The Demon Haunted Bible

And of course, all of this is just something bad guys would say. So we’re obviously in that… in that latter category.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I get reminded every day that I… that I am a demonic tool of Satan. Yeah. It warms the cockles of my demon-possessed heart. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan Beecher?

Things are great. I am… I’m enjoying, you know, it’s… it’s the fall season. It’s an exciting time when, you know, all the pretty things die and go away and all of the bad weather haunts us and takes over. And I… I try to… I try to enjoy it, but… but it’s tricky. It’s tricky. But it’s a good time, I think, for a spooky show.

Yes, it’s a good time, when we’re recording this, for a spooky show. When anyone is listening to it, the spooky time will have passed.

Okay. Okay, okay, fine. We are recording on Halloween. Yes, we are. We both have ADHD. You can’t expect us to think that far into the future so that we record a show and it comes out in a timely fashion. That’s just not how we do.

I… I just watched Hot Ones earlier, and it’s Jimmy Fallon, the episode that came out today, and it’s a Halloween special. And I was like, they probably recorded this in July. Yeah, but… and so I was like, they have a clue what they’re doing.

Look, if we… if we had producer money, maybe we would… maybe we’d be able to do this. But as of yet, we are… we’re not quite that rich. You guys haven’t shared us with all of your friends, and you haven’t all signed up to be patrons yet. So until that point, spooky show comes when spooky show comes. And… and that is now. Yeah, we…

We barely have production money.

Yeah, exactly. So anyway. But it’s a fun one. We’re gonna be… we’re gonna be diving into a subject that a lot of our listeners slash viewers have requested. So I’m excited about it. So let’s just dive right in.

Yes, let’s.

So here’s the thing, Dan. When we decided we were going to talk about demons on the show, here’s the thing about this show. What I have learned from doing this show for a year and a half is that A, everything I thought I knew about the Bible is probably not right, and B, a lot of the things that you hear the most about from, especially from certain fringe areas of Christian or, you know, theological study, you… I can dismiss it. Like, for instance, when they, you know, when I hear people screaming that abortion… that the Bible says abortion is the murder of babies and that it’s very clear on this. I know that’s nonsense. And when the end… or… or if they say that, you know, the Bible is anti-LGBT and…

And you should be too, I know that that’s nonsense. I’m used to thinking that when the fringes are really emphatic about something, it’s… they’ve probably really put a whole lot of lenses on it to get to this thing. So when I started researching demons, I was like, I wonder if that’s even in the Bible. And then I went, and I was like, oh, it’s in the Bible. Holy cow. So it’s not that… it’s not one of those.

Right?

It’s not one of those things that’s not even really there. Oh, it’s there.

It’s in the New Testament. Yeah, yeah. The…

Oh, that’s an interesting point.

Yeah, yeah. And we’ll talk a little bit about why.

Okay, but…

Yeah, can… but continue. I’m sorry, I interrupted.

No, no, no. I mean, I think that’s a great place to start. Let’s just… let’s just dive right in. Let’s talk about why I found all kinds of New Testament demonic verses. And you’re right, didn’t find much or hardly anything in the Old Testament.

So just like we have some stuff that’s not in the Hebrew Bible, like hell. Like you… if you look in the King James Version, you see hell a bunch in… in the Old Testament, but that’s just because it’s a bad translation of Sheol, a Hebrew word that does not refer to the conceptual package that indexes the… the English word hell. And the same is true of demon. You don’t have a Hebrew word for demon in the Hebrew Bible, mainly because demon is a Greek word. Like it originates in Greek. There is no Hebrew equivalent. And it comes from the Greek word daimon. So it’s spelled a little differently than… than how we use it. But demon is how it’s come into English. And… and the word daimon really only refers to a kind of divine influence. Like it’s not the word theos, which means a god, a deity, but it’s used to refer to the divine influence, power, agency of deities.

So divinity might be that. And, and it’s usually used to refer in Greek literature to the kind of influence where something might suddenly happen, good or bad. And you would say that’s a, a daimon, that’s the demon. And, but devoid of any kind of value judgment, we think of demon as a negative value judgment.

Yeah, it is.

It’s a bad thing.

It’s evil. It’s Right, yeah.

In, in ancient Greek, it was not, it was neutral. You could have a demon that made something good happen, or you could have a demon that made something bad happen. But it was this kind of faceless, nameless, just massive divine influence. And, and so like, you could also equate it with the concept of kind of a muse. Somebody’s individual kind of divine inspiration could be referred to that way, could be understood as a type of spirit, something like that. And so that’s the word that became what we now know as demon. And it gets picked up within Greco-Roman period Judaism, primarily in the Enochic and other pseudepigraphic literature literature. So First Enoch, Jubilees, some other texts from Greco-Roman period Judaism are the ones that first take this word and use it to render some different Hebrew concepts, but then to develop an idea of evil spirits. And that’s what gets picked up in the New Testament.

But it’s also dovetailing with Mesopotamian concepts. So none of this is native to the Hebrew Bible. But in Mesopotamia, in the Akkadian language, you have all kinds of concepts of malevolent spirits and divine entities. And to understand how they kind of organize their understanding of, of the divine world, you’ve got to understand the, the concept of center and periphery. So think spatially about a civilization. And I, I, this is how I think about my neighborhood. Like the really nice houses are in the center, and then you’ve got, you’ve got the starter homes and then you’ve got the condos. And then beyond that you’ve got the apartments and the bad apartments beyond that, like, you know, you’ve got these concentric rings of, of increasing value and importance to the, the society according to the people who live at the center anyway. And anciently they thought of the city as the center of civilization, as the pinnacle, the peak of civilization.

And the further away you got from the city, the, the less order there was, the more disorder there was, and the less civilization was possible. And so as you get to the outskirts, you get to places that are less habitable, and then you get into the uninhabitable wilderness. And the sea and the desert are kind of the prototypical uninhabitable wildernesses where humans can’t live and certainly can’t build an ordered society. So closer to the center, more order, more civilization. Closer to the periphery, less order, less civilization, more disorder. And that’s where. That’s the home of all of these malevolent spirits that occupy the wilderness and dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. And so in, like in Isaiah, you have the Lilith, Lilit. In Hebrew, this only occurs in reference to this prophecy about how Jerusalem would become this desolate, uninhabitable wasteland occupied only by the screech owl, I think is how the King James Version renders Lilit.

But it mentions all these kind of demonic forces. And like even Azazel, you know, if you go, that’s. That’s the entity that’s out in the desert that you’re leading the scapegoat out to. So these disordered, malevolent entities occupy the uninhabitable wilderness. And so in Mesopotamia, they were. They were always threatening the order of civilization. So you had to have a bunch of different ways to keep them at bay. And that was different charms and different kinds of magic that you would use. And, you know, women during menstruation had to make sure they were doing certain things because that provides a convenient portal for some of these demons. You know, in Egypt, you wanted to make sure they didn’t come in through the ears or through the nose because those were particularly susceptible orifices as well. So this kind of. They need.

They need a physical entree into the body is what you’re saying.

Yeah, and in this time period, we don’t yet have this. This dichotomy of material and immaterial. Everything is, is material in one way, shape or form. But some things are a different kind of material and, you know, more pure. Spirit was still material. Spirit was like, analogized as wind. Like even the word ruach, spirit means wind. And so you can. You can feel the wind just like you could feel spirit.

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

Well, see, that’s a different story. No, it has no color, but. And so these, these spirits are conceptualized as something like the wind, so they can get in you, you know, if you’re not careful. And this is this is kind of what gets conflated with the Greek concept of the daimon within Greco-Roman period Judaism. They’re taking some of what they have, some of the residual Mesopotamian influence from the exile and from the Persian period, and they’re mixing it with some of the Greek concepts and they’re also mixing it with some Hebrew Bible texts. So, for instance, the sons of God, they come down and they have children with the human women from Genesis 6 , verses 2 through 4. That’s kind of the foundation of the Enochic tradition, which then reinterprets it and expands on it and generates this narrative where they come down and they.

And they have these children who are the giants, and the giants have children who are the Nephilim and the, the spirits of the deceased Nephilim are the evil spirits that then become the demons. And so.

Interesting. Okay.

According to one narrative, there are a bunch of different narratives, but that’s.

Yeah, and that doesn’t seem to match up with the narrative that I got from multiple sources in my research about sort of the origin story of the demons. Okay, but I, I don’t know. We. I guess we can just talk about that. I, you know, I, I found in a few places where it would say that demons are. And, you know, this one uses Second Peter as its reference point for this. But it, it says demons are angels that, that sinned.

And rebelled against God. And so they are destined for hell and they’re going to torment as many of us as they can before they have to go there. Or something along those lines.

Yeah. So. So there we have, we have the idea of these, these angels. So in the Enochic tradition, and we see this primarily in Jubilees, the, the angels, they’re created on the first day and they watch the rest of creation. And you know, they’re, they’re the, the Muppet babies, just kind of like, hey, everything’s great. And. But then when you get the story of them descending because, you know, they’re just way too horny, that then leads to all this bad stuff. So they fall and then you’ve got these named angels who are, are doing all this bad stuff. And then in, in Enoch, God is, is like, tells the other angels, like Gabriel and Michael and, and these others is like, go bind them under the earth for, you know, for 70 year, you know, whatever, years of years. And.

Oh yeah.

And so they are imprisoned and they’re bound. And, and this is where we get the development of concepts of hell. It’s originally for the angels. So the disobedient angels are also another kind of conceptual template that dovetails in with the idea of demons.

So that’s. That’s from Enoch. That idea comes. Like, what’s fascinating to me about this, one of the fascinating things is that, like, most of Christianity rejects the Book of Enoch as scripture. Currently.

But it’s very.

Christianity is also descended from the Book of Enoch.

That’s what I’m saying. Like, it’s so clear how powerful the influence of that book has been. When you look at, you know, the stuff that makes it into the New Testament, it is like all of it references it all the time.

Yeah, yeah. It’s concepts of the devil, concepts of hell, concepts of heaven. The. It’s all there.

So the Second Peter verse that I was talking about that was referenced in that article that I was reading is 2nd Peter 2, verse 4, which says, for if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into the. Into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment. And I didn’t know where that came from, but I guess it’s an Enoch thing.

Yeah. And. And you have. So that’s a reference to Enoch in, like, the Book of Jude . You have a direct quotation from.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And here in Enoch, chapter 19. And Uriel said to me, there stand the angels who mingled with the women, and their spirits, having assumed many forms, bring destruction on men and lead them astray to sacrifice to demons as to gods until the day of the great judgment in which they will be judged with fire.

The concept of demons, because Deuteronomy 32 is the Song of Moses. It went triple platinum. I… I think Pharrell probably ripped it off at some point or another, but… I’m just kidding. I have nothing against Pharrell, but it says here the… it’s talking about Israel in the wilderness, things they did wrong, things they… they sinned on. And it says they sacrificed to shedim. And that’s a Hebrew word that probably is related to an Aramaic word, shaddayin, which is like a class of deity. And we see it in an inscription that was discovered called the Deir Alla inscription, which mentions Balaam. But that’s probably a kind of secondary class of deities. And it says they sacrifice to shedim, not to God, gods they did not know, to newly arrived ones whom your ancestors had not feared.

And so this is… this is condemning the Israelites because they were sacrificing to other gods and it calls them shedim. And this might be… in fact, I think it’s probably related to the root from which we get Shaddai, El Shaddai. I probably shouldn’t sing that. But so it’s probably related to God’s title Shaddai, which may come from this specific class of deity. But when it came time to translate that into Greek for the Septuagint, they didn’t really have an equivalent for shedim. And I think shedim probably occurs in maybe like two or three other passages in the Hebrew Bible. Let me see. Yeah, it looks like it occurs also in Psalms 106:37 . They sacrifice their sons and their daughters to shedim and they chose daimon or daimonion to… to translate shedim, which meant that these…

And… and there’s an argument to make that it’s probably because we don’t know what kind of deities they are. They’re just these nameless, faceless deities. Oh, well, daimon means kind of a nameless, faceless, divine power. It’s this undifferentiated mass of… of divinity. And so, “Oh, that makes perfect sense. Let’s go with that.” But then the demon becomes the… the object of false worship. It becomes false gods, it becomes wicked deities. And that plays into the development of the… the Enochic tradition and Jubilees and… and stuff like that. And so by the time of the New Testament, all of this is coming together. And who is it that they sacrifice to? Oh, they sacrifice to demons. And so when you look in most English translations of the Bible now, because the… the Septuagint rendered daimoniois for shedim, they sacrificed to demons, not God. That’s the NRSVUE.

They sacrificed them to devils, not God. That’s the King James Version, New English Translation: they sacrifice to demons, not God. So… so now we have demons in the Old Testament because of the Greek translation. And so we’re… we’re building this construction of demons going all the way back.

Yeah, but… but that’s a case of backfilling, right? Like that’s not… that… that’s unlikely that… that’s the… the newer concept of demon is what is meant in… with… with the shedim concept.

Yes, yes. The… whatever shedim was intended to mean when that was composed in Hebrew, that has been overlaid with the much later concept of the demon. So yeah, it is altering what’s going on there. But most English translations are just content to say, “Yeah, we’ll just use demons, whatever, who cares?”

So let’s… let’s move then to the New Testament and talk about what that idea is. What is… like, do we have a sense? I know, it’s like demons are mentioned plenty of times in the New Testament and almost casually in a bunch of ways. I’m thinking now of… of Luke 8 where in verse 2 it says—and Luke 8 has another demon thing—but in verse 2, you know, it’s talking about how… how Jesus was… was sort of walking and he was accompanied by a bunch of people. And verse 2 says, “as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza,” blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s just like… it feels so… like thrown… just sort of cast out.

Oh, and then Mary, and boy, she had seven of them, but they got rid of those. It’s no problem. Yeah, it didn’t. It just doesn’t feel like, like we don’t hear that story. It’s just like a side note that like, also she had, she had a whole bunch, but… but we got rid of those.

Well, there was probably a tradition that was in circulation back when Luke was, or at least the author of Luke was gathering their sources. And so it’s a throwaway line. It’s, it’s, you know, referring to something that people at that time period would have known. But obviously that story’s been lost to us. But yeah, it is, it is kind of that. That’s the world they lived in. It was, it was a, a demon haunted world where, you know, because, you know, the wind blows and you know, it might give you an earache, it might go up your nose, you might, you know, swallow a mosquito or something like that and you might have a demon get in there and that might make you sick. If you feel depressed, maybe that’s a demon like that. They were attributing an awful lot of different things to demonic possession, including mental health issues and, and other pathologies I’m sure that we don’t know about.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that’s the thing. Right. Like I, I was going to get to that later on, but it definitely seems like. No, it’s fine. Like it definitely seems like what we’re, what a lot of this is is just explanations for things that we now know are caused by entirely other things. You know, for mental health issues or for, you know, disease or whatever. It seems like if someone just starts vomiting ferociously out of the blue, you know, before there’s germ theory, it’s like, I don’t know, probably a demon.

You know what I mean? Like, like what else, what other explanation are you gonna have if someone’s just, if something, you know, if someone is having a, you know, a psychotic break, you’re not going to be like, oh, that’s, there’s probably something wrong with their brain or maybe they’ve had a… Yeah. You know, whatever they’re, they’re going to immediately, immediately jump to there’s something external affecting them.

Yeah. And, and I think the, you know, we all have kind of an internal anti contamination system that’s kind of intuitively built in and you know, it’s kind of why people hate the, the smell of flatulence. So anybody else’s anyway, because the intuitively it’s kind of like ah, this is harmful and it’s not. But we all have that internal contamination system that, that is compelling you to perceive certain things to be harmful. And, and there can be, you know, sometimes it has to do with food, sometimes it has to do with actions. There is a sexual disgust sensitivity is a part of that. People think certain sex can be contaminating. And so when you have that, that’s sitting so close to the surface because they don’t have better explanations for what’s going on. And they’re, and they’re not really thinking scientifically according to how we understand the term. And in other words, they don’t have enough information for their reflective cognition to overrule the intuitive side of things.

The intuitive side of things gets to drive. And that is going to, because of the proximity to these other ideas about a demon haunted world, the gravitational pull is just going to be too great. And so your internal contamination detection system is going to very easily connect things you’re afraid of and things that you might perceive to be the outcome of contamination to align with the notion that there are demons everywhere around us and.

That they get inside of you. Like that’s the other thing is that, you know, if you go further down in Luke chapter eight, you get to a guy, in Matthew, it’s two guys, who is, who’s, who’s living in the tombs and who is possessed by demons. Who, who is… you know, what we would call possessed? He, he… somebody… somebody’s actually living inside of him or a bunch of somebodies, as it turns out. Talk about that. Where did that come from? That just that it’s such… I mean, and this is the guy, just so we get the story, the broad strokes are this guy is a crazy hermit guy, lives out in the wilderness. Ish.

I guess at least on the outskirts. It’s, it’s.

If there are tombs, this is on the outskirts. Which again, you overlay that center periphery idea and it’s like he’s, he doesn’t belong in civilized society. He’s got to occupy the outskirts.

And anyway, Jesus approaches him and he cries out. He cries out and fell down before him shouting, what have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the Most High God, I beg you, do not torment me.

He asked what his, what his name is.

And he says Legion, but. But yeah, the idea is just the demon is. Is. Is identifying as a multiplicity of. Of demons. So it’s not just one demon because the, the number shifts. Ask what his name is. And then he says Legion because many demons had entered into him. And I think the daimonia. Yeah. As soon as he says that, it shifts to the plural. That’s a neuter nominative plural had entered into him. And then it says they. Where was the NRSVUE? They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. Is what the NRSVUE. And so it’s back to the plural. And so the idea is upon first glance, this is a single demon. And Jesus is like, oh yeah, we take care of this all the time. I can do this on a weekend. And. But then it’s like, oh, no, it’s a bunch of them.

It’s a bunch of them. And, and for whatever reason, I guess when they get cast out of the guy, they have to go back to the abyss if they can’t find another place to be. And they beg Jesus. That’s so weird that the demons are like, please just put us in the pigs, will you? Put us in the pigs. We would love that. It’s not Jesus, like, I condemn you to, to pig life. They’re asking for it. And Jesus is like, yeah, go ahead. It’s all right.

Well, in. And it’s, you know, it’s fitting because they. What kind of demons are they? Or spirits are they. They’re unclean. What is a pig? It’s unclean. And so it’s. They’re drawn to a more or more natural habitat. And this is why the demons are. Are, you know, shoving the guy out into. What did you say? The. What is the King James said, I’m in the. Driven him into the wilderness or driven him into the wilds.

Into the wilds is. Yeah, yeah.

And. And the word there in. I lost my place. Yeah, it’s eremos, the wilderness, because that’s where demons are located.

At the outside, in the periphery.

So when they were, when they were in the man, they were making the man run out, go to the wilderness, go to their habitat.

Yeah. So like, think Stranger Things.

He doesn’t like. What is it that he doesn’t like? He doesn’t like the hot. He likes the cold. And so, you know, he, he wants to crank up the air and then you drive him out by. By making it all hot. And, and so it’s the same idea. This is kind of a very intuitive, natural notion. And, and it comes from the, the very natural and intuitive notion of, of possession, which is something that you find in all kinds of societies around the world and throughout time. This notion that. And I’ve talked about this a little bit. It’s in my book where, you know, the human body is conceptualized as a container. We have an inside, we have an outside, and the inside is where executive control is located. And because we have these unseen agents all around us for good, for bad, or sometimes they. They can be neutral. And, and that’s why you want to make sure your, your orifices are all taken care of either through your apotropaic amulets or whatever spells or whatever you.

You have that keeps them out so they can’t get in. Because if they get in, then that’s where your executive function is, is located. And they can take it over.

Right.

And so demon possession or spirit possession is something that is phenomenally widespread. Transculturally, transhistorically. It’s just something that we find all over the world. And, and this is just the 1st century CE Greco-Roman Jewish manifestation of spirit possession. Only these spirits are unclean. And then, you know, prophecy is a product of spirit possession as well. Only the clean, the good spirit of God.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s really interesting. So. Yeah, so, yes, I mean people talk about. I guess I had thought about it because I, you know, when I was researching for this, I did stumble on a video that, that was like, don’t worry though.

Yeah, well, and, and you’ve got this, this metaphor. There’s another part where they talk about the person’s body as a house and you’ve got the, the strong man who, who—and I’m forgetting precisely what the metaphor is, which is embarrassing, but you’ve got to tie him up and you know, you’ve got to sweep out all the, all the unclean stuff. And so yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, this is just a function of this perfectly natural side effect of human cognition is that we understand ourselves to be containers that can sometimes be taken over. And, and you know, you look at the possession of Saul. When Samuel says to Saul that God’s spirit is going to—usually the translation says something like overtake or overcome you or something like that. But the Hebrew root is tsalach, which means penetrate. God’s spirit is going to penetrate you. Non-sexually, or maybe it is sexually.

And, and it says he will give you a new heart and that’s how you will be, you know, anointed king, is you’ll have a new heart. And so the, because the heart is conceptualized as the seat of cognition that is located internal to you. And so we think of the, the seat of cognition as the brain now. And so, you know, we’re going to switch brains and then, you know, that that changes who’s in charge. For them, it was the heart. God’s spirit is going to, you know, possess you, take you over, change out your own heart for a new one that belongs to God. And so it’s, it’s the same thing, only we like this kind of possession.

Yeah, interesting.

I. Can I just bring up a silly side fact and just have you answer it for me really quickly. You had mentioned that, that it makes sense that the, the, the Legion is cast into the swine because unclean goes into these, these unclean animals. But the swineherd, that, that herd of swine was owned by a, a person who was taking care of them and was presumably kind of upset that his whole, like, livelihood was then like stampeded into the lake and drowned. Yeah, I, so there must have been people who were eating pigs at that time.

Well, they’re, yeah, they’re not in, they’re not in a Jewish-dominant territory right now.

They’re on—they’re on—they’re to the east of the Sea of Galilee. Now there’s a traditional location for this that’s right on the shore, but depending on which manuscript you look at, it has different names for this location, where they are. And when we’ve tried to locate places that went by that name in the first century, they’re like miles away. So it’s like the, the pigs didn’t just run off a cliff or down a, down a hill. Are we there yet? Shut up. And, and yeah, the idea is that they’ve, you know, they drive the, the man out into the wilderness and they’re just like, let’s, yeah, let’s get these pigs somewhere. And they just, who knows, accidentally or intentionally drive them into the water and kill them. And you know, the, that’s how, that’s their, their just deserts. And when it, when it says abyss, the word there, the Greek is, is abyssos. But this is the netherworld. This is where the wicked angels, the evil spirits were being kept.

So, so basically we need to occupy these humans or we’re going to go back to the chains and the darkness where we await judgment that is mentioned in, in the Enochic tradition and then is picked up within the New Testament. So basically this is our, you know, we’re out here joyriding so that we don’t have to. And, you know, that’s keeping us out of jail.

Right.

So we want to, we want to be joyriding even if we have to get in the pigmobile and then, you

know, we’re gonna, and then the pigs immediately drown, presumably. Presumably depriving them of their

of their mobile.

Yeah. And presumably they

off they go back to the abyss. Anyway. Yeah, I just wanted to provide the coda of that story.

Yeah. Which I find hilarious, which is that the, the swineherds run back and tell everybody in the town what happened, and they’re like, hey, Jesus, would you please leave? We’re uncomfortable with everything. Yeah, we would like you to please go.

Quite the buzzkill.

You killed all this dude’s—

You helped that one guy. But then all this dude’s pigs are now dead. That’s just not nice.

So let’s talk a bit about how demons, like, how they were meant to affect people. Because we talked about the possibility or what I would deem the likelihood that this demonic possession was just an etiology or a way of explaining just, you know, various health, slash mental health afflictions.

Do we, do we have a sense of like, what they were explaining? What things were happening to people?

Yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got a few different things that are explained as demon possession where Jesus heals people by casting the demon out as if it was simply a mechanical issue.

Right.

That, oh, here’s your problem. You got this demon. Let me just—okay, there we go. So like in Matthew 9 , verse 32 starts, after they’d gone away, a demon-possessed man who was mute was brought to him. And when the demon had been cast out, the one who had been mute spoke and the crowds were amazed and said, never has anything like this been seen in Israel. So he’s—he’s making the deaf to hear, the mute to speak. And a lot of this is attributed to his authority over demons. And so this is—this is a way to signal that he has this power over demons and can just, you know, boom, you’re healed, the demon is gone. See there, he’s got away. And, and presumably they go to the abyss or whatever. But—but then in verse 34, it says, but the Pharisees were saying, by the ruler of demons, he casts out the demons. And—and this comes up later where they—they accuse him again of—

Of casting out demons by Beelzebul, which is—

Oh, meaning he’s summoning the power of the—of—of big daddy demon.

Yeah, like, this is all—this is all just a grift. He’s—he’s just like, they’re in league together and—and he’s like, I’ve got to dupe them into thinking that I have power over you. Yes, sir. And so that’s—that’s the accusation that they’re making. And then—and then Jesus gives the famous, a house divided against itself cannot stand. How can I cast out demons by the prince of demons? Which was—yeah, great movie. Kevin Costner. No, that was Prince of Thieves. Never mind. And—and I love—and Beelzebul is an interesting story. So Beelzebub is how most people are used to hearing that.

And that’s how—and that’s probably how a lot of translations actually of the New Testament render it. But the Greek is Beelzeboul or Beelzebul. And that’s because it is based on the Northwest Semitic storm deity Baal. And the title would have been Zebul Baal. That’s a title that we know from the Ugaritic literature, which just means Prince Baal or Prince Lord.

But they’ve—they’ve altered it. Beelzebub means Lord of Flies. Right. So it’s—it’s a way to make fun. It—you know, it’s—it’s like the pejorative nicknames that certain presidential candidates give people that—that give him trouble. It’s just a way to mock and deride. But that’s one of the—that’s one example of a pathology or a condition or a—a disability that is attributed to demonic possession. There’s another one in Matthew 15:22 , just then, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, have mercy on me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is tormented by a demon. But he didn’t answer her. And this is where we get, it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. And she says, yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. And the—the very problematic, xenophobic dismissal of the Syrophoenician woman.

And he said—and he basically says, woman, great is your faith. You know, and then from that hour, her daughter was healed. And elsewhere we have—we have them describe this as, you know, scratching oneself and—and not being able to—to walk and all this kind of stuff. So obviously, severe mental health issues are also being attributed to demon possession.

Yeah, I feel like I—you know, it’s funny because I think a lot of people might think it, that—that it’s—it’s harmless. These ideas are—are just interesting. But, but, you know, they’re—who are they hurting?

And, and the treatment—and don’t take them, you know, don’t take your kid who’s suffering to a doctor when what, what they need is a priest who’s willing to do an exorcism. That sort of idea and it’s just a, A, that means that people who need help aren’t getting available help. There is available help and they’re not getting it. And B, it also sort of oddly puts the blame onto the victim. You know, the, the person experiencing really difficult things is suddenly blamed for it. Like they were, you know, they weren’t spiritual enough, they weren’t filled enough with the Spirit of God and thus they allowed this demon inside of them and it’s their own fault. And I think both of those two ideas combined. You know, the, the exorcism is actually on the rise currently as, yeah, as a, as a performed rite. Religious rite.

And that freaks me out.

Yeah, I’ve, I’ve seen, I’ve, I’ve definitely seen a lot more folks on Twitter talking about exorcism as, as the, the go-to fix for problems, particularly for children. Yeah, I’m seeing it a lot associated with, with people’s kids. They’re like, don’t take them to a doctor. They’ll pump them full of drugs and, and you know, then they’ll turn trans. So you need to take them to an exorcist. And I, and I’ve even had some, some proclaimed, self-proclaimed exorcists tell me, oh, this is real. It’s totally real. And yeah, that’s phenomenally harmful. People die because of that kind of thing.

thing or experience just massive loads of trauma that they will have to unpack for the rest of their lives because they were a child and they were told that they were possessed by a demon.

And that, that’s not easy to wrap your head around as a, you know, eight-year-old or whatever.

No, no, it’s, it’s horrifying that that kind of thing continues to—the, the kids are conditioned to, to think that way because I, I mentioned that, that this is kind of a natural intuitive way of, of thinking about contamination and, and stuff like that. When you don’t have enough education for your reflective cognition to overrule those intuitions, we have plenty of that now, but if you are conditioned, you can actually condition your intuitive cognition to then overrule the reflective cognition. And that’s what happens when you’re raised to believe these things and taught that if you don’t believe these things, that that is the influence of demons and that that is unrighteous and that that is what is going to ensure that you’re, you know, you don’t make the rapture or that you’re going to go to hell. And so it creates this internal war between the reflective and, and the intuitive cognition. And it allows all of the progress that humanity has made in treating preventable diseases, disability, all of these conditions so that they are on the rise.

It’s, it’s, it’s basically an anti-vax position on things that are not vaccinated.

How many times did we hear demonic discussions in relation to COVID, like in, in relation to. Instead of go out and get the vaccine and you know, all of the, there was like a bunch of the anti-vax sort of rhetoric was centered on religious reasons why this was coming to pass. This, this pandemic was happening. And, and so if, if there is a spiritual cause, then the, then the only cure that’s available must also therefore be spiritual. Yeah, I, I think that that’s a, you know, it’s. I, I guess what I’m getting at because I, you know, I, in, I’m in no way trying to talk people out of believing what they’re doing, you know, out of their, their Bible beliefs. But I think it’s really important to point out that as this idea of demonic possession was very clearly a, a New Testament innovation, it was something that didn’t exist throughout the, you know, the, well, at least hundreds of years of the Old Testament.

Yeah, well, at least the, the identification of these things as demons. There was certainly the notion of spirit possession and societies, they certainly also had, had those ideas. That’s why you have these magical texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt that it’s like, here’s the spell to get rid of the demon that’s clogging up your, you know, your uterus or whatever.

That’s the idea. So, so to me, the idea isn’t like you have to give up your belief in, in like this shouldn’t shake someone’s faith if they, you know, it, if they want to keep believing, what it should do is, is at very least make people think. This is explaining. This is one explanation for a series of. Of issues. Yeah, we have better, you know, we’ve had 2,000 years to come up with much better explanations for those things. It doesn’t mean that, you know, that, that the Bible is wrong, but it was wrong about this. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, that mute guy wasn’t possessed by a devil. It wasn’t possessed by a demon.

Yeah. And. And the story is a literary creation. Jesus did not heal a mute person. This is just a way for them to have Jesus fulfilling the prophecies that existed or were thought to exist at the time regarding the coming of the Messiah.

Well, now I’ve gone too far.

I wanted to bring up one, one final thing. I wanted to talk about a way that Bible translation uses demons for the sake of colonialism.

Oh, hey. All right.

There’s this really cool paper that I, that I came across while I was doing research on demons for. It was for my book, but it was actually, it was dovetailing with stuff I was doing at work.

Wait, do you mean your book? The Bible says so.

No, my previous book, but. Oh, but the Bible says so. Is my forthcoming book available available now for pre order? Yes, pre order at the link that we have in my link tree and.

Also and in the show notes of this and every upcoming episode. Episode.

So, yes, but there was. I read this fascinating paper because I was. I was looking at cultural imperialism and, and colonialism and this kind of stuff as it related to Bible translation. And there are a bunch of. Not a bunch, but there are some really good books on. This one’s called Translating the Message that is about translations of the Bible and colonialism and stuff. But there’s this. There’s this wonderful scholar, Musa Dube, who wrote a paper called Consuming a Colonial Cultural Bomb: Translating badimo into Demons in the Setswana Bible. And what this is about is the fact that when they were translating the Bible in Setswana back in the 19th century, they chose a specific word to render the word demon in the New Testament. Now, in, in Setswana, they had a word for evil spirits. They didn’t use that word. They chose badimo. And I, and I may not have the accentuation right, that may be badimo. I’m not, I’m not positive, but that was a word that refers to benevolent ancestral spirits that helped people, that inspired people, that they sought out for divinatory.

Purposes and, and all different kinds of things like that for healing and stuff like that. And so the, the argument is that the choice to render badimo was based on the desire to eliminate the influence of the benevolent ancestral spirits from this community of Batswana or Setswana speakers.

So sort of a poison pill to go back and, and, and, and and degrade their old concepts and the old religious practice.

So. Oh yeah, exactly that a way to try to use the Bible translation as a tool of extracting these unwanted cultural residues that, that they thought were not consistent with Christianity. And the problem is it didn’t work because the, their traditions associated with the badimo were too strong. And so rather than understand the badimo as evil spirits, they understood the Bible and these references to the badimo as another instrument for facilitating the aid of the badimo. And so they would use the Bible translation as like spells, as incantations in order to invoke the badimo. And they understood that Jesus was kind of a, a facilitator of, of accessing the badimo.

And so the Bible translation became a tool of divination associated with the badimo because they the. And and there’s this theory of host guest ideas of translation where the, the target culture is the host and the, the translation is the guest. And and basically the, the host took over, appropriated the little poison pill that the guest was trying to, to bring in. And so I, I think it’s a wonderful exam. It’s a wonderful illustration of how Bible something as as ostensibly benign as Bible translation can be a tool for cultural imperialism, but also how it can go. It can go sideways if.

I love it.

Yeah, if you don’t get it right.

And one wonders if they read the story of the demons being cast into pigs and started to like try to communicate with their ancestors after that.

I’m trying to see if they do talk about that. Yeah, that was—so they use badimo in that part where he sends him into the pigs. Okay. So no, it doesn’t tell, or she doesn’t give any examples that use that particular story. But yeah, they do use the Bible as kind of an icon, as a bit of an idol in that regard to facilitate the access to the badimo.

I think that’s so—that’s a heartwarming moment for me. You know, that when the ancestral thing, when the thing that’s trying to be subsumed then does the subsuming, that’s kind of fun.

Yeah. And you know, there are all kinds of examples of using vernacular translation for the sake of cultural imperialism, particularly in Africa with the Portuguese language, for instance, as well as in places like the Philippines and elsewhere. So, yeah, it’s a messy, messy business, surprisingly enough.

But it’s not surprising at all. Yeah, I guess one of the takeaways for me on this is just that if you were raised with demon fear—and I think so many people were raised with a lot of fear of demons and sort of the other side. Now the rhetoric is all political too, you know, you see people like Lance Wallnau talking about how Kamala Harris is demon-possessed and using demon magic to get where she is and all of this stuff.

And…

I think we can release it. I think we can safely, gently release the demon fears back into the wild. Cast them into a pig. Go find yourself.

Or allow them to sail into the abyss.

Yeah, cast them back into the abyss because you don’t need that anxiety in your life. That’s not what they were meant for, and it’s certainly not useful for you.

And it’s such a pathetic way to try to cut off thoughtful discourse as well. To just frame someone as demonic is dehumanizing. It’s a thought-stopping cliche. It reduces everything to this zero-sum binary game where there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s nothing in between.

Right.

That is such a corrosive, destructive way to look at the world.

And of course all of this is just something bad guys would say. So we’re obviously in that latter category.

Yeah. Oh yeah, I get reminded every day that I am a demonic tool of Satan. Yeah, it warms the cockles of my demon-possessed heart.

Well, if your cockles have been warmed and you would like to become a part of keeping this show going, we love to invite you to become one of our patrons if you can afford it. Go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and throw a few shekels our way. We would certainly, certainly appreciate that. You could get access to an early and ad-free version of every show and the After Party, which is extra content that we make just for our $10 a month and up patrons. Also, if you’d like to reach out to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much. I hope your demons do well this week and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

The Demon Haunted Bible

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology