1 Dale Martin, e.g., notes how “the ancient Greek category of daimones (the plural form) could include anything from a god, to a junior sort of divine being, to a being intermediary between divinities and humans … good or bad, helpful or harmful”; Dale Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) x–xi. See, further, Lars Albinus, “The Greek δαίμων between Mythos and Logos,” in Die Dämonen. Die Dämonologie der israelitisch-jüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt (ed. A. Lange, H. Lichtenberger, and K. D. Römheld; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) 425–46; H. Cancik, “Römische Dämonologie (Varro, Apuleius, Tertullian),” in Die Dämonen (ed. Lichtenberger and Römheld), 447–60; Andrei Timotin, La démonologie platonicienne. Histoire de la notion de daimôn de Platon aux derniers néoplatoniciens (PhA 128; Leiden: Brill, 2012).

2 Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (Synkrisis: Comparative Approaches to Early Christianity in Greco-Roman Culture; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) 25.

3 I use daimones here and below as shorthand for the use of both δαίμων and its nominalized adjectival form δαιμόνιον to refer to transmundane powers. The latter is more commonly found in both LXX and NT, leading some scholars to propose a bifurcation in their meanings, with a positive δαίμων and a negative δαιμόνιον. Bazzana, however, has recently put this old notion to rest; ibid., 25–26.

4 Recent examples include ibid., 25–27; Eric Sorensen, Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Christianity (WUNT 157; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002) 80–84.

5 Werner Foerster, “δαίμων, δαιμόνιον,” in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich; 10 vols.; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933–1979) 4:1–21. For the English, see Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (ed. Frederick W. Danker, et al.; 10 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964) 2:16–19 (hereafter TDNT).

6 Foerster, TDNT, 2:15.

7 Ibid., 2:17.

8 Ibid., 2:16.

9 Dale Martin, “When Did Angels Become Demons?,” JBL 129 (2010) 657–77. Martin does not cite Foerster, but he does present his narrative about the development of the term and its meaning in the NT as the consensus and conventional wisdom; for a list of some of the many reference books that repeat the same narrative, see ibid., 657 n. 1. Note also the prominence of both in reference works like Gregory Wiebe’s entry “Demons in Christian Thought,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (ed. T. Whitmarsh), http://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8290.

10 Martin, “When Did Angels,” 657. This distinction is also emphasized in Ryan Stokes, “What Is a Demon, What Is an Evil Spirit, and What Is a Satan?,” in Das Böse, der Teufel und Dämonen (ed. Jan Dochhorn, Susanne Rudnig-Zelt, and Benjamin Wold; WUNT² 412; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016) 259–72.

11 Martin, “When Did Angels,” 657.

12 Ibid., 664.

13 Ibid., 666.

14 Ibid., 677, thus setting aside a datum that would otherwise seem to disprove his hypothesis, namely, Philo’s explicit equation of the angeloi of LXX Gen 6:2 with daimones in Gig. 2.6.

15 The depiction of the postexilic/pre-Christian Jewish “stage” of its purported polarization in this development in terms of dualism is pushed even further, e.g., in the iterations of this narrative in Dictionaries of Deities and Demons in the Bible (ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst; 2nd ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1999)—henceforth DDD. G. J. Riley’s entry on “demon” there (DDD, 235–40) suggests that “during the intertestamental period, the terms daimon and daimonion began to assume under Jews the negative connotation of ‘demon in league with the Devil,’ ” speculating about the influence of Zoroastrian dualism.

16 On this pattern and its history, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (JLCRS 14; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 54–84.

17 Bazzana, Having the Spirit, 26.

18 In fact, this is the only context in which δαίμων and δαιμόνιον are used in the NT Gospels; Matt 7:22; 8:31; 9:33–34; 10:8; 11:18; 12:24, 27–39; 17:18; Mk 1:34, 39; 3:15, 22; 5:12; 6:13; 7:26, 29–30; 9:38; 16:9, 17; Lk 4:33, 35, 41; 7:33; 8:2, 8:27, 29–30, 33, 35, 38; 9:1, 42, 49; 10:17; 11:14–15, 18–20; 13:32; Jn 7:20; 8:48–49, 52; 10:20–21. Elsewhere in the NT, we find an association of daimones with those whom “pagans” worship as deities (1 Cor 10:20; Acts 17:18), and more specifically with non-Jewish sacrifice (1 Cor 10:21) as well as with idols (Rev 9:2)—consistent with what we shall see below as the patterns in LXX usage. For other uses that do not fit the LXX or NT Gospel patterns, see 1 Tim 4:1; Jas 2:19; Rev 16:14; 18:2.

19 Bazzana, Having the Spirit, 25.

20 Ibid., esp. 25–31, 101–17. David Frankfurter makes a similar suggestion for Mk 3:22 already in “Master-Demons, Local Spirits, and Demonology in the Roman Mediterranean World,” JANER 11 (2011) 126–31, at 128.

21 Frankfurter, “Master-Demons,” 127. Noting how “it is generally understood that the demonology of the Jesus movement of the first two centuries was uniquely polarized and all-pervasive,” Frankfurter there asks whether “this typical picture of a polarized early Christian demonology may be too static, too beholden to gospels and apologists, to have worked in everyday practice” (126–27). What Bazzana suggests, in effect, is that it does not even work for the Synoptic Gospels.

22 The diversity of the data is similarly stressed by Stokes, “What Is a Demon.”

23 For a survey of its patristic usage, see E. C. E. Owen, “Δαίμων and Cognate Words,” JTS 32 (1931) 133–53. On the problem of scholars treating LXX texts “as a direct channel of verbal concepts to primitive Christianity,” see Cameron Boyd-Taylor, “In a Mirror, Dimly—Reading the Septuagint as a Document of Its Times,” in Septuagint Research: Issues and Challenges in the Study of the Greek Jewish Scriptures (ed. Wolfgang Kraus and R. Glenn Woode; SBLSCS 53; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006) 15–32, at 16.

24 Such disaggregation is especially pressing inasmuch as it is not yet possible to speak of a single “Bible” in this period—let alone a single translation thereof.

25 On the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, see Aramaica Qumranica: The Aix-en-Provence Colloquium on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. K. Berthelot and D. Stökl ben Ezra; STDJ 94; Leiden: Brill, 2010); Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14–15 August 2017 (ed. Mette Bundvad et al.; STDJ 131; Leiden: Brill, 2020)—as well as further references and discussion below.

26 Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 41–86. To be sure, in some past research, azazel, lilit, se’irim, deber, qeteb, and/or reshef have been treated as if demonic figures already in the Hebrew Bible; this approach is exemplified by DDD. With the partial exception of lilit, however, such readings may be largely the result of the retrojection of later Jewish demonologies; so, e.g., Judit Blair, De-demonising the Old Testament: An Investigation of Azazel, Lilith, Deber, Qeteb and Reshef in the Hebrew Bible (FAT² 37; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009) 16–54. Furthermore, in some cases, references to se’irim have been interpreted demonically in the Hebrew Bible on the basis of the LXX, assuming that δαιμόνιον already meant “demon” (10–12).

27 Stokes, “What Is a Demon,” 259.

28 Ryan Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019).

29 In other words, scholars have tended to blur what Albert Pietersma usefully distinguishes as the exegesis within the process of translation of specific LXX texts from the exegetical potential therein and how they were sometimes read by later readers; Albert Pietersma, “Exegesis in the Septuagint: Possibilities and Limits (The Psalter as a Case in Point),” in Septuagint Research, 33–45. Here, I follow Pietersma’s caution that we cannot determine the former unless our “rules and procedures for identifying exegetical activity [are] based on the textual-linguistic make-up of the translated text” (37).

30 Bazzana, Having the Spirit, 220–21.

31 Foerster, “δαίμων,” TDNT, 2:9; Martin, “When Did Angels,” 671–73. I do not mean to suggest that Philo is not “Greek” in his usage, but only that the dichotomization of “Jewish” versus “Greek” is here misleading. For analysis of Philo’s discussion of daimones in relation to the Platonic tradition, see, e.g., Timotin, La démonologie platonicienne, 100–103, 117–19; F. E. Brenk, “In the Light of the Moon: Demonology in the Early Imperial Period,” ANRW 2.16.3 (1986) 2068–145, at 2098–107.

32 For the speculation on δαιμόνιον as diminutive and thus meant to downplay these entities, see Foerster, “δαίμων,” TDNT, 2:9; Martin, “When Did Angels,” 658 n. 4.

33 The Hatch-Redpath entry on δαιμόνιον and δαίμων, e.g., lists five known Hebrew equivalents: [1] אליל, [2] גד, [3] ציי, [4] שעיר, and [5] שד (cf. שוד); Edwin Hatch and Henry Redpath, Concordance to the Septuagint (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1897) 1:283. Of the 19 verses listed, however, only seven even have an attested Hebrew equivalent in MT; indeed, the majority of what is listed are verses from Tobit and Baruch. On the Aramaic of the former, as now known from Qumran, see further below.

34 On the 19th-cent. context and concerns that shaped the Hatch-Redpath Concordance, especially with reference to Hatch, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, 59–63. On the place of the TDNT in the history of research on the “theology” of LXX texts, see also Martin Rösel, “Towards a Theology of the Septuagint,” in Septuagint Research, 239–52.

35 Martin, “When Did Angels,” 666.

36 As Matthew Thiessen has shown, there is a similar pattern in the NT scholarship on the term προσήλυτος as it relates to the biblical versus rabbinic meaning of גר: there too, due in part to the influence of the TDNT, the scholarly discussion has been founded upon arguments from the late 19th and early 20th cents. that misleadingly conflate examples from across different LXX texts; Matthew Thiessen, “Revisiting the προσήλυτος in ‘the LXX,’ ” JBL 132 (2013) 333–50.

37 Compare Foerster’s entry, which begins with a treatment of ancient Greek and Hellenistic materials that includes Philo and Josephus. This is followed by a treatment of Jewish materials that begins with OT and LXX, followed by “Tannaitic Judaism” (Mishnah, Talmud, etc.) and “Pseudepigraphical Judaism” (esp. 1 Enoch and Jubilees); TDNT, 2:9–10. Inasmuch as Martin’s treatment is more explicitly chronological, it is striking that he begins with LXX and then has a separate section on “Second Temple Judaism” that includes the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch and Jubilees, as well as DSS and Tobit, but also much later “pseudepigrapha” like the Testament of Solomon. His treatment of Philo and Josephus follows, albeit marking these materials as more “Greek” than “Jewish.”

38 I make this point about the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls in more detail in Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Hellenistic Judaism beyond Judaism and Hellenism,” in Like One of the Glorious Ones (ed. Ra‘anan S. Boustan, David Frankfurter, and Annette Yoshiko Reed; TSAJ; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming).

39 On the variance among LXX texts, see e.g., Gilles Dorival, Marguerite Harl, and Olivier Munnich, La Bible Grecque des Septante. Du Judaïsme Hellénistique au Christianisme Ancien (2nd ed.; Initiations au Christianisme Ancien; Paris: Cerf, 1994) 92–111.

40 For an accessible survey, see now T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint (ed. James K. Aitken; London: Bloomsbury, 2015) 3–6.

41 See, further, Siegfried Kreuzer, “From ‘Old Greek’ to the Recensions: Who and What Caused the Change of the Hebrew Reference Text of the Septuagint?,” in Septuagint Research, 225–38.

42 See esp. Emmanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Simor, 1997 [1981]); idem, “The Qumran Hebrew Texts and the Septuagint: An Overview,” repr. in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, Septuagint: Collected Essays (3 vols.; VTSup 167; Leiden: Brill, 2015) 3:353–67.

43 The value of such an approach has been richly demonstrated, e.g., by Matthew Goff, “Hellish Females: The Strange Woman of Septuagint Proverbs and 4QWiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184),” JSJ 39 (2008) 20–45; Sarah Pearce, Words of Moses: Studies in the Reception of Deuteronomy in the Second Temple Period (TSAJ 152; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

44 As Daniel Machiela notes, the Aramaic DSS attest “a cluster of Jewish writings later than the principally Hebrew literature that would eventually coalesce into the canonical Hebrew Scriptures (and the Christian Old Testament), yet largely earlier than the principally Hebrew compositions of the Hasmonean and Herodian periods (i.e., Jubilees, 1 Maccabees, and the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls)”; Daniel Machiela, “Aramaic Writings of the Second Temple Period and the Growth of Apocalyptic Thought: Another Survey of the Texts,” Judaïsme ancien/Ancient Judaism 2 (2014) 113–34, at 114–15. On this literature, see, further, idem, “The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls: Hellenistic Period Witnesses to Jewish Apocalyptic Thought,” in The Seleucid and Hasmonean Periods and the Apocalyptic Worldview (ed. Lester L. Grabbe, Gabriele Boccaccini, with Jason M Zurawski; LSTS 88; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016) 147–56; idem, “The Compositional Setting and Implied Audience of Some Aramaic Texts from Qumran: A Working Hypothesis,” in Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom (ed. Bundvad et al.), 168–202; Devora Dimant, “The Qumran Aramaic Texts and the Qumran Community,” in Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez (ed. A. Hilhorst, É. Puech, and E. J. C. Tigchelaar; JSJSup 122; Leiden: Brill, 2007) 197–20; Andrew Perrin, The Dynamics of Dream-Vision Revelation in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls (JAJSup 1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

45 Henryk Drawnel, “Priestly Education in the Aramaic Levi Document (Visions of Levi) and Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208–211),” RevQ 22 (2006) 547–74; Daniel A. Machiela and Andrew B. Perrin, “Tobit and the Genesis Apocryphon: Toward a Family Portrait,” JBL 133 (2014) 111–32; Perrin, Dynamics of Dream-Vision Revelation; idem, “Tobit’s Context and Contacts in the Qumran Aramaic Anthology,” JSP 25 (2015) 23–51; Devora Dimant, “Tobit and the Qumran Aramaic Texts,” in Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke (ed. A. Feldman, M. Cioată, and C. Hempel; STDJ 119; Leiden: Brill, 2017) 385–406; Hanna Tervanotko, “A Trilogy of Testaments? The Status of the Testament of Qahat versus Texts Attributed to Levi and Amram,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the Scriptures (ed. Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar; BETL 270; Leuven: Peeters, 2014) 41–59.

46 John J. Collins, “The Transformation of the Torah in Second Temple Judaism,” JSJ 43 (2012) 455–74.

47 As John J. Collins notes, this was a longstanding presumption in 19th- and early 20th-cent. scholarship, popularized especially by Wilhelm Bousset. The Persian origin of the name Asmodeus in Tobit, however, seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and the further evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls has not born out this old theory; John J. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1997) 132–33.

48 Reed, Demons, 5–21, 198–246.

49 I do not mean to imply that demon-belief was not present in ancient Israel; more plausibly, as Tzvi Abusch stresses, “ancient Israel did not transmit its magical expertise in writing”; Tzvi Abusch, “Exorcism. I. Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,” in Essenes – Fideism (ed. Rainer Hirsch-Luipold and Sebastian Fuhrmann; vol. 8 of The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014) 513–19, at 517–18. Furthermore, as Saul Olyan notes, even angels are vague and unnamed prior to the Hellenistic period: “the only named angels in the Hebrew Bible occur in the latter half of the Book of Daniel, a composition of the second century BCE”; Saul Olyan, A Thousand Thousands Served Him (TSAJ 36; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993) 15. Earlier, transmundane powers are described instead by their functions, whether as messengers (e.g., angel of the Lord in Exod 23:20–21; destroying angel in 2 Sam 24:16/1 Chron 21:15; angel of the covenant in Mal 3:1; angel of His presence in Isa 63:9) or as those who threaten or accuse humankind on God’s behalf (e.g., the destroyer of Exod 12:23, etc.; the satan in Job 1–2; Zech 3; 1 Chron 21:1).

50 Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004) 152.

51 Anne Marie Kitz, “Demons in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East,” JBL 135 (2016) 447–64, at 447.

52 Here, I stress changes in literary practices vis-à-vis transmundane powers due to my interest in how lexical selection and other translational practices might fit therein. For a more conceptual mapping of what changes about Jewish demonology in the Hellenistic period, see Bennie Reynolds III, “A Dwelling Place of Demons: Demonology and Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Apocalyptic Thinking in Early Judaism: Engaging with John Collins’ “The Apocalyptic Imagination” (ed. Cecilia Wassen and Sidnie White Crawford; JSJSup 182; Leiden: Brill, 2018) 23–54.

53 Ibid., 30.

54 Reed, Demons, 87–101; Douglas L. Penney and Michael O. Wise, “By the Power of Beelzebub: An Aramaic Incantation Formula from Qumran (4Q560),” JBL 113 (1994) 627–50; Bennie Reynolds III, “Understanding the Demonologies of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Accomplishments and Directions for the Future,” Religion Compass 7 (2013) 103–14; Archie Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1–4 in Early Jewish Literature (rev. ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015).

55 On LXX Psalms, see the history of research and assessment in Tyler Williams, “Towards a Date for the Old Greek Psalter,” in The Old Greek Psalter: Studies in Honor of Albert Pietersma (ed. Robert J. V. Hiebert, Peter J. Gentry, and Claude E. Cox; JSOTSup 332; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001) 248–76; cf. Arie van der Kooij, “On the Place of Origin of the Old Greek of Psalms,” VT 33 (1983) 67–74. On LXX Isaiah, see Ronald Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation and Interpretation (JSJSup 124; Leiden: Brill, 2008) 21–24.

56 Jubilees likely dates no earlier than the 170s BCE and no later than 125 BCE; James VanderKam, e.g., favors a date in the 160s or 150s BCE; Jubilees: A Commentary (2 vols.; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2018) 1:25–38.

57 In this I depart from Martin, “When Did Angels,” but also from P. S. Alexander, “The Demonology of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam; 2 vols.; STDJ 30; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 2:331–53.

58 Frankfurter, “Master-Demons,” 131; also idem, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 13–15, 19.

59 Reed, Demons, 8–11, 87–101.

60 Ibid., 206–19.

61 Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, “To the Reader of NETS,” in NETS, xiv–xviii.

62 Pietersma, “Exegesis in the Septuagint”; Boyd-Taylor, “In a Mirror.”

63 Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, 24; Reed, Demons, 220–40.

64 On the character of LXX Deuteronomy, see Pearce, Words of Moses, 21–24; John W. Wevers, “The LXX Translator of Deuteronomy,” in IX Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Cambridge, 1995 (ed. Bernard A. Taylor; SCS 45; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 57–89.

65 Melvin Peters here translates: “They sacrificed to demons and not to God, to gods they did not know. New recent ones have come, whom their fathers did not know” (LXX Deut 32:17 NETS).

66 John W. Wevers, Notes on Greek Deuteronomy (SCS 39; Atlanta: SBL Press, 1990) 519.

67 Quote from Martin, Inventing Superstition, 18.

68 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 179–81, at 180.

69 Brenk, “In the Light of the Moon,” 2074, 2079. When surveying its meanings prior to Plato, Timotin similarly notes how δαίμων is variously used of specific deities in early usage but more often denotes undetermined divine power and the human or earthly effects of its distribution; Timotin, La démonologie platonicienne, 15–19. The latter includes its association with fate (19–26) and vengeance (26–31), as well as a personalization seen in its use of souls of dead and guardian spirits (31–34)—all of which, in his view, share a sense of distribution (34). What is distinctive to Plato and his heirs, by contrast, is the mapping of the place of the δαίμων as intermediary, functionally and/or cosmologically between the gods and humankind.

70 Neoplatonic Demons and Angels (ed. Luc Brisson, Seamus O’Neill, and Andrei Timotin; Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition 20; Leiden: Brill, 2018) 1–6, at 2.

71 If Plutarch’s report of Xenocrates is accurate (Fac. 943e–944a), it is possible that some cosmological interpretations of Plato’s daimones were current by the 3rd cent. BCE. But as tempting as it might be to imagine the daimones of LXX Deut 32:17 as the lesser powers or sublunary spirits of the Platonic tradition, one is hard pressed to find any hint of a cosmological concern. What we see here falls closer to the indeterminate sense that we see in Greek myth and religion, as is perhaps not surprising, given the prominence of the former in Hellenistic-period Greek paideia. Engagement with Homeric and Hesiodic traditions among Alexandrian Jewry is clearly evident, e.g., in the early Ptolemaic strata of the Third Sibylline Oracle, on which see Ashley Bacchi, Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book III of the Sibylline Oracles (JSJSup 194; Leiden: Brill, 2020).

72 E. C. Marchant (LCL 168:8) translates as follows: “Socrates does wrong by not worshipping the gods worshipped by the state and of bringing in other novel divinities: he also does wrong by corrupting the young men.” His rendering of δαιμόνια as “divinities” points to what is missed when the term is presumed to mean “demons,” not least of which is the main point of contrast here—i.e., between what is familiar and proper to the polis, on the one hand, and what is new and unknown, on the other.

73 Note the indictment as summarized in Socrates’s question to Meletus in Plato, Apol. 26b (ἢ δῆλον δὴ ὅτι κατὰ τὴν γραφὴν ἣν ἐγράψω θεοὺς διδάσκοντα μὴ νομίζειν οὓς ἡ πόλις νομίζει, ἕτερα δὲ δαιμόνια καινά;)—which he later answers by stressing that it is not that he does not acknowledge anything divine, but rather just “though not the ones the city acknowledges, but different ones” (οὐ μέντοι οὕσπερ γε ἡ πόλις ἀλλὰ ἑτέρους; 26c). Whether or not the parallels with Xenophon reflect the actual indictment, this evidence proves significant for our purposes in attesting the sense of daimones that both presume—especially as used in the context of a contrast between the objects of ancestral or civic worship and those problematized as new, unknown, and thus questionable.

74 Pearce, Words of Moses, 24.

75 The term δαιμόνιον occurs once in the Greek of the Book of the Watchers preserved in Codex Panopolitanus. Unfortunately, the Aramaic for the relevant verse, 1 En 19:2, is not extant (cf. gānēn [pl. ’agānent] in the Ge‘ez), although we do find a case where δαιμόνιον renders שד in a contemporaneous Greek Jewish translation from Aramaic in Tobit (see Tobit 6:7; 4QTobit^b frag. 3 I 13; cf. 3:8, 17; 6:15–17; 4QTobit^a fr. 11 I 8; 4QTobit^b fr. 3 II 9, 15). Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the Aramaic of 1 En 19:2 remains uncertain enough that further analysis would be needed to assess whether or how the Greek of 1 En 19:2 fits into the patterns discussed above. What is clear, however, is the indeterminacy of the daimones here—which fits with what we see in LXX Deuteronomy. Scholars have debated the precise identity of the daimones of 1 En 19:2 (e.g., Reed, Fallen Angels, 50–51; Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 287; Stokes, “What Is a Demon,” 263–64), but what is perhaps more striking is that they are left uncharacteristically unspecified even despite the Book of the Watchers’ general systemizing impulse: all that is written of daimones here is that they are worshiped through sacrifice due to the polluting and destructive influence of the spirits of transgressing angels.

76 On the challenges of discerning the meaning of שד in biblical sources, beyond its function to denote foreign deities, see Henrike Frey-Anthes, “Concepts of ‘Demons’ in Ancient Israel,” Die Welt des Orients 38 (2008) 38–52, at 42–43.

77 Pietersma, “Exegesis in the Septuagint,” 38.

78 Boyd-Taylor, “In a Mirror,” 30.

79 Anneli Aejmelaeus, “Characterizing Criteria for the Characterization of the Septuagint Translators: Experimenting on the Greek Psalter,” in The Old Greek Psalter (ed. Hiebert, Gentry, and Cox), 70–71.

80 Pietersma translates as follows: “They did not destroy the nations, which the Lord told them, and they mingled with the nations and learned their works. And they were subject to their carved images, and it became to them a stumbling block. And they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons” (LXX Ps 105:36–37 NETS). The only corresponding Hebrew to survive is from MT. Psalm 106 is not extant in 11QPs^a, although it may have been in 4QPs^d (which possibly preserves 106:48).

81 In the Hellenistic and early Roman period, as Bazzana notes, “words that belong to the lexical domain of daimôn occur quite often and with neutral value in Greek texts of the Hellenistic and early Roman period … refer[ring] primarily to beings, objects, or even events that—for a variety of reasons—can be labeled ‘divine’ ”; Bazzana, Having the Spirit, 25.

82 For Ps 96, only vv. 1–2 are extant in DSS (see 1QPs^a; 4QPs^b). To be sure, it is possible that the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX Ps 95 differed, perhaps reading אלים. This seems implausible, however, not just because of the importance of this word play within Ps 96, but also because there are no other examples of cases where אל terminology is rendered by δαιμόνιον; this very passage, in fact, attests its rendering of θεός, even at the expense of sense, etc., and even when those in question are οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν.

83 Pietersma translates as follows: “Declare His glory among the nations, among all the peoples, His marvelous words, because great is the Lord and very much praiseworthy. He is terrible to all the gods, because all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens” (LXX Ps 95:3–5 NETS).

84 Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, “Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles,” JQR 105 (2015) 1–41, at 4.

85 Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Even if the trajectory that they trace is more unilinear than the evidence quite permits (as suggested, e.g., by Christine Hayes, “The Complicated Goy in Classical Rabbinic Sources,” in Perceiving the Other in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity [ed. Michal Bar Asher Siegal and Matthew Thiessen; WUNT 394; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017] 147–67), the power of their point remains: the dichotomization of Jew/non-Jew has roots in the Deuteronomistic contrast of Israel and “the nations,” as well as in the holy-seed ideology of Ezra-Nehemiah, but takes on newly intensified forms in Second Temple, NT, and rabbinic literatures, as exemplified by the increasingly conflate character of the term goy and its erasure of non-Jewish specificity.

86 Riley, “Demons,” in DDD, 238.

87 Frey-Anthes, “Concepts of ‘Demons,’ ” 43.

88 I focus here on Jewish parallels, but it is certainly intriguing that the best-known non-Jewish example is Greek versus barbarian.

89 For an accessible synthesis, see Smith, Memoirs of God, 80–84.

90 See, e.g., Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 266, with n. 54, on what he calls “the ‘demonological’ explanation of pagan religions, beloved in apocalyptic circles.”

91 I.e., the point in both is more akin to what we see in 4QDeut^j xii:14 and LXX Deut 32:8–9; contrast 1 En 20:1–5 in the Book of the Watchers and 1 En 89:65–74 in the Book of Dreams. For a comparison with the claims about angelic management of Israel in Dan 10 and the “Animal Apocalypse,” see Todd Hanneken, “Angels and Demons in the Book of Jubilees and Contemporary Apocalypses,” Henoch 28 (2006) 11–25, at 19, 22–23.

92 On Mastema in Jubilees, see Hanneken, “Angels and Demons,” 20–22—there stressing that “creating problems for idolaters, performing God’s dirty work, or making accusations like the satan figure in Job 1, it is never the case that Mastema appears as the diabolical enemy of God” (21).

93 The Hebrew for some of Jub 1 is preserved in 4Q216, but this is unfortunately not among what survives of it.

94 Compare the denunciation of idolatry in the Epistle of Enoch, which similarly extends 1 En 19:2, albeit seemingly distinguishing shedim/daimones from “evil spirits”—or at least not explicitly equating them: “And they will worship stones, and others will carve images of gold and silver and wood and clay, and others will worship evil spirits and demons and every (kind of) error [Eth. la-nafsāt ’ekuyāt wa-’agānent wa-la-k ^wellu tā‘ot], and without knowledge, but no help will be found from them” (99:7, following the Ethiopic). Greek and Latin survives for part of the verse, both expanding “evil spirits and demons” to include “phantoms”; see Stuckenbruck, 1 Enoch 91–108, 394–95.

95 As Stokes notes: “for the author of Jubilees, the designations ‘demon’ and ‘evil spirit’ were to some degree interchangeable. Either of these designations would suffice for those malevolent beings that would attack and mislead humankind. In contrast, Jubilees nowhere refers to those beings worshipped by the nations as ‘(evil) spirits,’ but only as ‘demons’ (1:11; 22:17)”; Stokes, “What Is a Demon,” 265. With Stokes (265 n. 23), I find Martin, “When Did Angels,” 668, unnecessarily skeptical in this regard.

96 Reed, Demons, 304–6. On Jubilees’ paralleling of demons with non-Jews, see also eadem, “Enochic and Mosaic Traditions in Jubilees: The Evidence of Angelology and Demonology,” in Enoch and the Mosaic Torah (ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and Giovanni Ibba; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 353–68; VanderKam, “Demons in the Book of Jubilees,” 353–54.

97 This is made most explicit in Jub 30:9–11; see further Reed, Demons, 283–85.

98 E.g., most recently: Gerrit C. Vreugdenhil, Psalm 91 and Demonic Menace (OTS 77; Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–2.

99 The tension between naturalistic and supernaturalistic readings is also apparent in the later history of interpretation of Ps 91; see, further, Brennan Breed, “Reception of the Psalms: The Example of Psalm 91,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 297–308. The original context of this psalm, as Breed notes, remains debated, and includes possible functions as “a purification ritual, a general blessing, an oracular promise of military victory given to a king, or thanksgiving for a recovery from illness … a temple entrance liturgy, a request for asylum in the temple, an enthronement ceremony or even a song of conversion to Yahwism” (298). Its reception, however, is shaped by “the incantatory language of the psalm and its ambiguous references to dangerous elements that could be understood in demonic terms”; even if “terror of night,” “pestilence that walks in the darkness,” and “noonday devastation,” in his view, “do not necessarily refer to demons … a reader in postexilic Yehud might have thought they plainly referred to evil spirits” (299).

100 I.e., although the components of the verse are in a different order; 11Q11 col VI lines 7–8: יהלך [ ]פל [ ] מקטב י̇שוד[ ] מדבר.

101 See, further, Esther Eshel, “Apotropaic Prayers in the Second Temple Period,” in Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Esther Chazon; STDJ 48; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 69–88; Matthias Henze, “Psalm 91 in Premodern Interpretation and at Qumran,” in Biblical Interpretation at Qumran (ed. Matthias Henze; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 168–93.

102 The term שד appears in 11Q11 frag. 2 col. I line 10 (context unclear but in a fragment that also includes a reference to exorcism in line 7), paired with ruḥot (i.e., “the spirits and the shedim”) in col. II line 3, possibly also line 4 there, as well as in col. V line 12.

103 Reed, Demons, 285–92.

104 This psalm, e.g., is famously called a “song referring to demons [פגעים]” in b. Shevuot 15b. For examples of Ps 91:1 on magical bowls, see Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985) 184–87.

105 Thomas J. Kraus, “ ‘He That Dwelleth in the Help of the Highest’: Septuagint Psalm 90 and the Iconographic Program on Byzantine Armbands,” in Jewish and Christian Scripture as Artifact and Canon (ed. Craig A. Evans and H. Daniel Zacharias; London: T&T Clark, 2009) 137–47. This psalm is also famously quoted in the Synoptic Gospels, with vv. 11–12 placed in the mouth of the devil during his temptation of Jesus (Matt 4:6; Lk 4:10–11).

106 Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation, 21–24.

107 See examples and discussion in Williams, “Towards a Date,” 263–68; I follow here his conclusions there.

108 Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation, 137–51; Courtney J. P. Friesen, “Extirpating the Dragon: Divine Combat and the Minus of LXX Isaiah 51:9b,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 4 (2013) 334–51, at 344–47.

109 For arguments for the latter, see Isac Leo Seeligmann, The Septuagint Version of Isaiah (Leiden: Brill, 1948) 81–82; Steven Schweitzer, “Mythology in the Old Greek of Isaiah: The Technique of Translation,” CBQ 66 (2004) 214–30; Joachim Schaper, “God and the Gods: Pagan Deities and Religious Concepts in the Old Greek of Isaiah,” in Genesis, Isaiah and Psalms: A Festschrift to Honour Professor John Emerton for His Eightieth Birthday (ed. Katherine Dell, Graham Davies, and Yee von Koh; VTSup 135; Leiden: Brill, 2010) 135–52. See also the consideration of the translator’s Alexandrian context, with caution about any quick conclusions about “contemporization,” in Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation, 20–72, 152–72.

110 For the history of research, see Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation, 4–19. Some, such as Arie van der Kooij, have gone so far as to propose that the translators “create new texts with a meaning of their own, presumably with the ultimate purpose not only to modernize the text linguistically, but also to actualize the prophecies of Isaiah”; Arie van der Kooij, “The Old Greek of Isaiah in Relation to the Qumran Texts of Isaiah: Some General Comments,” in Septuagint, Scrolls and Cognate Writings (ed. George J. Brooke and Barnabas Lindars, S.S.F.; SCS 33; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992) 195–213, at 208.

111 Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation, 287.

112 Schaper, “God and the Gods,” 135. Compare Steven Schweitzer’s conclusion, on the basis of his analysis of what he calls its “mythological elements,” that the notion of LXX Isaiah as a “free” translation can be misleading: it “may be termed a ‘rather free translation’ insofar as it is not slavishly literal but is faithful to the meaning of the parent text; but it is not ‘rather free’ in the sense that the translator paraphrased or changed what he understood to be the meaning of the parent text”; Schweitzer, “Mythology,” 230.

113 Moisés Silva translates: “These are the people who provoke me to my face continually; they sacrifice in the gardens and burn incense on bricks to the demons, which do not exist” (LXX Isa 65:3 NETS).

114 For Isa 65:3, differences between MT and 1QIsa^a are here minor and do not affect the particular issue at hand. On the relationship between 1QIsa^a, MT Isaiah, and LXX Isaiah, more broadly, see Eugene Ulrich, “The Developmental Composition of the Book of Isaiah: Light from 1QIsa^a on additions in the MT,” DSD 8 (2001) 288–305.

115 Silva translates: “But as for you who forsake me and forget my holy mountain and prepare a table for the demon and fill a mixed drink for Fortune …” (LXX Isa 65:11 NETS).

116 Timotin, La démonologie platonicienne, 19–26.

117 Schaper, “God and the Gods,” 139–49; cf. Seeligmann, Septuagint Version of Isaiah, 99–100. Further to this deity’s associations with Alexandria, see P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (3 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) 1:209–11; Daniel Ogden, “Alexandria, Agathos Daimon, and Ptolemy: The Alexandrian Foundation Myth in Dialogue,” in Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies (ed. Naoise Mac Sweeney; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 129–50; and on his place in the Greek Magical Papyri, see also João Pedro Feliciano, “The Agathos Daimon in Greco-Egyptian Religion,” The Hermetic Tablet: The Journal of Ritual Magic 3 (2016) 171–92.

118 Schaper, “God and the Gods,” 146, here critiquing Riley, “Demons,” in DDD, 238. Tyche, of course, was well-known and worshiped throughout the Hellenistic world. In emphasizing her linkage with Agathos Daimon as key to understanding the translator’s choices in this verse, Schaper cites Fraser’s observation that “altars, dedicatory stelae, and other monuments frequently bear the inscription Ἀγαθοῦ Δαίμονος Ἀγαθῆς Tύχης in which it is not possible to distinguish between the two deities even in the fourth century BC”; Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:210.

119 See, further, Blair, De-demonising, 63–80, reassessing and critiquing this presumption.

120 Dan Ben-Amos, “On Demons,” in Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005) 27–37, at 30. See also Blair, De-demonising, similarly stressing the poetic function of much of the language retrospectively deemed demonic (216–17 and passim).

121 Here, I follow Blair, De-demonising, 73–90, in reading the creatures in Isa 13 and 34 as primarily birds and animals. Blair has shown how traditions about lilit/Lilith led early 20th-cent. scholars to read some of the other figures listed alongside in Isa 34 as demonic. In addition, the scholarly habit of interpreting se’irim in demonic terms was shaped in part by the very LXX traditions discussed above (see 24–30, 79–91).

122 Silva translates: “But wild animals will rest there, and the houses will be filled with noise; there sirens will rest, and there demons will dance. Donkey-centaurs will dwell there, and hedgehogs will build nests in their houses; it is coming quickly and will no delay” (LXX Isa 13:21–22 NETS).

123 Silva translates: “Thorn trees shall grow up in their cities and in her fortress. It shall be a habitation of sirens and a courtyard of ostriches. Demons shall meet with donkey-centaurs and call one to another, there donkey-centaurs shall repose, for they have found for themselves a place to rest” (LXX Isa 34:13–14 NETS).

124 Schaper, “God and the Gods,” 138–39.

125 See LXX Isa 5:14; 14:9, 11, 15; 28:15, 18; 38:10; and discussion in Schweitzer, “Mythology,” 220–22.

126 George Nickelsburg reconstructs and translates 1 En 19:1–2 as follows: “And Uriel said to me [i.e., Enoch]: ‘There stand the angels who mingled with women. And their spirits—having assumed many forms—bring destruction upon 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 finality. And the wives of the transgressing angels will become sirens’ ”; 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 276; I add brackets here to mark his reconstructions based on words in the Ethiopic that are not in the Greek.

127 See n. 74 above on the uncertainty surrounding the use of daimones in this verse—a question on which more analysis is needed, especially in light of the above findings about LXX texts. It is also intriguing to wonder whether a term for ostriches therein like יענה בנות, which literally means “daughters of greed/wilderness,” would make an apt postdiluvian fate for the “daughters of men” of Gen 6:1 and 1 En 6:2. For other suggestions, which take the sense of “sirens” more as the result of a misreading on the part of the Greek translator of the Book of the Watchers, see Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 288; Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “What Becomes of the Angels’ Wives? A Text-Critical study of 1 Enoch 19:2,” JBL 125 (2006) 766–80, at 770–71.

128 Unfortunately, space does not permit a full analysis of 1 En 19:1–2. Suffice it to note that a fresh analysis of this much-discussed passage might be warranted in light of the above analysis of LXX daimones. The Greek translation of the Book of the Watchers is typically dated between 150 BCE and the turn of the era, likely around the same time as the Greek translation of Daniel; see e.g., James Barr, “Aramaic-Greek Notes on the Book of Enoch (I),” JSS 23 (1978) 184–98; idem, “Aramaic-Greek Notes on the Book of Enoch (II),” JSS 24 (1979) 179–92, at 191; Eric Larson, “The Translation of Enoch: From Aramaic into Greek” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995) 198–203. Accordingly, even if the influence of the Book of the Watchers might be reflected in some form in LXX Isaiah, some connections on the level of its Greek translation are also possible as well, especially if contemporaneous.

129 Schweitzer, “Mythology,” 228–29; also Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson, “Isaiah through Greek Eyes,” in Writing and Reading the Scroll of Isaiah: Studies of an Interpretive Tradition (ed. Craig C. Broyles and Craig E. Evans; 2 vols; VTSup 70–71; Leiden: Brill, 1997) 2:531–46, at 541.

130 Martin, “When Did Angels,” 664.

131 Michael Mach, Entwicklungsstadien des jüdischen Engelglaubens in vorrabbinischer Zeit (TSAJ 34; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992) 37–51. Mach’s findings are much repeated but might be worth revisiting and reassessing in light of the many advances in this area since the 1990s.

132 See, further, John Gammie, “The Angelology and Demonology in the Septuagint of the Book of Job,” HUCA 56 (1985) 1–19, esp. 4–12.

133 See 1QIsa^a col. 11 lines 28–30; col. 26 lines 13–15.

134 Both of the latter are hapax legomena.

135 On יענה בנות, see Blair, De-demonising, 75–77.

136 On the locative aspect of demonology, see already Jonathan Z. Smith, “Towards Interpreting Demonic Powers in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity,” ANRW 2.16.1 (1978) 425–29, esp. 438–49.

137 Blair, De-demonising, 77–80.

138 Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, 14, 30.

139 Ibid., 30.

140 Eshel, “Genres of Magical Texts,” 396–98.

141 Our surviving manuscripts of Songs of the Sage date from the late 1st cent. BCE. On these hymns, read as hymns, see Joseph Angel, “Maskil, Community, and Religious Experience in the Songs of the Sage (4Q510–511),” DSD 19 (2012) 1–27.

142 For other possible readings, however, see the survey and reassessment in Noam Mizrahi and Hector Patmore, “Three Philological Notes on Demonological Terminology in the Songs of the Sage (4Q510 1 4–6),” RevQ 31 (2019) 239–50. Personally, I am less persuaded by the arguments there that depend upon parallels with much later targumim.

143 Siam Bhayro, “Reception of Mesopotamian and Early Jewish Traditions in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls,” AS 11 (2013) 187–96; Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Writing Jewish Astronomy in the Early Hellenistic Age: The Enochic Astronomical Book as Aramaic Wisdom and Archival Impulse,” DSD 24 (2017) 1–37.

144 Mizrahi and Patmore, “Three Philological Notes,” 244–47 at 245.

145 Olyan, Thousand Thousands, demonstrates the importance of exegesis in the development of Jewish angel-names and angelology. Much the same might be said for demon-names and demonology.

146 Reynolds, “Dwelling Place,” 26. Frankfurter suggests that this dynamic continues even into late antiquity, wherein even the Christian concept of daimones still “involves a perpetual oscillation between the terrifying and the protective”; “Master-Demons,” 131.

147 Kitz, “Demons in the Hebrew Bible,” 463. See, further, Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Scribes, Scrolls, and Stars in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls at 70: The Lewent Colloquium in Ancient Studies (ed. Alex Jassen and Lawrence Schiffman; London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming); eadem, “Demons beyond Dualisms,” in New Paths in Jewish Thinking: A Festschrift for Elliot Wolfson (ed. Glenn Dynner, Susannah Heschel, and Shaul Magid; West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, forthcoming)—there also redressing this habit in much of my earlier work.

148 Reed, Demons, 224–28.

149 Alexander, “Demonology,” 331. Even this polarization is still largely focused on function: to the degree that there is a polarization of angels and demons, it is because of the stress on how the latter “cause harm and mischief to humans in a variety of ways” (331–32)

150 Esther Hamori, “The Spirit of Falsehood,” CBQ 72 (2010) 15–30—there noting, e.g., how “the use of רוח terminology (rather than מלאך or no reference at all to an intermediate divine being) is bound to a specific kind of work that YHWH wants to have accomplished, according to each narrative” (18).

151 Kitz, “Demons in the Hebrew Bible,” 463.

152 Reynolds, “Dwelling Place,” 30–35.

153 Philo, Gig. 2.6: οὓς ἄλλοι φιλόσοφοι δαίμονας, ἀγγέλους Mωυσῆς εἴωθεν ὀνομάζειν, ψυχαὶ δ᾿ εἰσὶ κατὰ τὸν ἀέρα πετόμενα.

154 My integrative aim here thus contrasts, e.g., with approaches such as that of Joachim Schaper, who attempts to read LXX Psalms as “a document of proto-Pharisaic theology”; Joachim Schaper, Eschatology in the Greek Psalter (WUNT² 76; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995) 20. For a critique of such attempts to “construct a variety of Judaism underlying this or that text of the Septuagint,” see also Boyd-Taylor, “In a Mirror,” 15.