talking to the divine council like we’ve talked about before, but. But yeah, we don’t, we don’t. They’re not sending, they’re, they’re not like, yeah, send. Getting their, their speedy delivery guy to go and, and send it off. I do know that eventually the idea. There are. So the idea of angels morphs out of messenger and into some really interesting different concepts.

So I’m thinking right now of, of Ezekiel’s vision of the cherubim who are guarding the Garden of Eden, making sure that none of us get back in. And far from cute little babies with baby, little wings that are like little chubby cheeked cupids or whatever.

Right.

Ezekiel has a totally different look for the cherubim.

Yeah. So we have a few different words that are, that are used in, in Ezekiel. We have living beings, we have ofanim, which this means wheels. And so something that’s popular on social media is to talk about biblically accurate angels and then have a giant series of wheels with eyes all over them and wings and all this kind of stuff.

Yeah. Which is, which is understandably terrifying. That is.

Yes. Yeah, it’s freaky. It’s, it’s some literary imagery that people are not. Well now we are, but a long time ago people were not used to actually seeing it represented on paper. But. But yeah, it’s. What’s the, it’s a, it’s a freaky circle. Yeah. So. And the problem here is that there’s not a word of this text that identifies them as angels.

That is a post-biblical identification because later on down the road we’re going to create this entire hierarchy of the angels and the heavens. And then we’re going to look back on words like cherubim, seraphim, ophanim, and other entities that are never described as angels in the biblical text. And we’re going to say they’re angels. And there’s, there’s a. So there’s a process that’s taking place here. We start with God’s meeting with humanity. We don’t like that very much. Let’s get something in between them. Okay. We got this malak. We got angels. Now when we get into the Greco Roman period, we have this problem of the gods of the nations. And particularly during the exilic period, when, because Adonai is the God only of Israel, when Israel is outside of Israel, how are we supposed to worship the God that is only worshiped inside of Israel? This creates this, this big problem we have in the Psalms.

How can we sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land? And so to facilitate the worship of Adonai on the banks of the river, the Tigris and the Euphrates in Babylon, we got to come up with some way to make God accessible. Ezekiel actually mobilizes the divine throne. the divine throne. Ezekiel’s like, man, what if God’s throne had wheels and it could fly and then it could come here to Babylon and then we wouldn’t have to be in Israel. And that’s more or less what, what the story in Ezekiel is, is trying to do. Say we don’t need the temple.

Ezekiel. Well, we’ll just say that he had a very active imagination. Yeah, I’m not. You know, there are those who would theorize that maybe he had some imagination aids that he was, that he was using because.

Yeah, supplementing his imagination because.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned the wheels with the eyes, but like that. Can, Can I describe some of the other things that he talked about? There’s the cherubim, which are. They have four faces. An eagle face, a human face, an ox and a lion face. Straight legs with four wings, one of one set of which covers their body and the other while the other set flies, which I think is kind of funny. And then like cow hooves for feet. Yeah, that. I, I don’t know what to do with that. That’s a crazy looking. That’s a crazy looking dude. Faces.

Yeah. And. And today we can, we can gin up imagery of this. And we can say, that looks really weird.

Yeah, somebody do that. Go, go, go to Midjourney, have AI tell AI what angels look like. What, what, what? Or non-angels. Sorry.

Yeah, well, and anciently, this would have been. They’re literarily constructing this out of these kind of symbolic images. So I don’t think that what we have is somebody who had a weird dream and then woke up and tried to describe it. I think what we have is a writer sitting down and going, well, we gotta get these symbols in here, and I want to make it say this, and I want to make it represent that. Okay, so we’re going to have four faces. One’s an ox, one’s a bull, one’s a human. And they’re going to six wings. And they’re also drawing from Isaiah 6 , which has the seraphim, and they have six wings. And with two wings, they covered the crotchal region. And with two wings they. They flew and stuff like that. So it’s imagery that’s out there in the zeitgeist already, and they’re kind of consolidating it all and saying it’s all in one big ball.

It does kind of have the feel of a. Of a design by committee, doesn’t it?

It kind of. It has a feel of like. Like a whole bunch of guys sitting around and they’re like, well, how are we gonna get the. The bull in there? Well, you could have the bull’s feet. Okay, well, how are we gonna get a lion in? Let’s give it a lion head as well. We already gave it a person head. No, no, let’s. You know what? We can have as many heads as we want.

Do we want somebody’s leaning over the shoulder of somebody on a drafting table? More eyes? Yeah, yeah, no, no, more eyes. And so we’ve got all these creatures, and this is kind of a way to just imagine what’s going on up in the heavens. They don’t really have any guardrails, any ceiling on what the heavens are like. And so they’re reaching out for more and more powerful imagery. And so Ezekiel is one of the ones who’s most vociferous about this and is most productive about this. But one of the things that they have to do is do something about the gods of the nations. In pre-exilic Israel, Adonai was the God of Israel, but every other nation had their own patron deity, had their own God. In the exile and into the Greco-Roman period, we come up with this idea. The. The pantheon is made up of the high deity, the children of the high deity. The second tier, we might have some craftsman deities, but then the, the servile deities, the servant deities, the messengers are on the bottom tier.

And what they did to try to exalt Adonai the God of Israel over the other gods of the nations was, was basically smush them all down and say you’re all angels now and God’s the only one who’s still a full-fledged deity. And this is what I have argued in peer-reviewed publications that Psalms 82 is doing, where God stands amidst the gods and judges. And then you have this statement toward the end, you are gods, children of the Most High, but you will all die like men and fall like any prince. And then here the idea is we’ve got to depose the gods of the nations. And then in the last verse the psalmist calls on God to rise up, for you will inherit all nations. And so what this does is it empties the seats on the divine council and then the God of Israel takes over rule of all the nations.

And now are you sure you’re not thinking of Palpatine in this?

I, I’m a, I’m a Star Trek guy myself, so I don’t know who you’re talking about.

Yeah, right. Where do we go from here?

So where we go from here is the increased literacy and the increased literary productiveness of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. So we’re getting a lot more people who can read and write and they’re producing a lot more literature. This is where a lot of the apocryphal, a lot of the pseudepigraphal literature is born is in the Greco-Roman period. And we get a lot more speculation about what’s going on up in the heavens. And so we’ve had a bunch of different ways to try to handle the divine council. Making them angels, condemning them to mortality, but we’ve still got our scriptural heritage and they’re still there.

So you still have to deal with them in some way. And so now that they’re all angels we’re starting to come up with theories about what’s going on in the heavens.

They, they have responsibility over different aspects of the functioning of the universe. And we’re going to think of them kind of like a, a military hierarchy or a bureaucratic hierarchy or something like that. And so they have different stations. We’ve got general angels and we got foot soldier angels and we got all these different stations. And then they’re going to come up with names for them, you’ve got. And, and most of them have el on the end. So we’ve got. And, and the, the Book of Enoch is, is one of the most prolific in this regard because it comes up with all of these angels who come down to Mount Hermon with Shemihazah, which is the, the main baddie in the early parts of the Book of Enoch. And they name all these angels that came with him. And so you’ve got a very productiveness period where we’re coming up with all these different ideas about angels. And this is where we’re starting to look back on some of these entities from the earlier Hebrew Bible and we’re starting to incorporate them into this angelic hierarchy.

And this is also where we get the rise of, or the beginnings of concepts of demons, which we’ll get to a little later.

All right.

But we have the production of an entire hierarchy of the heavens. And so, as we move into the New Testament, we are adopting, we’re looking back at the Hebrew Bible through the lens provided by Greco-Roman period Judaism. And so the, the types of things that we see going on with the messenger of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible and with God themselves are now consolidated within these angels. So when we get into the Annunciation to Mary and John the Baptist’s mother, they’re visited by angels and they’re all shiny and scary and they’re afraid they’re going to die. And this reflects precisely the visitations of the Malakh Adonai, the angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible, where Gideon and Moses and Hagar and these others are afraid they’re going to die or are surprised that they have seen God and have managed to survive.

And so those things are, are kind of systematized. And now when angels visit humans, they’re always shiny and frightening. In the Hebrew Bible, that’s not the case with God. It’s the case. And then once we put the, the angel in that position, now all of a sudden angels are shiny and frightening, right? And so the angels of the New Testament are kind of the accumulation of everything that has been gathered as part of the Jewish scriptural heritage from the early Hebrew Bible all the way down to through the Enochic and other pseudepigraphal and apocryphal literature down to the New Testament. So New Testament angels, very different from Hebrew Bible angels. And they have names. They get to say, I am the angel Gabriel. And they have identities and they have assignments, and you start to get concepts of, well, this is the angel that carries prayers up to the presence of God.

And this is the angel of the presence or something like that. This is the one that stands in the presence of God at all times.

Are words like archangel? Are those biblical or are those applied after, afterwards?

Oh, gosh, you caught me off guard there.

I got you.

All right, I want to say, I want to say archangel is somewhere in the. No. Is it in Daniel? I think it might be in Daniel. So Daniel is written in the Greco-Roman period. This is written, the final form of it comes in the 160s BCE. And there I mentioned that the nations had their own gods. But then in Daniel you have this reference to the prince over Persia and the prince of Greece. And then Michael is described as the, I’m going to say Michael is described as the archangel. The archangel or a head angel. And this is a reflection of this idea that the gods of the nations have now become guardian angels. So the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece are the guardian angels who 600 years earlier would have been the patron deity of Persia and the patron deity of Greece.

Okay, I, I, I’m just on Wikipedia right now under the archangel thing, and it says that in Judaism, the highest ranking angels such as Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel, who are usually referred to as archangels in English, are given the title of Sarim.

Sarim, yeah, princes.

Okay, so that’s what we’re talking about.

Yeah. So Jude, the, the book of Jude in the New Testament only has 1 chapter. Verse 9 refers to Michael as archangelos, the archangel. Okay, so that’s that Greco-Roman period Jewish tradition. And Jude is quoting directly from Enoch in their, in their epistle as well. So that’s where the idea of the archangel is, is coming from. And that is probably. Yeah, I, I think that might be the only time that word comes up.

You were just talking about, about sort of ranking the angels, you know, just different ranks. And that seems like the highest rank, right?

Like these, these are considered the highest possible angel.

And then when you, they have the best cars for delivering messages.

Right. They get the, the corner offices in heaven with the best view. And when you get into early Christianity and early Judaism, you have more traditions about angels. Where you, you know, recite an incantation for this angel. If you have the gout, you recite an incantation for this angel if somebody is trying to murder you. Like you have all different kinds of situations where there are angels who are assigned to oversee that.

It’s almost a patron saint idea.

Yeah, yeah, it’s very much. And so the whole patron saint idea, I would. And I don’t know how thoroughly it’s been argued, but it very much matches up with the very early idea of the children of God, the second tier deities, patrons over the nations who have responsibilities over the functioning of the universe, which then becomes angels, which then becomes special deceased folks. So it’s a very similar framework that is being repopulated with different types of individuals as the, the, as the theology is developing and changing.

Okay. I actually really like thinking of it in. Along this, this sort of continuum of time as, as they evolve in and conceptually are given sort of more, less ambiguous characteristics and they become more and more real things. I, I do feel like, you know, you said, you, you said that they’re shiny, which I. Is actually kind of how they’re referred to, you know, when they visit, when Gabriel visits Mary or whatever. But are they people there? I mean, surely the person that gave, you know, Gabriel, when Gabriel visits Mary, she’s not seeing, you know, a lion face and a bear face.

No. So, no, this, this is an anthropomorphic entity. Overwhelmingly they are. They are anthropomorphic, which is why I, and I haven’t looked into it. I probably should, but I would imagine the, the kind of lumping in of the seraphim and the ophanim and the cherubim and all these others as angels is probably something that seems like it is late antique period, maybe even medieval. I don’t think that’s going on yet in the biblical period. I could be wrong. And, and for anyone who wants to go research more about, particularly angels, Annette Yoshiko Reed is a phenomenal scholar who has published some wonderful texts on this. Demons, Angels and Writing in Ancient Judaism is a wonderful text. Fallen Angels in the History of Judaism and Christianity. Wonderful book, edited volume. She published a paper called When Did Daimones Become Demons. So she’s done a lot of great work on this.

And so if she happens to hear this episode and is like, Dan is wrong about all of this, listen to her and not to me because she knows this much better than I do.

Well, and, and if we get enough wrong, we may have to have her on the show. We’ll. We’ll figure something out.

All right. Well, I think that’s a good primer on, on angels. Do you. Is there anything else that we need.

To add to it or at this point, giving me license to just ramble more is probably going to be deleterious to. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Well, then we will move on to our next segment. I don’t know. What do you want to call it? We didn’t work this out. So let’s just say, you know, we could put.

We getting demonic.

Getting demonic.

We got angelic, now we’re going to get demonic.

So the demons. We’ve got angels now. I, I’ve, I’ve read a little bit about demons.

Demonism. De. You know, demonology is, is a thing.

It is.

I don’t know. And, and it really has taken on a life of its own. Even modern new theologies have just turned demons into. Everything’s a demon now. You can’t, you can’t go anywhere without. There’s just demons in everybody. Demons are being exorcised out of people. Demons are what, you know, cause wokeness. If you’re in, in. If you go to certain churches.

What is the, what is his name? Mark Driscoll.

Yeah, yeah.

Is like demons recognize each other.

And you know what? We’re going to play it, we’re going to play that clip. So hang on. So here’s, here’s Mark Driscoll, a pastor in America, American pastor, big important pastor guy, talking about demons and people and wokeness and whatnot.

Roll the ugliness.

Demons know each other. And if they’re working through people, the demons who are friends introduce the people to become friends. And in the days of technology and the Internet, evil people find each other and they form soul ties and they bond together to do evil and to oppose good. We call this cancel culture. We call this progressivism. We call this the woke mob. That’s exactly what it is. It’s like, well, how is it so powerful? It’s demonic. How is it so organized? It’s demonic. How is it so quickly overtaking every area of culture?

It’s demonic.

Well, why does no one see it? Because they call it justice, and that’s the deception.

So there you have it. Evil demons meeting each other, their friends. Like, is any of what he just said biblically grounded?

None of it. This is entirely. Yeah, this is, this is entirely an attempt to say, okay, we, we’ve got this idea from the Bible of demons. Now let’s make it fit our own day and let’s make it serve the interests of my attempts to structure power and values. And the enemy is wokeness. So I’m going to say everything that is woke is, is demonic. And we’re going to come up with some kind of framework for, for blaming this all on demons. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there for whom it. It kind of scratches an intuitive itch. It makes them feel justified in their own perspectives and their own insecurities and fears about the world around them. And so it just takes on a life of its own. And not a word of it has anything to do with anything in the Bible related to demons. And in the. In the Hebrew Bible, you have maybe one reference to demons.

Oh, okay, so, okay, what’s. Let’s start with that. What is that?

Okay, it’s Deuteronomy 32:17 . We get this word shedim, and it says. Let me pull up the Hebrew here just so I don’t misquote it because I don’t want to get more letters. Have we ever gotten a letter? Probably not. Hopefully people don’t know where we. We live. Okay, so 32.

That is not an invitation for you guys to try to track us down.

Yeah. Yeah. And they sacrifice to shedim, lo eloah, elohim lo yeda-um. Um, so it says they sacrificed to shedim, not to. To deity, to gods they did not know. And so the. We have two parallel statements, and it’s referring to these shedim as deities of some kind. But the word shedim is widely interpreted as a reference to some kind of deity, some kind of demon. And we get the translation of this Hebrew word in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, as daimoniois or demons or daimonia or however you want to. You want to understand that. And so that’s probably the best candidate for a reference to demons in the Hebrew Bible. And it’s basically saying these folks were sacrificing to the wrong deities. And so the idea is demons are bad deities, deities we don’t like.

Okay, so. So the earliest idea is just. And, you know, I think a lot of. A lot of what I hear people like Pastor Driscoll hollering about in terms of demons, demons, they often will bring in other past deities. They’ll bring in Baal, and they’ll bring in, you know, these other Molech or whatever. And. And I. It feels like they’re. What they’re doing is just any. Any non Adonai deity. We then conflate with or. Or. Or demote to demon.

Does that seem fair?

Yeah. Well, and. And it’s because the. The goal is to kind of reduce everything to a black and a white, a good and a bad, evil and not evil good. And so everything that’s on the opposite side from. From God, the God of Israel, is going to be considered evil. And so you take things like. Like Baal, Beelzebub in the New Testament. And I recently posted a video about this, how in the New Testament Beelzebub is equated with Satan. And basically all these monstrous malevolent forces that are mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew Bible all become Satan at one point or another, whether it’s in the New Testament, whether it’s in early Christianity. And Beelzebul is how it’s transliterated in the New Testament. And that’s an accurate representation of what this deity’s name would have been. Beelzebub is an editorialization. So Beelzebul would be Baal Zebul or Zebul Baal, which is a title we know from the Ugaritic literature means Prince Baal or Prince Lord.

They distort it to Beelzebub or Baal Zebub, which would mean Lord of Flies. So it’s a way to wag the finger at them and make fun of them. Right. And. But Baal was the Northwest Semitic storm deity. Baal was the one who made it rain, who was the rider of the clouds. Baal was the one who facilitated agriculture and all this kind of stuff. Baal was the deity whose divine profile Adonai came in and took over. So, and we have Psalms 29 , we have Isaiah 27:1 , we have Psalms 104 , we have a bunch of places where praise that was originally directed at Baal was taken over ye old five finger discount by people who want to use that stuff to praise Adonai as the one who is now the real. Yeah. Rider of the clouds. So the, yeah.

The, the longest standing yoink in human history is of, of Baal’s divine profile. And then they want to turn around strong yoink.

It was a powerful, that was a power yoink right there and then, and.

Then they want to turn around and say he’s the devil.

And it’s, it’s the inspiration for God’s representation in the Hebrew Bible. And. And so everything becomes the devil in, in one form or another. Now we do have a lot of the inspiration for what we can refer to as demonology in Greco-Roman period Judaism and into the New Testament is drawing from two different sources. One of them is Mesopotamian. You did have ideas and this is related to other traditions from places like Egypt and elsewhere, of malevolent divine forces, mini-deities that could possess or occupy your body and make you sick or make you do bad things. And they could get in through. The main places they could get in through were through the ears, through the mouth and for women during menstruation, that was a particularly, that was a very volatile time. So they would have incantations that they would pronounce in order to, to keep things on the outside that you wanted on the outside so that they didn’t get in and either make you sick or make you do bad things.

And you also get some of these ideas of demons coming from the Greco-Roman world. So by the time you get to the New Testament you’ve got this idea that maladies, disabilities, things like that were the product of some kind of possession. A demon has got into someone and has caused this. And so in the New Testament we have Jesus basically going around healing people from what would have been just run of the mill conditions or pathologies, but they’re being attributed to some kind of malevolent divine force that has invaded their body. And so Jesus is the way to get them out. And in Late Antique Christianity and early Judaism you have a lot of apotropaic amulets and things like that that are also being used where they have the divine name or they’re calling on one of these angels that is responsible for this specific malady.

You’ve used the term apotropaic before, but can you just define it again?

It’s warding off evil.

So if you have an apotropaic amulet on you, you can ward off evil. And the evil eye was one of the, one of the most widespread concepts. So just, just a few years ago there was an amulet that was an anti-evil-eye apotropaic amulet that was discovered near Arbel, which is a mountain, northwest corner of Sea of Galilee. Those of you who come with us to Israel-Palestine next year will have an opportunity to go to the top of Arbel and see the whole of the north, northern Galilee from there. But they found an amulet that has an inscription on it and a drawing of somebody stabbing a woman who is representative of evil. And then the evil eye is on the other side. So these were the, the, the world was just permeated with divine forces, malevolent and benevolent. And anything that was going wrong was probably because. And a malevolent force has somehow gained entry to your body or your spirit or something like that and is wreaking havoc.

And so you had a variety of ways to try to protect yourself, to try to rid yourself if they did gain entry. And then Jesus kind of comes in and is the one who can take care of everything for you. But instead of replacing everything else, you just had Jesus’s name slapped onto everything else. So you still had people using the apotropaic amulets and everything, only they just had Jesus’s name.

Okay, yeah, I mean, I suppose that’s. That’s as good as any. And that’s an upgrade right there.

Yeah, we’re just making it better. And. And this down to this very day, you have similar ideas. So there was. I want to say his name is Wookey is coming into my head, but it might be Woolley, I don’t think. But in the 19th century, this is a guy who translated a Bantu language Bible. It might have been Setswana. I don’t remember if that’s what it was. But there’s a word that they use. Badimo in this language represents ancestral spirits. And in this society, they would appeal to the badimo to aid them in all kinds of different endeavors. And so what this individual did, this European Christian who came in to colonize the area did, when he translated the Bible, was for the word demon. He rendered badimo. And the hope was that this would disincentivize people from wanting to engage with the ancestral spirits.

This would literally demonize those ancestral spirits. So they would go from being the good guys to being the bad guys.

So he’s trying to take their current theology, twist it and, and say, oh, no, the thing that you like, that’s. Those are actually the bad guys.

Yeah. When you read our story, you’ll see that they’re actually the opponents that are the bad guys. And it didn’t work because they then started using passages from the. This translation of the New Testament as their ritual implements and tools for engaging with the badimo. And so there, there’s a. There’s an interesting story about. There’s an interesting article. There are a handful of articles have been written on this with the whole concept of how we do Bible translation and, and how people frequently are trying to do Bible translation in order to manipulate societies. And sometimes those societies don’t take to it as. As well as they. They think they should. And with the adoption of the. The word demon in Greek, daimon didn’t really necessarily refer to a malevolent spirit. It could refer to your inspiration. It could refer to. They were basically just little gods who did a variety of different things.

But as another example where we took that and we said, okay, it’s just the bad guys. Now it’s just a demon.

That’s. Oh, wow, that is interesting. First of all, I love the idea of little gods. Little gods just flying around. They might be good, they might be bad. You don’t know. I now that’s the world that I want to live in is, is the world with little gods. So one of the things that, one of the concepts that I encountered when I was sort of looking at all of this, and you mentioned it earlier in the program in the show, is the idea that demons could be fallen angels or that, that there are. What is, what is a fallen angel? And how does, how does that factor into all of this?

So in this trajectory of the development of the concept of angels, and particularly in the Enochic literature, we have this story in Genesis 6 where the children of God, the sons of God specifically, have a hankering for some human women. And they come down and they, and the text says they, they took, they made wives of whichever of them they chose. And then the. They have offspring. And this story with the Enochic literature, this is basically fan fiction. So we don’t get a ton of detail in most of the stories in the Hebrew Bible, but as we bring more questions to it and as the, these stories circulate in society and we wonder about stuff, people are going to come up with answers. And one of the things is First Enoch is kind of taking this and expanding on it, innovating on it and telling a new story, using this as the inspiration. And according to this new story, the Bene Elohim, the sons of God are angels. And the descent to go down and, and take wives of the human women is this big story about how they rebel.

And they come down on Mount Hermon with 200 something odd angels and they name a handful of them. down on Mount Hermon with 200 something odd angels and they name a handful of them. And this is the origin of, or this is how evil makes its way into humanity. They didn’t know warfare and they did not know about abortion, and they did not know about weaponry and they did not know about makeup. But these angels come down and they teach humanity all these things. And so this is a way to account for the presence of evil in the world by saying these originally good angels rebelled and their descent to earth becomes this concept of, of the fall of the angels. And then later on in First Enoch, there, these angels are going to be punished. When we get into the rabbinic period and, and the period of early Christianity, you have a lot of debates about are angels even sexually compatible with human women? Right. And so there are different takes on that. Can angel. Do they even have their own agency?

Can they rebel? So you have different takes on that and you have newer interpretations of Genesis 6 that say, no, those were, those were humans, because that accounts for the whole agency question that accounts for the sexual compatibility question. And so people say, well, that was the line of Seth and that was all humans who did that. And so we actually have different ideas about who these, these entities were. Were they angels, were they humans? It’s a free for all basically around this time period. And we see some of this in the book of Jude , we see some of this in Peter, we see it in other places. But this story of the fall of the angels is one kind of origin story for the concept of demons. And so you also have evil angels. And these evil angels also get names that frequently end in el as well. And these become soldiers in Satan’s army, as particularly Christianity further develops and elaborates on, on these angels.

And I’m trying to think of the name of a book. Saul Olyan is a wonderful Hebrew Bible scholar who published a book oh man, 30 years ago, A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism, which is about how the naming angels and giving them assignments is kind of a way to say, look how big and grand God’s troops are, God’s armies are. And this is a way to further exalt God. But then the more you also expand on the enemy troops, you kind of further increase the size, the grandeur, the glory, and also the tension. And Revelation is kind of another attempt to further meditate on what’s going on in the heavens. And we’ve got the dragon and we got Satan, and we got the one third of the host of heaven are cast down to earth with Satan.

So this is the idea that the fall of the angels and the, and the lead malevolent angel who becomes Satan, they took one third of the angels that were up in heaven with them. And so it’s. It’s not a single story that is just being represented by different authors. The story is developing as these authors are coming up with things and as they’re responding to their own circumstances and the times they are changing. And so the story, it is changing at the same time. And as Christianity and Judaism diverge, so too a lot of the practices and a lot of the understanding of, of who these angels are, who these demons are.

I guess I’m wondering if there’s a biblical origin to the idea, because the thing that you hear about with demons now all the time is that they are possessing us, right? They are, that they are getting into us. They are, they are making us do bad things. They are chatting with their friends through us.

Certainly vaccines have something to do with demons?

Yeah, you, I mean obviously if you’re vaccinated, you got a bunch of demons in you, you gotta, you gotta probably get that taken care of. gotta probably get that taken care of. But what is there is that biblical, the idea of these entities invading us and then taking over, like being able to control us in some way.

So we don’t see that in the Hebrew Bible, but like I said in Mesopotamia there was this idea that, that these forces could gain entry into your body to cause illness and stuff like that and then make you do bad things. And this becomes, this merges with Greco-Roman Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism, and you get this idea that demons, a demon or multiple demons can possess the human body, can take over executive functions of the person and turn them into the demoniac who, you know, wanders around the crypts and has, can break chains. But because they’re so strong. And so by the time of the New Testament that is pretty firmly in place. But it’s something that I would suggest probably comes back from the exile, Zoroastrianism and the dualism of Zoroastrianism where you have Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda opposing divine forces. That dualism is probably influencing the framework for, for Greco-Roman period Judaism, how they’re looking at Mesopotamia, how they’re looking at the Greco-Roman world.

And so by the time of the New Testament, I would say that the idea of possession is there. But what’s interesting, and I did a lot of research on this for my doctoral dissertation which became my book, is you have concepts of spirit possession in the overwhelming majority of societies around the world and throughout time.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that it’s a.

Pretty intuitive notion that your, the, the seat of your agency, your cognition is, is separable from your body. And if that’s the case, then why not the case that agency from somewhere else can take over your body is very intuitive. It happens all the time. And so there have been a lot of great investigations of the idea of spirit possession in all kinds of different societies as well as in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, and how those traditions have interacted with more local traditions when they come into a new area. So fascinating line of study and fascinating. Just this issue, this idea of possession which I think part of in the Hebrew Bible you do have the idea that God can possess a person. And, and you see it particularly with Saul.

Samuel tells Saul in one part that God’s spirit is going to force entry into your body and give you a new heart and turn you into a new person. And so the ecstatic prophetic trance is God possessing the person. And so you do have a, a one tradition, at least one tradition of possession going on in the Hebrew Bible.

In that case, it being a good thing.

Right. That and it is the benevolent possession. Yeah. In that instance, you don’t get a.

Lot of that in, in modern day pop culture or whatever. The, the benevolent possession. I mean the movie Ghost, I remember there was some good, there was some benevolent possession in that movie. So. So yeah, maybe it’s there, maybe I’m wrong. Well, this is fascinating. I’m sure that we could go on and on. We’ll find other ways to talk about demons. In the meantime, seek medical attention. If you have, if you have health problems, don’t go, go to a doctor before you go to a priest.

Yeah. If somebody says, you in danger, girl, best seek out professional medical help first and then. Yeah, the Tarot reader.

Yeah, exactly. All right, thanks so much, Dan. If you would like to write into us, you can do so. It is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the email address. If you would like an ad free version of the show and extra content and all that sort of stuff that’s available to all of our patrons over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Otherwise, thanks so much for joining us and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Angels and Demons

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology