Introduction
In ancient Greek, δαίμων and related terms denote transmundane power in a manner that can encompass divinities and intermediate spirits of various sorts—whether good, wicked, or capricious.Footnote 1 This moral indeterminacy extends to its adjectival forms (δαιμόνιον, etc.), which are used to mark powers, objects, and events as divine, divinely sent, or otherwise marvelous.Footnote 2 How, then, did these terms come to be so negatively valanced as to become synonymous with supernatural evil? Or, in other words: when did daimones become demons?Footnote 3
This question has been explored primarily in relation to the practical issue of how best to understand δαίμων and δαιμόνιον in the New Testament.Footnote 4 Most influential, in this regard, has been Werner Foerster’s 1933 entry on these terms in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament.Footnote 5 Foerster traces their Greek usage, then turns to the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint (LXX), and other ancient Jewish sources to outline what he proposes as the two separate lines of development that culminate in the NT. In his view, the NT marks a moment of distinction between demonic and divine not yet found in “animistic,” popular, or philosophical Greek traditions, and this is by virtue of its debt to Judaism. “The decisive feature in Jewish demonology is that demons are evil spirts,” Foerster asserts, and “there is no bridge between evil spirits and good.”Footnote 6 In his view, the recasting of the Greek terms to fit this Jewish notion begins in the Septuagint and culminates in the NT, which is “consistently opposed to the Greek divinisation of the demonic.”Footnote 7 It is not just that “angels and demons are antithetical,” but “it is only in the NT that we have a full and radical distinction.”Footnote 8
This narrative has been much repeated, especially in the updated form outlined by Dale Martin. In his 2010 “When Did Angels Become Demons?,” Martin traces the process whereby the indeterminate and potentially positive daimones of classical Greek literature became the categorically negative daimones of early Christian literature.Footnote 9 Whereas Foerster analyzed NT uses of these terms alongside references to negatively valanced πνεύματα (i.e., spirits), Martin asks precisely when “ ‘demon’ refers to the same being as ‘evil (or unclean or polluted) spirit.’ ”Footnote 10
His concern is to pinpoint the origins of the “familiar Christian mythology” in which “demons are or were fallen angels” and “Satan was an angel who rebelled against God.”Footnote 11
When tracing the process by which “the term ‘demon’ … came to refer to any and all malevolent superhuman (or supernatural) beings,” however, Martin similarly posits Jewish demonology as an intermediate stage, and he treats the Septuagint as a bridge between Greek daimones and Christian demonology. He posits that the LXX translators “lump several Near Eastern words and beings into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ category of Greek daimons—along the way casting both the words and the beings in a more consistently negative light than may have been assumed by most Greeks.”Footnote 12 It is also in the Septuagint—Martin argues—that “angels became one species of cosmic workers, and daimons another.”Footnote 13 As for Foerster, the Septuagint thus sets the stage for the NT in Martin’s schema, even as both precede the “familiar Christian mythology”: it is not until the second and third centuries CE, with authors like Justin, Athenagoras, Tatian, and Origen, that Martin sees the “identification of evil spirits and demons” as well as the “gradual identifying of evil spirits and demons with the fallen angels.”Footnote 14
These narratives are familiar and appealing. On the one hand, they dramatize changes in the semantic field of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον to fit the script of what is commonly told as the shift in ancient Mediterranean religiosity with the spread of Christianity—away from a polytheism characterized by a sprawling multiplicity of powers, toward its polarization into good and evil domains, marked by a hierarchization toward monotheism.Footnote 15 On the other hand, they tell the history of the meaning of this term as the tale of contrasting Greek and Jewish perspectives, uniquely resolved in the NT and Christianity.Footnote 16
Recently, however, Giovanni B. Bazzana has demonstrated that even the NT evidence “runs counter to the often-repeated assumption that the Jesus movement introduced a significant polarization in demonology.”Footnote 17 In the Synoptic Gospels, δαίμων/δαιμόνιον is used to refer to spirits that possess and/or are driven out from people.Footnote 18 In part because of the consensus noted above, the scholarly presumption has been that these spirits are “thoroughly negative beings intent on harming humans by seizing control of their bodies.”Footnote 19 Closer analysis, however, does not bear out this presumption. Just as the Gospels’ representation of possession of or by daimones makes sense as part of a continuum with the positive senses of spirit-possession found in Pauline references to “having the pneuma of Christ,” so their usage of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον also matches with the morally indeterminate senses of these terms in other Greek literature of the time, including by Philo and Josephus.Footnote 20 Far from attesting a unique polarization, NT usage fits with what David Frankfurter has observed of both Greco-Roman and Jewish traditions, wherein daimones “oscillated, or had the potential to oscillate, between beneficial and malevolent functions.”Footnote 21
The findings of Bazzana and Frankfurter undermine the conventional narrative noted above.Footnote 22 As a result, I suggest that these findings also point to the need to reassess the relevant sources. The present article takes up this task, with a focus on the Septuagint. As noted above, the analysis of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον in LXX texts has been largely subordinated to the reconstruction of the Jewish background of NT words and ideas. Accordingly, the analysis of what these Greek terms mean in LXX texts has been blurred with the question of when precisely they took on the sense that they later come to bear in Christianity—that is, when daimones became demons.Footnote 23 My suggestion, in what follows, is that such an approach does not do justice either to our LXX data for daimones or to what these data can tell us about Second Temple Judaism.
In the first section of this article, I use the test case of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον to highlight some of the longstanding scholarly habits that have shaped past research on the Septuagint and Second Temple Judaism. In particular, I make a case for disaggregating what word-studies have tended to treat in monolithic terms as “the Septuagint.”Footnote 24 To do so for δαίμων/δαιμόνιον, I suggest, is to open the way for situating specific LXX texts in relation to what we are learning anew from the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls about Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic period.Footnote 25 In the second section, I experiment with such an approach. I survey the specific LXX texts in which we find the terms δαίμων/δαιμόνιον, distinguished from one another but chronologically correlated with contemporaneous Jewish sources for demonology in Aramaic and Hebrew.
It is often repeated (although too often needed to be repeated) that “the Septuagint” cannot be treated as if a single text. This article shows how our understanding of Jewish demonology may have suffered from such an approach. The diverse uses of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον in LXX Deuteronomy, the Greek Psalter, and LXX Isaiah cannot be reduced to a single plot point on the way to the NT and Christianity. When we consider these LXX texts in their own terms, what we see is more akin to an interconnected constellation with synchronic clusters of concern.
As we shall see, most of the meaning-making around LXX daimones is achieved through the setting and application of a pattern of lexical equivalence of δαιμόνιον for שד. The equivalence is set in LXX Deut 32:17, and it is followed at least once in the Greek Psalter (105[106]:37; cf. 90[91]:6). In addition, in the Greek Psalter and LXX Isaiah, δαιμόνιον is further used with the same function and in the same context as in LXX Deut 32:17—namely, as a term of distinction contrasting the God of Israel with all other entities or objects of sacrificial worship (i.e., LXX Ps 95[96]:3–5; LXX Isa 65:3; cf. 1 En 19:2 GrPan). Some of the uses of δαιμόνιον in the Greek Psalter, in particular, resonate with the concern for Jewish/Gentile difference in Jubilees’ treatment of transmundane powers. What is less clear, however, is whether and how the LXX usage serves to demonize daimones in a categorical sense akin to later Christian notions of demons as inherently evil.
Far from engaging in any theological program of polarization, the production of meaning in these LXX texts operates through lexical selection with subtler innovations. Within LXX Deuteronomy and the Greek Psalter, for instance, any association of daimones with the demonic is arguably only achieved through LXX Ps 90:5, by virtue of its apotropaic and exorcistic resonances. Just as “magical” materials from the Dead Sea Scrolls help us to understand this move, so too with some of the uses of δαιμόνιον in LXX Isaiah (i.e., LXX Isa 13:21; 34:14; cf. δαίμων in 65:11); there too, we find the supernaturalizing of some of the creatures that haunt the desolate landscapes of Isa 13 and 34. When we look beyond linguistic and canonical divisions to situate specific LXX texts alongside other Jewish writings of their times, what emerges is a complex of Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew evidence for a new literary creativity surrounding transmundane powers in the third and second centuries BCE, as textualized through a varied range of textual practices—of which translation arguably forms one part.
Reading Demons in “The Septuagint” and Second Temple Judaism
In the Hebrew Bible, one finds strikingly little explicit concern for the demonic.Footnote 26 There are only two attestations of what comes to be the main rabbinic word for “demon” (i.e., שד; Deut 32:17; Ps 106:37), but neither yet carries the sense of how Ryan Stokes notes “modern speakers of English, including scholars of ancient Jewish and Christian literature, tend to use the word ‘demon’ as a sort of catch-all term for any evil superhuman being.”Footnote 27 Even terms like satan are not yet demonized nor proper names.Footnote 28 Later, in the NT and early Christianity, an interest in the demonic appears to abound. It can be tempting, thus, to look to the Septuagint as a bridge. After all, the Greek term δαιμόνιον is used to render both occurrences of שד (LXX Deut 32:17; Ps 105[106]:37; cf. Ps 90[91]:6), and it appears elsewhere as well (LXX Ps 95[96]:5; Isa 13:21; 34:14; 65:3)—thus seemingly expanding the prominence of the demonic in the Jewish scriptures that would be best known to early Christians. Accordingly, scholarly treatments have often looked to the Septuagint for precedents for Christian demonology.Footnote 29
This practice has been commonplace for nearly a century, at least since the TDNT. Although much has changed between Foerster and Martin, much has also remained the same. Both, for instance, emphasize that LXX daimones are distinct from those various entities conflated under the category angeloi. Foerster cites this as a precedent for what he claims as the NT’s unique polarization of the otherworld. For Martin, it signals what is not quite yet in LXX or NT, namely, the extension of the category daimones to encompass even fallen angels. Despite their differences, both are thus representative of the broader tendency to treat the LXX as if a step on the way to the NT.
Both do so, moreover, in the context of drawing a sharp distinction between 1) the Greek/Hellenistic background for the NT use of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον, which is treated in terms of the semantic field of this specific term and which emphasizes its neutral and divine meanings, and 2) the biblical/Jewish background, which is treated more broadly and which is primarily cast as background for the term’s polarization. Yet, as Bazzana observes, this distinction does not fit the evidence.Footnote 30 To bifurcate “Jewish” approaches from their “Greek” counterparts, it is necessary to treat Philo and Josephus as evidence for “Greek” but not “Jewish” usage.Footnote 31 In fact, this is part of why the LXX data prove so critical for the arguments of both Foerster and Martin: it is here that they pinpoint the “Jewish” origins of a negative sense of the Greek term that presages what they posit as the purported polarization in the NT (at least in its nominalized adjectival and possibly diminutive form δαιμόνιον).Footnote 32
Foerster and Martin construct a unilinear trajectory of development in part by treating LXX data in monolithic terms. To be sure, Martin is far more careful to emphasize the variety therein. Rather than distinguishing between different LXX texts, however, he structures his survey around the Hebrew terms in the corresponding MT.Footnote 33 In this, he follows the conventional pattern in word-studies of this sort, which has been shaped by text tools like the TDNT and the Hatch-Redpath Concordance.Footnote 34 Even as Martin makes note of the multiplicity of what is commonly called “the Septuagint,” he considers all the data together, without concern for the dates or translational tendencies particular to specific LXX texts.Footnote 35 Here as elsewhere, the result is both to atomize and to conflate.Footnote 36
Also akin to Foerster’s and other entries in the TDNT, Martin’s inquiry treats the LXX materials together as a separate stage of development from what is surveyed thereafter as the relevant developments in Second Temple Judaism—in this case, focusing on the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees.Footnote 37 Here too, Martin’s approach is representative of a broader scholarly tendency: it has long been habitual to treat Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish texts of the time as evidence for “Judaism” while treating Greek Jewish texts as evidence for “Hellenistic Judaism.” Partly as a result, too little has been done to situate specific LXX texts in relation to the Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish texts of specific times.
In sum, past research on the demonization of daimones has been shaped by three scholarly habits that have stood in the way of understanding the significance of LXX evidence for Second Temple Judaism, in general, and Jewish demonology, in particular: 1) the mining of these Greek Jewish translations for understanding the NT; 2) their lexicalized atomization for this aim, typically with little concern for the particular LXX texts in which the terms in question occur, their specific dates, translation tendencies, and so on; and 3) the compartmentalization of LXX data, especially in surveys of this sort, whereby this material is examined in relative isolation from other Second Temple materials. My suggestion, in what follows, is that the test case of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον is an apt focus for modeling an alternate approach—a potential that is newly possible, thanks to evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls that has contributed both to advancing the study of ancient Jewish demonology and to enabling new perspectives on Judaism in the Hellenistic period, beyond older dichotomous approaches to “Judaism” and “Hellenism.”Footnote 38
It is conventional to refer to early translations of Jewish scriptures into Greek in shorthand as “the Septuagint.” As is well known, however, these translations did not originate as a single text, nor did they circulate as a single book, collection, or corpus prior to the fourth and fifth centuries CE.Footnote 39 In the context of the Second Temple period, it is thus more accurate to speak of a translation tradition that started with an initial rendering of Pentateuchal texts into Greek around the third century BCE, to which were later added—here and there, and with each its specific style—the translation of other scriptures over the course of at least another century.Footnote 40 During this time, the initial translations (sometimes called “Old Greek”) were themselves updated into new recensions, sometimes seemingly spurred by a desire to bring Greek translations further into line with the Hebrew (e.g., kaige, ca. first century BCE), but sometimes also with an impulse to update some of them to match shifts in the Hebrew (e.g., as best known from the growing dominance of the proto-MT).Footnote 41 This is a process that is much better understood now because of evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which radically expanded our manuscript data for Hebrew “biblical” texts and text types as well as confirming the antiquity of a number of readings in the LXX.Footnote 42 The text-critical ramifications have been explored for many decades now. In what follows, I explore how evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls might also help us to situate LXX texts within the cultural history of Second Temple Judaism and to understand the meanings of some of its otherwise less obvious lexical choices.Footnote 43
Especially valuable, in my view, is the evidence of Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, which has shed new light on the shifts within Jewish literary cultures in the Hellenistic period.Footnote 44 The pre-Maccabean dates of the Enochic Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers have been known since the discovery of the Aramaic Enoch fragments at Qumran, which also included fragments of an Enochic Book of the Giants related to later Manichaean and Jewish materials. Also discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls were Aramaic fragments of the Book of Tobit, Aramaic fragments related to the Testament of Levi (i.e., Aramaic Levi Document), and otherwise unknown Aramaic writings like Genesis Apocryphon, Visions of Amram, and Admonitions of Qahat. Scholars continue to debate the degree to which these writings, or some clusters thereof, constitute a “corpus” created by distinctive scribal circles.Footnote 45 What is clear, however, is that these Aramaic materials are nonsectarian and largely presectarian: although read and copied by the Qumran yaḥad, their concerns differ from the Hebrew materials later produced by that community.Footnote 46 In the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, we thus have a newly recovered cache of evidence for Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic period—including in the third and second centuries BCE, when many LXX texts were also first taking shape.
Most relevant, for our present purposes, are new insights into the beginnings of Jewish demonology. Past research often speculated about the impact of Persian dualism on postexilic Judaism, albeit with little evidence.Footnote 47 The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, however, point to the distinctively Hellenistic contexts of our earliest known expressions of Jewish demonology.Footnote 48 Prior to the Hellenistic period, unequivocal references to what we would call “demons” are surprisingly rare.Footnote 49 Even when one finds Hebrew terms related to destruction power or names associated with deities elsewhere in the ancient Near East, their usage tends to be allusive and ambivalent, if not wholly naturalized and defused; just as “Astarte became a term for fertility,” as Mark Smith notes, so “Resheph for flame, and Deber for pestilence.”Footnote 50 Hebrew terms later central to rabbinic demonology are similarly sparse. Even when one finds “references to subordinate supernatural beings that engage in destructive activities,” as Anne Marie Kitz has shown, there is no sense of intrinsic evil: they are described in terms of the functions with which God charges them, and their destructiveness pertains to “mission and not moral standing.”Footnote 51 But this changes—seemingly suddenly—starting around the third century BCE.Footnote 52 The Aramaic Jewish literature of the early Hellenistic age seems to delight in discussing demonic personages; not only are they named, as Bennie Reynolds notes, but “they have speaking roles, emotions, and personalities.”Footnote 53 Just as Tobit and Genesis Apocryphon tell tales of pious Jews performing exorcisms, so the Book of the Watchers recounts the origins of “evil spirits” and discusses their impact on humankind, while handbooks like 4Q560 specify different classes of demonic creatures from which one might ask protection.Footnote 54 To the degree that the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls permits a more fine-grained analysis of the development of Jewish demonology, I suggest that this evidence may prove useful for contextualizing the LXX usage of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον as well.
Translating Jewish Demonology?
As noted above, past studies of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον have tended to treat “the Septuagint” as a single data point. Martin, for instance, describes it as one stage in the development from the Hebrew Bible that leads to the further demonological innovations found in Second Temple Judaism (esp. Book of the Watchers; Jubilees), which in turn sets the stage for the New Testament and early Christianity. As much as this approach might seem commonsensical from a modern canonical perspective, it makes far less sense when we attend to the dates of the LXX texts in which δαίμων and δαιμόνιον occur. To the degree that LXX Deuteronomy approximates the Old Greek, it may well date from the third century BCE with a provenance in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Greek Psalter is typically dated to the second century BCE, and LXX Isaiah to the middle of that same century (ca. 140 BCE).Footnote 55 What this means, in practice, is that LXX Deuteronomy took shape around the same time as the Book of the Watchers and other Aramaic Jewish texts in which we first see a sustained and systematic Jewish interest in systematizing knowledge about transmundane powers. When we find references to daimones in the Greek Psalter and LXX Isaiah, however, it is from after this first flourishing of Jewish demonology in Aramaic and more contemporaneous with our Hebrew evidence for its reception and transformation, such as we find in Jubilees, 11Q11, and Songs of the Sage.Footnote 56
Might we see any intersections, then, between these demonological developments and the LXX usage of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον? In asking this question, I do not mean to imply that all our varied evidence reflects or even presages a single narrative or system.Footnote 57 Rather, I here follow Frankfurter in considering “demonology” as “a dynamic process, not a static belief-system.”Footnote 58 What we see of the beginnings of demonology in the Jewish context, in particular, consists of a cluster of textual practices, collecting and reframing biblical, Near Eastern, and “magical” traditions about transmundane powers in newly systematized written forms.Footnote 59 These textual practices were tightly tied to totalizing claims to scribal knowledge, as we see especially in the Aramaic Enoch tradition and Jubilees, but thus remain in productive tension with the continued circulation of local demon-beliefs in more practical and personalized settings, as we see in 4Q560, 11Q11, and other “magical” materials also found at Qumran.Footnote 60
Might we see anything similar in the LXX use of daimones? At first sight, there might seem to be notable challenges to making any such claim. After all, the LXX translation tradition is typically characterized by isomorphism on the sentence-level and often by remarkably consistent patterns of one-to-one lexical equivalence, especially within individual texts but sometimes between them as well.Footnote 61 Indeed, this is why text tools like the Hatch-Redpath Concordance are so useful both for the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible and for the lexicography of New Testament Greek. It is also why scholars like Albert Pietersma and Cameron Boyd-Taylor have called for caution in any search for exegesis and theology therein, especially in the case of “word-based” translations wherein meaning is made primarily on the level of lexical selection.Footnote 62
What makes LXX texts so difficult to cull for exegesis and theology, however, also makes them particularly interesting to juxtapose with the systematizing practices that mark the beginnings of Jewish demonology that we see in Aramaic and Hebrew materials. In those materials, we see the impulse toward systemizing knowledge about transmundane powers achieved through Listenwissenschaft and its narrativized extensions, but also through etiologies of “evil spirits,” taxonomic claims about “spirits,” and the spatial mapping of angelic and demonic domains.Footnote 63 New meanings are made through textual practices that do not so much invent ideas about transmundane powers as reframe and recast received traditions. Might we see anything similar at play in the patterning of lexical equivalence and other word-based translational practices that shape the LXX use of δαιμόνιον?
A. Daimones and Divine Indeterminacy in LXX Deuteronomy
To the degree that the form of LXX Deut 32:17 that comes down to us approximates the Old Greek,Footnote 64 it offers the earliest known example of the Jewish use of the Greek term δαιμόνιον, here to render Hebrew שד:
ἔθυσαν δαιμονίοις [cf. MT לַשֵּׁדִים] καὶ οὐ θεῷ [cf. MT אֱלֹהַ לֹא], θεοῖς [cf. MT אֱלֹהִים], οἷς οὐκ ᾔδεισαν, καινοὶ πρόσφατοι ἥκασιν, οὓς οὐκ ᾔδεισαν οἱ πατέρες αὐτῶν (LXX Deut 32:17)Footnote 65
What is not entirely clear, however, is why δαιμόνιον would make an apt equivalent for שד. Why in this context would the translator have rendered a Hebrew term with demonic connotations with a Greek term that bears some sense of the divine? Indeed, as John Wevers notes, “the line [in the LXX] might well be translated ‘they sacrificed to deities, but not to God.’ ”Footnote 66
As noted above, past scholarship has tended to focus on the ways in which pre-Christian usage differs from later Christian senses—that is, the moral indeterminacy whereby “daimones could be taken to refer to gods or goddesses, semi-divinities, or any kind of superhuman being (like ‘lower grade’ gods, ‘heroes,’ daimons/demons, or what moderns might think of as ghosts or angels).”Footnote 67 When we refrain from reading this Hellenistic-period translation in the context of questions shaped by texts written centuries later, however, it might be easier to make sense of this choice. Studies of the term δαίμων in Classics, for instance, have tended to distinguish its usage in Greek myth and religion from the philosophical trajectory forged in Platonic exegesis and best known from Plutarch and Plotinus. The latter is no doubt useful for understanding references to daimones by Roman-era authors like Philo, Paul, Athenagoras, and Justin. It is the former, however, that arguably proves more useful for sources like LXX Deuteronomy.
Walter Burkert, for instance, notes how the term as used in Homer, Hesiod, and Greek religion “does not designate a specific class of divine beings, but a peculiar mode of activity,” which he posits as “occult power” and “the veiled countenance of divine activity … known only by their acts.”Footnote 68 What characterizes its meaning in Greek myth and religion, as Frederick Brenk similarly stresses, is that daimones may act like gods but tend to be “unidentifiable,” and “in contrast to the gods, the daimon never takes on any visible form.”Footnote 69 Set in this context, the choice of δαίμων in LXX Deut 32:17 may make more sense. After all, the choice of a term characterized by indeterminacy—evoking a supernaturalism of unnamed, unknown, or occluded source—is actually quite apt to render a term placed in parallel with “gods you did not know.”
Luc Brisson, Seamus O’Neill, and Andrei Timotin note how the “semantic fluidity” of the term δαίμων enabled its redeployment by philosophers toward the “rationalisation of religion,” with the exegesis of Plato influencing its evolution into late antiquity.Footnote 70 Although it is certainly possible that Alexandrian Jews were familiar with early expressions of this philosophical redeployment,Footnote 71 the Greek translators of Deuteronomy seem to draw upon the term’s “semantic fluidity” in a different manner. Its indeterminacy is not so much resolved as it is repurposed, so as to sharpen the contrast with the God known and familiar to Israel.
Interestingly, the daimones of LXX Deut 32:17 resonate less with Platonic ideas about human-divine mediation and more with the Athenian accusations against Socrates. Xenophon, for instance, describes the indictment as follows:
Ἀδικεῖ Σωκράτης οὓς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει θεοὺς οὐ νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια εἰσφέρων· ἀδικεῖ δὲ καὶ τοὺς νέους διαφθείρων (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1)Footnote 72
Here, too, one finds the nominalized adjectival form of δαίμων (i.e., δαιμόνιον) used with the adjective καινός (lit., recent, new) and sharply contrasted with θεός. Plato’s account of Socrates’s response to these charges uses δαιμόνιον in the same manner (Apol. 26b), with the same implication of newness and the unknown, framed in contrast with the known and named gods properly worshiped by Athenians.Footnote 73 As in LXX Deut 32:17, δαιμόνιον is placed in contrast with what is known, named, and proper to worship for a particular people, for which θεός is used instead.
Elsewhere, as Sarah Pearce notes, “the originality of Deuteronomy’s translator is revealed in the choice of translation equivalents.”Footnote 74 Similarly, we see how the choice of the term δαιμόνιον—a term bearing the sense of unidentified divine power and sometimes used in explicit contrast to the known gods properly worshiped by a specific people—does not so much demonize daimones. Rather, it cleverly repurposes one common sense of the Greek term to sharpen the distinction between Israel’s God and anything else worshiped through sacrifice. The distinction is not framed in terms of what we now contrast as “monotheism” versus “polytheism,” nor can it be reduced to ontological dualism. Rather, the choice extends Deuteronomy’s own emphasis on Israel’s God as the singular recipient of proper worship by Israel, while also articulating this emphasis in terms comprehensible to Hellenistic civic mores.
What might seem like a puzzling choice when we look forward to Christian demonology thus makes more sense when we attend to ancient Greek usage. But how does it compare to contemporaneous Jewish sources for demonology? It is also beginning in the third century BCE, after all, that we find the systematizing impulses noted above, whereby Aramaic Jewish sources exhibit a new concern to name, order, and classify demonic and other transmundane powers. This is a shift most famous from the Book of the Watchers, which narrates the descent of heavenly Watchers to Earth and their siring of Giants with human women (cf. Gen 6:1–4), recounts the origins and fates of the “evil spirits” (GrPan πνεύματα πονηρὰ; Eth. manfasa ʾekuyaʾ) that issue forth from the slain bodies of these Giants, lists and names both archangels and wayward Watchers, and outlines their teachings and domains.Footnote 75 By contrast, the acts of lexical selection that shape LXX Deut 32:17 seem to run counter to this impulse; if anything, the choice of δαιμόνιον further extends what we find in Deuteronomy and other early biblical literature, which signal the existence of powers other than God but resist pinpointing their identities. Whatever the precise meaning of שד in Biblical Hebrew, it has here been replaced with a term marked by multiple indeterminacies.Footnote 76
When we read LXX Deut 32:17 in its own context, rather than as a preface to Christian demonology, we notice that the choice of the term δαιμόνιον here functions primarily as a point of contrast with what is known and named as Israel’s God. The indeterminacy of the term enhances this dichotomy, and among the consequences of selecting the nominalized adjectival form may be that the focus falls less on the entities in question and more on their attributes—i.e., on that which, through sacrificial worship, is treated as if divine. Furthermore, the significance of the contrast pertains especially to sacrifice: daimones do not mark a pole in the polarization of the supernatural world into good and evil, but rather function as a term of distinction within the bifurcation of proper and improper worship, wherein Israel’s God is marked as the sole recipient of proper sacrifice.
B. Terms of Distinction and Binary Difference in the Greek Psalter
The Greek Psalter exemplifies what Pietersma notes of much of the LXX tradition: “the primary unit of meaning is the word” and “any change in meaning from the source resides in the first instance in the word, though it may well, of course, extend beyond that.”Footnote 77 Boyd-Taylor further notes how “the translator of the Greek Psalter … often draws upon the lexical equivalencies established in the Greek Pentateuch.”Footnote 78 We see both of these broader tendencies at play in the use of δαιμόνιον therein: meaning-making operates at the level of the word, and word choices can be readily understood in terms of LXX Deut 32:17. Nevertheless, δαιμόνιον is not just used in the only other verse in which we find the Hebrew term שד (i.e., Ps 106:37; cf. 91:6) but also in other verses shaped by similar concerns. This latter fits well with what Anneli Aejmelaeus further notes of this LXX text: meaning is made primarily through lexical selection, but there are cases when “a certain Greek lexical item is used to render several Hebrew words that are synonyms or related in meaning,” and it is often in such cases that we catch glimpses of how “the translator was very conscious of his duty to create a Greek book of Psalms which could be used by his religious community in prayer and praise to God.”Footnote 79
The Greek translation of Ps 106:37 reads as follows:
οὐκ ἐξωλέθρευσαν τὰ ἔθνη [cf. MT הָעַמִּים], ἃ εἶπεν κύριος αὐτοῖς, καὶ ἐμίγησαν ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν [cf. MT בַגּוֹיִם] καὶ ἔμαθον τὰ ἔργα αὐτῶν· καὶ ἐδούλευσαν τοῖς γλυπτοῖς αὐτῶν, καὶ ἐγενήθη αὐτοῖς εἰς σκάνδαλον· καὶ ἔθυσαν τοὺς υἱοὺς αὐτῶν καὶ τὰς θυγατέρας αὐτῶν τοῖς δαιμονίοις [cf. MT לַשֵּׁדִים] (LXX Ps 105:34–37)Footnote 80
Here, as in LXX Deut 32:17, the choice of δαιμόνιον to render שד draws meaning from indeterminacy, noted above: it enables these daimones to stand as otherwise unspecified objects of improper sacrificial worship. Inasmuch as τοῖς δαιμονίοις (v. 37) is here paralleled with τοῖς γλυπτοῖς (v. 36; lit. “those things that are fit for carving”), we can also see the additional meanings enabled by the choice of the adjectival form in particular, which leaves open the possibility that what is meant here might be things—marvelous objects, for instance, or those that appear as if divine or divinely sent.Footnote 81 Among what is opened up, when we set aside the habit of reading the daimones of “the Septuagint” as precursors to Christian demons, is thus the possibility that the term might sometimes denote or encompass idols.
This semantic scope might also help to make sense of the use of the term in LXX Ps 95. If we look only at the corresponding Hebrew, at least as we have it from the MT (i.e., Ps 96), it might seem an odd choice: δαιμόνιον is here used seemingly to render אלילים in verse 5.Footnote 82 The relevant passage reads as follows:
ἀναγγείλατε ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν [cf. MT בַגּוֹיִם] τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς λαοῖς [cf. MT הָעַמִּים] τὰ θαυμάσια αὐτοῦ. Ὅτι μέγας κύριος καὶ αἰνετὸς σφόδρα φοβερός ἐστιν ἐπὶ πάντας τοὺς θεούς [cf. MT אֱלֹהִים]· ὅτι πάντες οἱ θεοὶ [cf. MT אֱלֹהֵי] τῶν ἐθνῶν [cf. MT הָעַמִּים] δαιμόνια [cf. MT אֱלִילִים], ὁ δὲ κύριος τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἐποίησεν·(LXX Ps 95:3–5)Footnote 83
There is no Greek rendering that can capture the wordplay in the Hebrew, whereby those whom non-Jews think are elohim (i.e., gods) are revealed to be elilim (i.e., idols, worthless things, nothingness). Here too, however, δαιμόνιον functions as part of a binary contrast with Israel’s God, specifically in relation to the practice of sacrifice (θύειν).
This function proves especially poignant inasmuch as both LXX Ps 95:5 and LXX Ps 105:37 evoke this binary in parallel to another—that is, the contrast between Israel and all other peoples. The distinction is also made in the Hebrew, at least as known from MT. In the Greek, however, it is enhanced due to the use of ἔθνη to render both גוים and עמים. The Greek Psalter here follows a broader pattern noted by Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, whereby many LXX texts tend to “avoid the plural laoi, using ethnê for both goyim and ‘amim; and the singular laos when referring to Israel,” thereby reifying “the distinction between Israel and the other nations even at the cost of semantic consistency.” Footnote 84 Ophir and Rosen-Zvi suggest that such acts of lexical selection are part of a broader discourse of ancient Jewish difference-making, which develops the Deuteronomistic dichotomization of Israel and the nations, culminating in the rabbinic binary Jew/goy.Footnote 85 For our purposes, the parallel proves notable inasmuch as it points to one mode of meaning-making in word-based translation, whereby individual words have the power to evoke a totalizing binary. In this sense, it is possible that δαιμόνιον could sometimes function in a manner akin to what Ophir and Rosen-Zvi propose for ἔθνη. Its meaning can be constituted by what it is not. Just as the word goy serves to conflate the specificity of any and all non-Jews, so too sometimes with daimones: their function may be less to denote a specific class of entities, whether “demons” or not, and more to efface any such specificities, marking any object of improper or non-Jewish sacrifice as categorically distinct from the God of Israel. Whether a deity or an idol or a delusion matters less than what it is not.
In part because of the influence of Foerster’s narrative concerning the polarization of daimones, scholars have been tempted to treat non-Jews and their deities as thereby demonized; the DDD entry on “demons,” for instance, takes for granted that “as the gods of the nations were demonized, so ‘demon’ in the dualistic sense is found in the Septuagint.”Footnote 86 Similarly, a recent survey of demonic figures in the Hebrew Bible can stress, even without any examples or citation, that shedim are “turned into ‘demons’ only by the specific attitude towards foreign gods taken up in the LXX.”Footnote 87 As we have seen, however, there is no warrant for presuming that δαιμόνιον already bears such a stably negative sense in the third and second centuries BCE as to be able to demonize non-Jewish deities. Rather, read in its own terms, the choice of this term reflects a concern with the assertion of the distinctiveness of Israel’s God over against all others. As in the case of ἔθνη, one finds an extension of the Deuteronomistic rhetoric of difference-making, but also a practice of reifying binary contrasts most familiar from later Jewish discourses of difference, whereby what is proper is elevated through contrast with a totalizingly conflate term that encompasses all that is not (e.g., goy for non-Jewish difference, minut for inner-Jewish difference).Footnote 88 At least in the earliest LXX texts in which we find daimones, their function is arguably less to demonize than to conflate, denying deities other than Israel’s God any sense of specificity.
Among the effects of integrating a reference to daimones into LXX Ps 95, however, is to cast this contrast in more cosmological terms, in keeping with its emphasis on creation. Both LXX Deut 32:17 and LXX Ps 105:36–37 can be read as pertaining to what is proper for Israel to worship, consistent with what Mark Smith and others have noted of early expressions of what we now call biblical monotheism.Footnote 89 Yet, in LXX Ps 95:3–5, the difference between God and daimones pertains not just to the propriety of Israelite worship but to all of humankind.
Given the probable second-century BCE context of the Greek Psalter, the parallels with Jubilees prove particularly poignant. It has long been commonplace to read LXX Ps 95:5 as evidence for a Jewish belief that demons rule non-Jewish nations, for which Jubilees is cited in support.Footnote 90 But just as LXX Ps 95:5 is not so clearly about demons, so too for Jub 15:31. In the context of affirming that “there are many nations and many peoples, and all belong to” Israel’s God, it is there asserted that “he made spirits [manāfesta] rule over all of them in order to lead them astray from following him.” In Jubilees, the term “spirit” (Heb. ruaḥ; Eth. manfas) does not merely denote those that are evil or impure; it is also used for angels and other powers who do God’s will as well as what persists of human identity after death. Accordingly, what is said here is akin to LXX Ps 95:5: the point is not to describe these entities as much as to use the contrast with the God of Israel in order to make a point that is primarily about God and Israel—in this case: the uniqueness of his direct rule over Israel and his power over all other peoples as well.Footnote 91
To be sure, Jubilees integrates angels as well as many sorts of spirits into its account of the pre-Sinaitic past, including to extend the Book of the Watchers’ account of the fallen angels (5:1–11) and to posit the satan Mastema as the one placed by God to rule over the “wicked spirits” of their hybrid progeny, who torment humankind and encourage idolatry (10:1–14; 11:4–5).Footnote 92 If the Ge‘ez accurately reflects the Hebrew, Jubilees may be the first known source to explicitly equate these particular “spirits” with shedim (10:1–2). The Hebrew of the relevant verses does not survive. But just as the Ge‘ez term gānēn is used to render Hebrew שד in translations of Ps 106:37, so this is also the term that we find in the allusion to this same psalm in Jub 1:11 to describe those entities to whom God predicts that wayward Israelites will “sacrifice their children.”Footnote 93 Later, the same term is used for those “impure” entities who mislead Noah’s grandchildren (i.e., ’agānent rekusān in 10:1), and Jubilees goes on to explain how these are the “wicked spirits” (manāfest ʾekuyān) of the sons of the fallen angels (10:5), over whom God places Mastema (10:8–9) and because of whom angels teach Noah medicine (10:10–14).Footnote 94 In Jubilees, thus, we find the explicit equation of shedim/’agānent, who are associated with improper sacrifice in Deut 32:17 and Ps 106:37, with the “evil/wicked spirits” who torment humankind through disease and whose origins are revealed by the Book of the Watchers as linked to antediluvian angelic descent.Footnote 95
Jubilees moves in a different direction from LXX Ps 105:37 in its interpretation of Ps 106:37, drawing out the very supernaturalism there defused. Nevertheless, it reflects the same sharpened concern for Jewish/Gentile difference. Its demonology is less concerned with cosmic dualism than with distinguishing Jews from non-Jews and thus stressing what is at stake when Jews engage in non-Jewish worship.Footnote 96 When Isaac teaches his sons that non-Jews “worship demons,” for instance, it is in order to persuade them to “separate from the nations” (22:16–17). Likewise, the text’s many references to Israel sacrificing their children to Moloch and shedim are less about demonology or the theological problem of evil and more about the dangers of intermarriage.Footnote 97 If the Greek translators of the Psalms were less concerned with naming and classifying different sorts of transmundane powers than with using references to such powers to underline the uniqueness of God and Israel, they were hardly alone among Jews in the second century BCE.
Is there no sense, then, that the daimones of the Greek Psalter are demonic? The one possible exception to the pattern that we have seen so far occurs in LXX Ps 90. Here, too, the translation is word based. The context, however, is notably different from those noted above. Extending the list in verse 5 of what “you will not fear,” verse 6 enumerates the following:
Why do we here find δαιμόνιον where MT reads ישוד? Those scholars who have treated this act of lexical selection as an interpretative choice on the part of the translator have done so on the assumption that Greek δαιμόνιον already means “demon.”Footnote 98 Since we have no evidence that this is the case, it seems more plausible that the translator might have had a different Vorlage, with καὶ δαιμονίου here rendering or misread as ושד. Notably, the other lexical choices in this verse follow earlier equivalences, even at the expense of sense and with the effect of downplaying any potential supernaturalism. To translate deber with πρᾶγμα, for instance, renders the beginning of this verse somewhat puzzling—and if anything, de-demonizes what could be interpreted as a personification of pestilence.Footnote 99
Is it possible that a Hebrew version of this psalm that read ושד for ישוד was circulating in the second century BCE? The variance would be easy to explain as scribal error. But it also resonates with what we know of the early reception of this psalm. The evidence of 11Q11 proves useful in this regard. On the one hand, its version of Ps 91:5 confirms MT’s reading of ישוד.Footnote 100 On the other hand, the very inclusion of this psalm in 11Q11 attests the apotropaic interpretation of Ps 91 in this period.Footnote 101 After all, 11Q11 appears to preserve a Hebrew exorcistic manual of probable presectarian provenance, and Ps 91 is here compiled alongside exorcistic prayers and invocations.Footnote 102 Interestingly, for our purposes, these include a Davidic exorcistic prayer that addresses a horned entity of hybrid human-angelic parentage with language that recalls the account of the origins of “evil spirits” in the Book of the Watchers (11Q11 iv 4–13). This prayer is often cited as exemplary of the interplay between Jewish demonology, in the sense of the scribal systemization of transmundane powers, with so-called magic, in the sense of practical and context-specific attempts to control the effects of such powers on individuals. The same pattern is evident in Jubilees, which integrates prayers and speeches that speak to the human fear of demons, alongside what is claimed as an angelic perspective that emphasizes God’s rulership over all such spirits.Footnote 103 To the degree that daimones might be said to be demonized in the Greek Psalter, it is perhaps with a similar dynamic.
In my view, it is much easier to explain how shedim might have come to be included in the Hebrew of Ps 91:5 than to explain why a translator would choose δαιμόνιον to render ישוד. But even if the aim of the translator was limited to the application of an established lexical equivalence, the effect was to introduce daimones into a much different context than those noted above—i.e., as among potential sources of fear in a psalm readily interpreted as apotropaic speech. To be sure, even without any reference to “demons,” the Hebrew of Psalm 91 would come to have a notable place in Jewish ritual practices to protect individuals from threats posed by transmundane powers, from 11Q11 into late antiquity and well beyond.Footnote 104 But by late antiquity, we similarly find the first verses of LXX Ps 90 inscribed onto Christian amulets.Footnote 105 At the very least, the inclusion of the term δαιμόνιον in a psalm with apotropaic resonances meant that these entities became framed as a danger one might fear, for which one might ask for divine protection.
C. Daimones as a Taxonomic Term in LXX Isaiah?
To the degree that we might speak of LXX usage shaping the semantic field of δαιμόνιον, or the emergence of a specifically Jewish sense of the term, what we have seen so far is largely limited to the establishment of its equivalence to שד, the resultant association of daimones with improper sacrifice, its extension in relation to idols, and its resonance with contemporaneous discourses about Jewish/Gentile difference that intersect with demonology. Different dynamics emerge in LXX Isaiah. There is no evidence for שד or similar terms in the Hebrew, but this is the LXX text with the most references to daimones. There are three attestations of δαιμόνιον, and one of δαίμων—albeit never corresponding to the same Hebrew term in MT.
As noted above, LXX Isaiah is also typically dated to the second century BCE.Footnote 106 Its connections to the Greek Psalter have long been discussed, and although the directionality of dependence remains debated, it tends to be placed later.Footnote 107 Its translator seems to have been influenced by earlier Greek translations of the Pentateuch as well.Footnote 108 Despite its debts to these earlier translations, however, LXX Isaiah has long been noted to be “freer” and less “literal,” permitting more glimpses of the Hellenistic context of second-century BCE Alexandria.Footnote 109 Such assessments have inspired a search for theological interpretation and “actualized exegesis” therein, albeit with mixed results.Footnote 110 Yet even those who critique such efforts, such as Ronald Troxel, admit that “if translation involves a continuum from precise reflection of the source language, on the one end, to concern for fluency and linguistic appropriateness in the target language, the translator [of LXX Isaiah] stands closer to the latter end of the continuum than most other Septuagint translators.”Footnote 111 The result, as Joachim Schaper similarly notes, is “a fairly faithful, yet creative, translation of its Hebrew Vorlage.”Footnote 112
The usage of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον therein accords with this assessment, combining the extension of the patterns noted above with innovations that speak to its own time. Closest to what we have seen in LXX Deuteronomy and the Greek Psalter is LXX Isa 65:3. As in LXX Deut 32:17 and LXX Ps 105:37, daimones are here evoked in the context of a contrast between proper and improper sacrificial worship:
ὁ λαὸς οὗτος ὁ παροξύνων με ἐναντίον ἐμοῦ διὰ παντός, αὐτοὶ θυσιάζουσιν ἐν τοῖς κήποις καὶ θυμιῶσιν ἐπὶ ταῖς πλίνθοις τοῖς δαιμονίοις, ἃ οὐκ ἔστιν· (LXX Isa 65:3)Footnote 113
Although our evidence for the corresponding Hebrew in 1QIsaa and MT here differs,Footnote 114 neither includes any word that δαιμόνιον can be readily posited to render. Comparison, rather, suggests that the Greek translators added “daimones, which do not exist” (τοῖς δαιμονίοις, ἃ οὐκ ἔστιν) to explain the impropriety of the sacrificial acts here said to provoke God. Even as this addition resonates with the much-discussed tendency of LXX Isaiah to depart selectively from word-for-word translation, it speaks to a close connection to the Greek Psalter: not only is δαιμόνιον used in the same manner as we have seen above, but the addition is perhaps best understood in relation to Ps 96:5 and LXX Ps 95:5, doubly rendering elilim in the former so as to specify the indeterminacy of daimones in the latter.
By contrast, a more innovative usage can be found later in the same chapter. In LXX Isa 65:11, we find the only use of δαίμων in the LXX tradition:
ὑμεῖς δὲ οἱ ἐγκαταλιπόντες με καὶ ἐπιλανθανόμενοι τὸ ὄρος τὸ ἅγιόν μου καὶ ἑτοιμάζοντες τῷ δαίμονι [cf. 1QIsaa + MT לַגַּד] τράπεζαν καὶ πληροῦντες τῇ τύχῃ κέρασμα … (LXX Isa 65:11)Footnote 115
Here too, as in LXX Deut 32:17, LXX Ps 105:37, and LXX Isa 65:3, the context is sacrificial (albeit not expressed with terms related to θύειν). Yet there is reason to think the choice of δαίμων for Gad may have been shaped by more than such a context. Whereas earlier LXX uses of δαιμόνιον draw on the indeterminacy in the term’s semantic field, the usage here draws on another element therein, namely, its widespread use in relation to fate.Footnote 116 This is a choice that proves especially apt here in parallel with τύχη (lit., fortune).
Recently, Schaper has revisited Isac Seeligmann’s suggestion that this verse makes a more specific reference to Agathos Daimon, a deity with strong associations with Alexandria.Footnote 117 Citing inscriptional evidence for the pairing of Agathos Daimon and Tyche, Schaper argues that “LXX Isa 65:11 does not denounce ‘table fellowship with pagan gods who are in reality demons’ … but table fellowship with the actual tutelary deities Ἀγαθὸς Δαίμων and Tύχη, thus trying to prevent Alexandrian Jews from communing with the patron deity of their city and another one of its centrally important deities.”Footnote 118 Far from assuming an already demonized sense of daimones, the choice of the term δαίμων may presume Alexandrian Jewish familiarity with its more positive senses—and, if anything, may have answered those who might be tempted to participate in civic or private worship of the deity thus named. If Schaper is correct, this usage represents a notable departure from the indeterminacy noted above, even as it suggests that the choice of δαίμων rather than δαιμόνιον may be quite deliberate.
The remaining two uses of δαιμόνιον in LXX Isaiah can be found in the translations of Isa 13 and 34—two chapters that have been read as already possibly resonant with demonic overtones in their Hebrew versions.Footnote 119 The context in both cases is the prediction of destruction in part through the evocation of desolated landscapes populated with varied creatures. As with the Hebrew Bible more broadly, there is a lack of any explicit naming of demons or theorizing with respect to demonology. Nevertheless, as Dan Ben-Amos has noted, Isa 13 and 34 are exemplary of how biblical discourse on transmundane powers can sometimes “hover between the referential and the metaphoric, between the literal and the poetic.”Footnote 120 Among the functions of the term δαιμόνιον in LXX Isaiah is seemingly to defuse some of this hovering. Where MT refers to birds and beasts that dwell in devastated landscapes (e.g., goats, wildcats, hyenas, ostriches),Footnote 121 the Greek translations evoke spaces haunted by daimones as well:
καὶ ἀναπαύσονται ἐκεῖ θηρία [cf. 1QIsaa + MT צִיִּים], καὶ ἐμπλησθήσονται αἱ οἰκίαι ἤχου, καὶ ἀναπαύσονται ἐκεῖ σειρῆνες [cf. 1QIsaa + MT בְּנוֹת יַעֲנָה], καὶ δαιμόνια [cf. 1QIsaa + MT וּשְׂעִירִים] ἐκεῖ ὀρχήσονται. καὶ ὀνοκένταυροι [cf. 1QIsaa + MT אִיִּים] ἐκεῖ κατοικήσουσιν, καὶ νοσσοποιήσουσιν ἐχῖνοι ἐν τοῖς οἴκοις αὐτῶν· ταχὺ ἔρχεται καὶ οὐ χρονιεῖ. (LXX Isa 13:21–22)Footnote 122
καὶ ἀναφύσει εἰς τὰς πόλεις αὐτῶν ἀκάνθινα ξύλα καὶ εἰς τὰ ὀχυρώματα αὐτῆς, καὶ ἔσται ἔπαυλις σειρήνων [cf. 1QIsaa + MT תַנִּים] καὶ αὐλὴ στρουθῶν [cf. 1QIsaa + MT לִבְנוֹת יַעֲנָה]. καὶ συναντήσουσιν δαιμόνια [cf. 1QIsaa + MT צִיִּים] ὀνοκενταύροις [cf. 1QIsaa אייאמים; MT אִיִּים] καὶ βοήσουσιν ἕτερος πρὸς τὸν ἕτερον· ἐκεῖ ἀναπαύσονται ὀνοκένταυροι [cf. 1QIsaa ליליות; MT לִּילִית], εὗρον γὰρ αὑτοῖς ἀνάπαυσιν. (LXX Isa 34:13–14)Footnote 123
It is not just daimones that are added here, but also sirens and donkey-centaurs (ὀνοκένταυροι). Accordingly, these passages can be read as part of the recasting of biblical traditions into Hellenistic terms that we have seen in LXX Isa 65:11.Footnote 124
This Hellenizing tendency has been widely noted in LXX Isaiah, in general, and is best known from the rendering of Sheol with Hades throughout.Footnote 125 In my view, however, the translational choices that shaped LXX Isaiah may be both Hellenizing and conversant with Judaism of the Hellenistic period as known from Aramaic and Hebrew sources. The pairing of sirens and daimones, for instance, recalls 1 En 19:1–2—a passage from the Book of the Watchers that similarly evokes a desolate landscape with an eye to future judgment:
Kαὶ εἶπέν μοι Oὐριήλ Ἐνθάδε οἱ μιγέντες ἄγγελοι ταῖς γυναιξὶν στήσονται, καὶ τὰ πνεύματα αὐτῶν πολύμορφα γενόμενα λυμαίνεται τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ πλανήσει αὐτοὺς ἐπιθύειν τοῖς δαιμονίοις μέχρι τῆς μεγάλης κρίσεως, ἐν ᾗ κριθήσονται εἰς ἀποτελείωσιν καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες αὐτῶν τῶν παραβάντων ἀγγέλων εἰς σειρῆνας γενήσονται. (1 En 19:1–2; GrPan)Footnote 126
Unfortunately, there is no Aramaic extant for this verse.Footnote 127 It remains intriguing, however, to wonder whether LXX Isa 13:21 may form part of the second-century BCE Nachleben of this Enochic tradition that we also know from Jubilees.Footnote 128 If so, what we see here might be akin to what Steven Schweitzer has suggested about LXX Isa 14:9: the choice of γίγαντες (i.e., Giants) for רפאים, in a context of rebellion, recalls Greek Titan traditions but also likely reflects the influence of “some form of the myth of the Watchers” known from the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees (cf. LXX Gen 6:4).”Footnote 129
Might this equation also point to some taxonomic impulse at play? After all, just as Jubilees equates the “evil spirits” who torment humankind and cause disease with the shedim/daimones associated with improper sacrifice and idolatry in the Book of the Watchers, so the effect of the use of δαιμόνιον in LXX Isa 13:21, 34:14, and 65:3 is to suggest that the creatures who haunt the desert are also those with whom non-Jews (and wayward Jews) are in sacrificial commensality. Furthermore, as noted above, δαιμόνιον in LXX Isaiah seems consistently used to render different Hebrew terms.
So far, we have yet to encounter any evidence for what Martin and others posit as the main contribution of “the Septuagint” to our modern notion of “demon,” namely, to “lump several Near Eastern words and beings into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ category of Greek daimons—along the way casting both the words and the beings in a more consistently negative light than may have been assumed by most Greeks.”Footnote 130 Might δαιμόνιον in LXX Isaiah begin to serve such a taxonomic function, taking on something of the classificatory sense of our “demon”? Such a suggestion proves especially intriguing in light of what Michael Mach has suggested for the Greek term angelos in the LXX tradition more broadly.Footnote 131 This Greek term for “messenger” is used to render not just Hebrew מלאך, as might be expected, but also האלוהים בני, קדשים, and other terms. Especially in LXX Genesis and LXX Job, angeloi thus become figures defined not just by their function but rather as a class of entities.Footnote 132
As noted above, the presumed parallel of angeloi and daimones has been central for older theories about the place of “the Septuagint” in the purported polarization of transmundane powers in Second Temple times. The closer one looks, however, the less clear this purported pattern becomes. It seems to be the case that δαιμόνιον is used to render different Hebrew terms, especially in LXX Isaiah. In 13:21, it is used for שעירים, but in 34:14 for ציים. But this does not suffice to conclude that δαιμόνιον here functions akin to our “demon.” After all, other Greek terms in LXX Isa 13 and 34 appear to be similarly fluid: δαιμόνιον is not the only term for which there does not seem to be a set word-to-word correspondence. We find other cases in which the same Greek term seems to be variously used for multiple types of creatures in the Hebrew.
In LXX Isa 13:21, for instance, ציים is rendered instead with a Greek term for animals (i.e., θηρία), and whether because of a different Vorlage or an interpretative choice, LXX Isa 34:14 includes no counterpart to the use of שעיר in Isa 34:14. In fact, given the notable overlap between the creatures listed in Isa 13 and 34, the lack of consistency is striking. In the Hebrew, as we know it from 1QIsaa and MT,Footnote 133 13:21–22 and 34:13–14 include wildcats (ציים), ostriches (יענה בנות), goats (שעירים), hyenas (עיים), and jackals (תנים); the former also mentions what seem to be owls (אחים), and the latter lilit.Footnote 134 To the degree that these can be used to reconstruct the Hebrew Vorlage behind LXX Isaiah, however, one finds notable variance. It is not just that ציים variously correspond to θηρία and δαιμόνια. We find sirens in LXX Isaiah where 1QIsaa and MT read תנים in 34:13 but יענה בנות in 13:21Footnote 135—the latter of which is rendered more literally with the Greek term for ostrich (στρουθός) in 34:14. And even though references to עיים more consistently correspond to ὀνοκένταυροι, this term is also used where we find lilit in 34:14. We may wish to be cautious, thus, in pointing to the LXX tradition to proclaim the emergence of δαιμόνιον as “a ‘one-size-fits-all’ category” akin to our English “demons.”
If LXX Isaiah reflects or effects some demonizing of daimones, it is perhaps more in relation to the locative dimension of demon-belief.Footnote 136 In the Hebrew versions of Isa 13 and 34, as Judit Blair has shown, the predicted desolation of Babylon and Edom is evoked through the naming of those wild animals and birds that will replace their domesticated counterparts in desolate landscapes now filled with their howling.Footnote 137 Even if not already demonic, such passages are ripe for reinterpretation with respect to what Frankfurter notes as the “mapping of misfortune” onto landscapes, whereby “the demonic emerges as a concept in conversation … in landscape features, immoral behaviors, parts of the body or afflictions, and animal attributes.”Footnote 138 In his view, this mapping forms an important component of the emergence of local demon-belief, which in turn forms the precondition for the development of demonology through the systematizing of naming, listing, and writing: “the enumeration of demons not only rendered ambivalent spirits demonic; it also claimed power over them—what is listed is thereby repelled.”Footnote 139
Within the Jewish literature of the Hellenistic period, the enumeration of demons is well known, not just from the lists in the Book of the Watchers and the naming of demonic figures in Tobit and Jubilees, but also from so-called magical materials preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Aramaic exorcistic incantations in 4Q560, for instance, include direct first-person speech to a “spirit” (רוח) as the subject of adjuration (4Q560 1 ii) but also appeals to male and female shudder-demons (נקבתא (וחלחלית(א דכרא יא(ל)לחלח) and male and female crumble-demons (4Q560 1 I: פרכית, פרך).Footnote 140 That Isa 13 and 34 were read and/or used in such a manner can be seen in Hebrew sectarian hymns of the Qumran yahad.Footnote 141 In Songs of the Sage (4Q510–511) the powers against which the petitioner seeks protection include some that recall the Book of the Watchers, such as “the spirits of the destroying angels and the spirits of the bastards [ממזרים ורוחות חבל מלאכי רוחי]” and possibly shedim (שד אים),Footnote 142 but also two creatures only otherwise known from Isaiah: lilit and owls (אחים) (4Q510, frg. 1, 5).
Is lilit, like the owl, a bird or animal that here takes on demonic connotations? Or is this yet another example of the renewed Jewish engagement with ancient Near Eastern tradition in the Hellenistic period that we see across apocalyptic, astronomical, and “magical” traditions?Footnote 143 It is difficult to determine, but what is clear is the connection with precisely the passages in Isaiah in which daimones become inserted in the Greek. This leads Noam Mizrahi and Hector Patmore to suggest that “underlying its list of demons is an exegetical tradition that conflates the scriptural passages of Isa 13:21–22 and 34:13–14.”Footnote 144 At the very least, we might note how the translator of LXX Isaiah is far from the only Jew of his time to connect these two passages or interpret some of the creatures therein in supernaturalizing terms.Footnote 145 To the degree that we find a taxonomic impulse in its use of δαιμόνιον, it is perhaps less like our modern sense of “demon” as a classificatory term for all evil transmundane powers, and more akin to what we see of the “mapping of misfortune” in 4Q560 and Songs of the Sage—and especially the latter, wherein exegesis bleeds into demonology.
Conclusion
When did daimones become demons? The question itself might efface as much as it reveals. It has been conventional to ask when δαίμων and δαιμόνιον come to mean what we expect, both from Christian demonology and from our English word “demon.” As tempting as it might be to look back to the ancient Jewish past and try to see their daimones taking form into our “demons,” the evidence resists reduction to such presentist narratives—even in the case of LXX Isaiah.
Teleological framing has long been habitual in biblical studies, in general, and in word-studies, in particular, and it is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the culling of LXX data for “background” to Christianity. Much may be missed, however, when we look to the LXX to connect the dots between the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, treating these and other Jewish materials as “not yet” or “on the way to” Christianity. To press LXX data for daimones into one trajectory of development toward Christian demons is to miss the key concerns of this material as well as the different sorts of meaning-making made by lexical selection. As we have seen, the term δαιμόνιον is sometimes conflated, collapsing the specificity of all objects of improper sacrifice in contrast to the known deity proper to a people. It sometimes functions as a term of distinction, evoking a totalizing binary that bifurcates the transmundane in parallel to the binary Jewish/Gentile. It sometimes serves to supernaturalize, contributing to the “mapping of misfortune.”
Attention to our Hellenistic-period Aramaic and Hebrew sources for Jewish demonology aids in drawing out such concerns. Whereas later Christian demonology is often theological, for instance, much of the theorization of transmundane powers in Hellenistic-period Jewish sources is more concerned with Jewish/Gentile difference or the practical problems of the sway of such powers on individual lives. In some cases, Aramaic and Hebrew intertexts also help to situate the acts of translation that we see in LXX texts in relation to the demonological or “magical” reception of some of these same traditions (esp. Deut 32; Ps 90; Isa 34), while also serving as points of contrast to the microdynamics of meaning-making in these largely isomorphic translations.
By means of conclusion, we might also consider the converse, asking whether and how attention to LXX daimones can contribute to our understanding of Jewish demonology. Although this survey of LXX data for daimones has been preliminary, for instance, it has yielded no clear evidence for the polarization credited to “the Septuagint” since Foerster, nor for the function of δαίμων/δαιμόνιον as a “catch-all” or “one-size-fits all” category for all evil spirits, as posited by Martin. Interestingly, however, this pattern is in keeping with what we see in the surge of interest in transmundane powers in Aramaic and Hebrew sources of the Hellenistic period as well: even as texts like the Book of the Watchers, Jubilees, 11Q11, and Songs of the Sage name, list, and theorize transmundane powers, they do not systematize them into any overarching binary system like “angels” and “demons.” It is because of this tendency, for instance, that Reynolds suggests that “demigods” might remain more apt to describe such entities:
In late ancient and medieval Judaism (and even more so in Christianity) one finds cosmologies with relatively well-developed notions of “good angels” and “evil demons.” But there are good reasons not to make substantive distinctions between malevolent and beneficent gods and demi-gods during most stages of Israelite/Jewish religion, even during Hellenistic times.Footnote 146
If so, what Kitz notes of ancient Israel remains largely true in Second Temple times: we may wish to avoid imposing “the presumption that a demon is an intrinsically evil supernatural being and an angel is an intrinsically good supernatural being.”Footnote 147
Seen from this perspective, the data for LXX daimones opens up a number of new questions. To what degree, for instance, has the quest for Jewish precedents for the later Christian polarization of “angels” and “demons” distracted scholars from the task of analyzing the category-construction found within our ancient sources? Above, we noted how many Jewish discourses of distinction from the Hellenistic period seem more concerned to bifurcate Jew from Gentile than to theorize ontological dualism. Might this dynamic have an impact on the use of angeloi and other terms as well?
In addition, when we set aside the expectation that daimones evolves into a “catch-all” or “one-size-fits-all” category in this period, we notice that ruḥot/ruḥin (i.e., spirits) is actually the word that more often serves that function. This is certainly the case in the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees, in which “spirits” is used for the full range of transmundane powers; the former even theorizes “spirit” through an extended contrast with “flesh,” outlining the spaces, roles, and modes of continuance proper to each.Footnote 148 Even despite the trend toward dualism within later sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls like 1QM, moreover, P. S. Alexander stresses how it remains that “the generic term for a demon in the Scrolls is a spirit (רוח)”—a term that is quite explicitly “not exclusive to demons” but also includes angels.Footnote 149
It is certainly intriguing that the dominant taxonomic term for transmundane powers in Hebrew and Aramaic sources of the time thus shares the major feature that modern scholars have found puzzling about the Greek term daimones: the term is morally indeterminate. Esther Hamori, for instance, notes how biblical ruḥot are defined foremost by their functions in relation to God,Footnote 150 and Kitz similarly notes how they are not good or evil as much as tasked with actions that benefit or harm humankind:
A רוח produced by YHWH is a subordinate supernatural being that operates under the authority of its progenitor. As in the case of the rābiṣu, the רוח develops from divine temperament and its subsequent oral expression. An individual רוח is a member of the host of heaven and, like any other faithful retainer, responds to YHWH’s invitation to execute punishment. With the approval of YHWH, it can be tasked to be a “lying spirit.”
Some רוחות are an elite group within in the heavenly council whose members are the four winds (Jer 49:36, Zech 6:5, Dan 7:2). On other occasions they are YHWH’s messengers generated in the swirling wrath of a divine thunderstorm (Pss 35:5, 104:4). At no time do any of these entities operate in opposition to divine will. Consequently, to the ancient Near Easterners the evil רוח of a deity was a physical expression of the deity’s just response to crimes against the Godhead.Footnote 151
To be sure, in the Hellenistic period, some such “spirits” begin to take on personalities of their own, with names, feelings, and stories of their own, and some even seemingly act independently of God—as most famously in the case of the Watchers of the Book of the Watchers.Footnote 152 Do the “spirits” responsible for illness and adjured through exorcism similarly act against God? That this became a question for Jews in the Hellenistic period is suggested by the detail with which Jubilees argues otherwise, even while acknowledging the fear that “spirits” inspire in humankind.
Strikingly, however, the possibility of such independence does not affect how these transmundane powers are described categorically: even in the Greek translations of 1 Enoch, they are categorized as πνεύματα, alongside both heavenly “angels” and those “evil spirts” who might also be daimones. In other words, to ask—with Martin—“When Did Angels Become Demons?” is to miss that both had long been understood as “spirits” anyway. And thus what Martin brackets as the statements of Philo that strikes him as too “Greek” to speak to “Jewish” trends of the time is something that arguably makes much more sense from Second Temple Judaism than the retrojection of categories and concerns from later Christian sources.Footnote 153
When we look forward to Christian demonology and modern ideas about “demons,” it may be tempting to search LXX texts for evidence for a growing divide between supernatural entities that are inherently either good or evil. But when we attend to the categories found within texts closer in time to these translations, different questions arise. To what degree, for instance, might LXX uses of πνεύματα retain the older senses of ruḥot/ruḥin or reflect shifts in its Hellenistic-period usage? And if we begin our analysis from the presumption that terms like δαιμόνιον could be indeterminate, in a manner that did not necessarily trouble ancient Jews, what else might we notice of its usage in and beyond the LXX tradition?
It is unclear just how demonic LXX daimones were initially meant to be. Nevertheless, I would thus suggest that the parallel with Hellenistic-period developments in Jewish demonology remains instructive. Seen from this perspective, the use of a term marked by moral indeterminacy is far from the puzzling choice that many modern scholars have made it out to be. As with other terms for transmundane powers in ancient Jewish literature, moreover, their function may have been more determinative than their categorical class or ontological status. And even as this term is used with related but different dynamics by the Greek translators of Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Isaiah, we can place lexical selection and other translational practices within the continuum of textual practices surrounding transmundane powers in the third and second centuries BCE.
As noted at the outset, the translation tradition of the Septuagint, in aggregate, is largely isomorphic and marked by many one-to-one lexical equivalences. This insight, however, should not lull us into old habits of atomizing “the Septuagint” and analyzing the lexical choices therein in isolation from what we know of specific texts, their tendencies, and their contexts. As is clear from the test case of daimones, much can be learned from attending to such specificities and working toward more integrative approaches to situating them in their Hellenistic and Jewish contexts—as not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Within the study of Second Temple Judaism, scholars have too often treated the very existence of a Greek translation of Jewish scriptures as a concession of sorts, as if needed to protect the Judaism of Diaspora Jews against the temptations of Hellenism. We might see something different, however, when we take a more integrative approach, situating specific LXX texts in relation to other Jewish evidence from the Hellenistic period.Footnote 154 After all, this translational activity in the new prestige-language of Greek was occurring around the same time that we also see the repurposing of Aramaic into a Jewish literary language. What we see in the LXX texts is much more than a matter of Diaspora Jews negotiating some binary choice between Hebrew and Greek, let alone between “Judaism” and “Hellenism.” Through the example of daimones, for instance, we glimpse how Jewish/Gentile difference was newly retheorized, extending Deuteronomy but also resonant as a counterbinary to the contrast of “Greek” with “barbarian.” In the process, we may begin to recover a Hellenistic-period Judaism that is multilingually expressed in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, variously making sense of a Hellenistic present in conversation with older biblical texts and traditions.
