A Genealogy of Satan, Part 5: The Devil vs. Demons

 

The words translated devil and demon in English have two distinct origins.

            Devil derives from Greek diabolos, which means 'accuser' and translates the Hebrew satan (also meaning 'accuser') in the Greek version of the Old Testament used by New Testament writers. The Devil literally is the Satan, and a devil (until its meaning blurred with use) is a satan, a figurative comparison to the Prince of Evil. Devil is one of his names. In The Book of Job, the diabolos (ha-satan 'the accuser') gathers with the "sons of God." If not literally a son, he's part of God's retinue. If he's a fallen, it's not evident in Job. The Devil is an individual, evil perhaps, but with angelic dignity.

Demon, an unrelated word, derives from ancient Greek daimon, a generic term for god in the time of Homer, later narrowed to minor deities--animistic spirits of persons or things. In Plato's Apology, Socrates calls the inner voice that warns him when he is about to make a mistake a daimon, something like a guardian angel. The Greco-Romans saw the world as animated by spirits, from the stars above to springs from under the earth. The Old Testament belittled them as foreign gods. Legions of demons were taken for granted by 1st-century Jews and had become evil. Demons became generic, ignominious creatures, ordered around by Jesus and lacking individuality--revealed only in the things they invisibly infected. Demons are the Devil's henchmen, legions of minor, earthbound spirits he commands.

The pseudo-scriptural Book of Jubilees, written about 150 BCE, was influential at the time of the New Testament and describes the origins of fallen angels and demons. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls says that Jubilees reveals secrets "to which Israel has turned a blind eye" (Nyland, "Introduction). The origin stories in Jubilees are alluded to in 2 Peter (2:4-8) and Jude (1:14-15), and early Christian references show that the work was widely read. If not the sole source of gospel demonology, Jubilees reflects the prevailing understanding of the gospel writers, the context of Jesus' miracles.

The Book of Jubilees explains the origins of Jewish holidays in a summary of Genesis. In the process, it adds elements from Enoch, especially the myth of the Watchers (Greek, Grigori) who were sent to earth “to instruct the humans to be honorable and to do the right thing on the earth" (Nyland, §4). In a corrupt crossing of species associated with the sin of Sodom (2 Peter 2:4:6), the all-male Watchers take human wives and father monstrous children. As a result, "Lawlessness increased on the earth and all living things went corrupt, humans, cattle, animals, birds, and everything that walks the earth--they went corrupt and started eating each other" (Nyland, §5). The Watchers, being angels, cannot die but are stripped of their powers and bound under the earth after being forced to watch their sons kill each other. This is a long process, and there are an indeterminate number of dead sons. Then God ritually purifies the earth in a flood. After the flood, Noah's descendants begin to fight with each other, and the patriarch declares that invisible spirits--undead spawn of the lustful Watchers--still plague the earth.

According to The Book of Jubilees, Noah's sons complain that "unclean demons" are corrupting their children, blinding, and killing them (Enoch 15:8). Noah prays that God prevent these unclean spirits from hurting good people, and God initially agrees to bind them along with Watchers. But the prince of the Watchers, here called Mastema, begs that a tenth of the demons be released under his command so that he can test human beings--the same pleading that, as Satan, he makes in Job, but with more success: "In my judgement," says Mastema, "these humans are  corrupt and easily led astray. The wickedness of the humans is enormous." The Lord agrees, and so legions of demons are loosed on the world (Nyland, §11). Even after the Watchers have been imprisoned under the earth, Mastema speaks directly the Lord. The unexplained premise is that the leader of the Watchers, comparable to the Devil himself, is free to visit heaven.

The Book of Enoch and The Book of Jubilees, both written before the first century BCE,  explain the Devil/demon dichotomy. The world is populated with legions of demons, "unclean spirits" invisibly doing the grunt work of tempting and afflicting people with God's permission (but not at his command), testing people and punishing them when they fail the tests. These demons are the equivalent of Greek demigods in that they are sons (no daughters are ever mentioned) of angels. Commanding them is a single Devil going by many names and "prince" of many things--including darkness, lies, and evil. Because Mastema was correct about human weakness, he has become prince the world, corrupting especially the rich and powerful and officers of the Roman Empire. The ravages of Satan's army will end only when the world as we know it ends and Christ returns to establish his Kingdom. Until then, Christians enjoy partial immunity but are still tested and tormented. Jesus is the Anti-devil, opposite to the Antichrist.

The Greek influence that followed Alexander's fourth-century conquest of the Judea is evident in the later Jewish myths, which imitate and invert the origin stories of the great Greek author, Hesiod. The people of Hesiod's Golden Age were, if not "sons" of heaven, "friends [philoi] of the gods" (Works and Days, l. 120). The term philoi implies family connection and exchange of favors. When Golden Age men died, they became daimones (l. 122)--literally demons, but in the positive sense that Socrates used to describe his guiding spirit. Gregory Nagy translates Hesiod's daimones as "superhumans" and Stanley Lomardo as "holy spirits," but for Jewish writers, in a culture where Hesiod was part of secular education, daimones became a synonym of "unclean spirits." 

The gospel daimons are morally inverted equivalents to those in Hesiod's Works and Days (quoted from Gregory Nagy's literal translation): "They exist because of the will of Zeus. They are the good, the earthbound, the guardians of mortal humans. They guard acts of justice, and they guard against wretched acts of evil. Enveloped in mist [invisible], they roam everywhere through the earth. They are givers of prosperity" (ll. 123-126). Hesiod's daimons are like guardian angels. Hellenized Jews of the Second Temple adopted Greek culture as far it jibed with monotheism, taking Greek names and building a gymnasium in Jerusalem, but Greek daimons, like the dedication of the temple to Zeus in 168 BCE, were anathema. Hesiod's came to be associated with avenging spirits (Russell, Devil, pp. 142-143) and were read as agents of Satan.

All of this came together in the New Testament. Jeffrey Burton Russell summarizes it this way: "The Devil is a creature of God, a fallen angel, but as chief of fallen angels and of all evil powers he often acts almost as an opposite principle to God. He is lord of this world, chief of a vast multitude of powers spiritual and physical, angelic and human, that are arrayed against the coming of the kingdom of God. . . . As Christ commands the armies of light, Satan commands those of darkness. The cosmos is torn between light and darkness, good and evil, spirit and matter, soul and body, the new age and the old age, the Lord and Satan. . . . Christ comes to destroy the old, evil eon and establish the kingdom of God in its place. In the end, Satan and his powers will be defeated and Christ's kingdom established forever" (Prince, p. 49).

As Russell points out, this dualistic, apocalyptic demon-haunted world-view is woven into the gospels and apostolic letters. To ignore it and espouse a Devil-free theology--especially emphasize individual salvation over cosmic re-creation in a catastrophic end-time--is to ignore Biblical Christianity. Individual salvation was inextricably intertwined with the victory of Christ and his angels over Satan and his legions, the restoration of a perfect earth with the Second Coming. Remove references to the Devil and demons from early chapters of the Gospel of Mark, and not much is left. Jesus' miracles demonstrate his power over demons, purifying the victims of "unclean spirits" to prepare for an immanent arrival of divine rule. When this didn't happen (and still hasn't happened), Christianity evolved into something that Paul might not recognize.

References

Enoch, The Book of, translated by George H. Shodde. Warren F. Dra[er, 1882. https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/The-book-of-Enoch.pdf 

Hesiod. Works and Days, translated by Gregory Nagy. Center for Hellenic Studies, Nov. 2, 2020.  https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/hesiod-works-and-days-sb/ 

---------. Works and Days and Theogony, translated by Stanley Lombardo. Hacket, 1993.

Nyland, A., translator. The Book of Jubilees. CreateSpace, 2011.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Cornell UP, 1977.

-----------. The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History. Cornell UP, 1988.