Relax. And welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more. Welcome to Southern Demonology. As always, I am your friendly neighborhood, ancient demonologist JJ. For the last episode, we finally tackled a question that probably should have been addressed much earlier in the life of a podcast with the word demonology right there in the title. Mainly, what exactly is a demon? And as is usually the case whenever we deal with ancient religion, what seemed like an easy question became less and less easy the further backward we went.
We started in ancient Mesopotamia, where harmful supernatural beings were certainly nothing new. There were spirits associated with disease, destructive winds, restless ghosts, and all manner of other powers that an ancient person would very much prefer not to encounter. But what we did not find was a single, clean category equivalent to what most of us mean today when we use the word demon. A supernatural being could be hostile toward humanity without therefore belonging to some organized cosmic kingdom of evil.
A spirit might cause illness and yet remain part of the same supernatural order governed by the gods. A destructive entity did not have to be a rebel against creation itself, which is a distinction that becomes extremely important once we move forward into the world of Second Temple Judaism. From there, we looked at older material in the Hebrew Bible, where the same basic caution has to apply. The harmful spirit that afflicts Saul and the lying spirit from the Heavenly Council in 1 Kings cannot simply be lumped together with the demonology we encounter centuries later.
Their historical setting and theological function are different, and in both cases, the harmful supernatural agency remains inside divine sovereignty rather than belonging to an independent kingdom of evil. Only after moving into the Second Temple period did the supernatural map begin looking much more familiar to us. As Jewish thought developed within the Persian and then Hellenistic worlds, increasingly dualistic ways of organizing supernatural beings came to the foreground. Spirits were not merely being evaluated according to whether they helped or harmed humanity.
They could now be increasingly understood according to the cosmic side to which they belonged. That does not mean every Jewish writer suddenly agreed upon one perfectly organized demonology. Because if there is one thing Second Temple Jewish literature will cure you of very quickly, it is the expectation that everyone should agree. But evil was becoming more organized. And in the Book of the Watchers, one enormously influential tradition gave an explanation for where at least some of those evil spirits came from.
The Watchers descend from heaven, violate the boundary between the heavenly and earthly realms, take human women, and produce giant offspring. The giants are eventually destroyed, but their spirits remain upon the earth where they become hostile spirits that afflict humanity. That gives us one origin story for demons. But it immediately creates another question. If these spirits survive the flood and continue attacking humanity, are they simply roaming around independently, or does anyone actually rule them?
And this is where we meet one of my favorite figures in the entire corpus of Second Temple literature. Mastema. Although, as with Satan, we need to begin with a warning. Mastema was not originally a name. The Hebrew word mastema means something much closer to hostility, enmity, or opposition, and it appears in the Hebrew Bible without referring to a supernatural individual at all. Hosea uses the term as a common noun, and there is nothing there requiring us to imagine some demonic prince standing behind it.
That is important because one of the most fascinating things about ancient demonology is watching abstractions gradually acquire personalities. We have seen this process before. A word describes a function. A function becomes associated with supernatural activity. That supernatural activity becomes personified. And eventually something that began as an abstract concept walks onto the stage as a character with motives, authority, and a proper name. The dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible suggests that this may be part of what happened with Mastema.
The process is comparable to other supernatural names in which an idea or destructive power gradually becomes personalized until the word itself functions as the name of the being associated with it. And if you think about it, that makes mastama's eventual role in Jubilees almost poetically appropriate. Hostility becomes a person, not merely someone who happens to be hostile, but hostility itself given supernatural agency. The evidence from Qumran shows us that this transition was not necessarily clean or complete.
The word mastama can still refer simply to hostility or hostile activity, while other texts speak about an angel of hostility and even plural angels associated with hostilities. Sometimes the term appears in connection with Belial, whom we are going to spend quite a bit of time with in the next episode. So when we meet Mastema in Jubilees, we should not imagine that every earlier appearance of the word was secretly referring to the same person in disguise. Ancient demonology does not work nearly that neatly.
And thank goodness for that, because otherwise I would have run out of podcast material years ago. What we instead have is a developing supernatural vocabulary in which titles, functions, names, and characters overlap with one another. One author might emphasize Belial, another, Satan, another, Mastama, while still another might focus on Azazel or some different supernatural antagonist entirely. These figures can share functions without being identical. That last point is going to become extremely important because Mastema looks very much like Satan in several places in Jubilees.
But simply saying that Mastema equals Satan and calling it a day strips away most of what makes him interesting. To understand why, we need to talk about the book in which he really comes alive. The Book of Jubilees is one of those Second Temple works that I find endlessly fascinating because it takes biblical history and essentially says there are some things here that require explanation. And then it proceeds to explain them.
Sometimes very enthusiastically, Jubilees retells Genesis and the early part of Exodus while expanding the stories, inserting additional traditions, resolving perceived problems, and placing enormous emphasis upon covenant, purity, chronology, festivals, and obedience to the law. The entire work presents itself as revelation given to Moses at Sinai, which gives the author the perfect framework for saying that the stories people already knew contained much more beneath the surface than the biblical text itself explicitly revealed.
And one of the things hiding beneath that surface, according to Jubilees, is supernatural hostility. That brings us back to Noah. The Book of Watchers had explained that the spirits of the dead giants remained upon the earth after the destruction of their physical bodies. Jubilees inherits this tradition, but once again it does not merely copy it. The book reshapes the Watcher narrative in its own way, even presenting the original descent of the Watchers as having a positive purpose before their corruption.
They are sent to teach humanity justice and righteousness, but their interaction with human women eventually produces the same catastrophic result: giant offspring, violence, corruption, judgment, and the survival of hostile spirits afterward. By the time we reach Gibeli's chapter 10, Noah and his descendants are living in a world that has supposedly been cleansed through the flood. Except there is one rather enormous problem. The supernatural aftermath of the old world is still there. The spirits attack Noah's descendants. They lead people astray, cause suffering, and destroy.
So Noah prays, and God responds by ordering that the spirits be bound. If that command had simply been carried out in full, this would probably be a much shorter podcast episode. Instead, Mastema steps forward. And what happens next tells us almost everything we need to understand about his strange place within Second Temple demonology. Mastema does not rebel against God. He does not attempt to fight the angels who are going to bind the spirits. He does not gather his forces in some distant corner of the cosmos and declare his independence.
He asks that some of the evil spirits be allowed to remain under his authority, because, according to his argument, human wickedness is great, and he requires them in order to exercise the authority given to him. God permits one-tenth of the spirits to remain. The other nine-tenths are bound. And this, my friends, is where Jubilees gives us something that looks like a demonic hierarchy while simultaneously refusing to give us the absolute dualism that later traditions will often assume. Mastama has subordinates. That makes him a very strange prince of demons.
And it also makes Jubilees much more sophisticated than the simple idea that good and evil have become two equal armies staring at each other across the cosmic battlefield. That is not what we have here. The dualism is real, but limited. Evil possesses structure without possessing independence. Mastama is an adversary without being an equal opposite of God, and the spirits beneath him can belong to the hostile side of the supernatural order while still existing under ultimate divine authority. This is one reason I think Mastma is such an important bridge figure.
If we jump directly from the Satan in Job to the later devil, we make the history seem much cleaner than it actually was. The Satan in Job operates as a member of the heavenly court. The Hebrew term there functions as a title, something along the lines of the adversary or accuser, rather than necessarily as a proper name. He challenges the righteousness of Job, but he has to request permission before acting, and his activity remains carefully limited by God. Mastama shares that adversarial function, but something has changed dramatically.
He is no longer merely testing one human being from within the divine council. He has spirit. He commands them. He uses them. He participates in a much broader supernatural struggle involving temptation, corruption, violence, idolatry, and opposition to the covenant community. The adversarial function has expanded into administration. And that development becomes especially obvious in one of the most famous stories involving Abraham, the binding of Isaac. Genesis 22 begins by telling us that God tests Abraham. You all know the story.
Abraham is commanded to take Isaac, his promised son, travel to the designated mountain, and offer him there. There is enough theological literature devoted to that chapter to crush someone beneath its collective weight. And I'm not going to attempt to solve all of those problems here. Because this episode is supposed to be 30 minutes long, not 30 hours. What matters for us is what Jubilees does with the story. The author inserts Mastema into the background. It is Mastama who proposes that Abraham be tested. And the resemblance to Job immediately jumps off the page.
In both stories, we have a righteous human being who has received divine blessing. A hostile or adversarial supernatural figure questions whether that person's righteousness will survive a genuine test. Permission is given, and the human being is placed in a situation of terrible suffering or danger through which faithfulness is demonstrated. Jubilees has effectively transferred the adversarial testing function into Mastama. That does not mean the author simply copied the character from Job, changed the name, and hoped nobody would notice. The supernatural worlds are already different.
Job's accuser has no demonic host under his command. Mastama does. And that difference is incredibly important because the development is no longer merely about accusation. It is about the organization of evil. But there is something else going on with the binding of Isaac that I think deserves more attention. The initiative behind the disturbing command has shifted. Genesis says that God tests Abraham. Jubilees introduces Mastema as the figure who proposes the test. God still authorizes what follows.
So Jubilees has absolutely not removed divine sovereignty or completely solved the theological problem. But it has created distance. The hostile impulse now has an intermediary. And this may help explain part of Mastema's development. The DVD raises the possibility that changing concerns about theodicy contributed to the increasing independence of hostile supernatural figures.
Theodicy, for anyone fortunate enough never to have spent an afternoon tangled up in that particular philosophical briar patch, is essentially the attempt to reconcile the goodness and justice of God with the reality of evil and suffering. And one of the ways religious traditions can address that problem is through intermediaries. An older text can attribute a destructive action directly to God. A later interpreter, increasingly uncomfortable with that attribution, can retain divine sovereignty while introducing another figure through whom the destructive action takes place.
Which brings us to Moses. Because if you thought Jubilee's inserting mastoma into the binding of Isaac was interesting, wait until we reached one of the strangest passages in Exodus. Exodus chapter 4 contains an episode that appears so abruptly that I would not blame anyone for thinking some pages had become stuck together. Moses has finally agreed to return to Egypt. He is traveling with his family. God has just spoken about what Moses is to say to Pharaoh. Then, at a lodging place along the way, God encounters him and seeks to kill him.
Zipporah circumcises their son, touches Moses with the foreskin, makes the famous statement about a bridegroom of blood, and whatever danger had been present immediately passes. Then the narrative continues. No explanation. No helpful narrator stepping in to tell you what in the world just happened. Nothing. It is one of those biblical passages that biblical scholars have stared at for generations while slowly developing migraines.
There are enormous debates about who exactly was endangered, why circumcision solved the problem, whether we are dealing with fragments of an older tradition, and what precisely the original story may have meant. Jubilees takes a much simpler approach. Mastema tried to kill Moses. And once again, the change is revealing. The older biblical narrative places the supernatural danger directly within divine agency. The later Second Temple retelling gives the hostile action to Mastama. The danger remains. The event remains. Divine sovereignty remains. But hostility. Hostility has acquired a face.
And that brings us directly back to Mastema's name. Hostility is no longer merely something that happens. Hostility has become someone who acts. That is why I think the phrase, hostility gets a name, captures Mastomer better than simply calling him Satan. He represents the increasing personification and organization of supernatural evil, but at the same time he retains enough of the older framework that he remains completely subordinate to God. The Exodus narrative gives Mastema even more to do.
He becomes involved with the Egyptians and their opposition to Moses and Israel, which pushes him beyond the role of tester and much closer to the ruler of a hostile supernatural camp. But even here the picture remains complicated because Jubilees gives Israel a very particular place within its supernatural geography. The nations can be associated with supernatural rulers and spirits, but Israel belongs directly to God. That means covenant is not simply a matter of identity or ritual obedience. It has supernatural consequences.
Circumcision, obedience to the law, participation in the covenant, and proper worship all become part of the boundary separating the covenant community from the authority of hostile spirits. The DDD notes this particularly in relation to the angel of hostility tradition, where covenantal obedience protects Israel from the supernatural powers associated with opposition. And I think that marks a major development from the Mesopotamian material we discussed in the first episode.
In Mesopotamia, if you encountered a harmful spirit, you might use an incantation, call upon a protective god, appeal to divine judges, or perform some other apotropaic rite. The question was how to remove the spirit. Jubilees is increasingly interested in a different question. Under whose authority do you belong? That is the language of jurisdiction. And jurisdiction is exactly what Mastema possesses. Not unlimited jurisdiction, but delegated authority over a portion of the hostile spirits that remain in the world.
Now, here is where I want to complicate something from the previous episode, and something I simplified too much in the first draft of this one. When we talk about the demonic remnants of the Watcher catastrophe, we often say that the giants die and their spirits become demons. That is certainly one major strand of the tradition. And the phrase used at Qumran, Spirits of the Bastards, is normally understood as referring to the spirits of the giant offspring. But that does not exhaust the supernatural population associated with the Watcher tradition.
The Songs of the Sage, preserved in 4Q510 and 4Q511, gives us one of the most fascinating lists of hostile beings from Qumran. The sage proclaims divine glory for the purpose of terrifying hostile supernatural powers. Among those powers are the spirits of destructive or ravaging angels, the spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, and other frightening beings whose exact translation is debated. That list matters because the spirits associated with the angels are distinguished from the spirits of the bastards.
The second category fits very comfortably with the giant spirits we already know from 1 Enoch. The first is more complicated. Some scholars understand the expression as something like demonic agents of destruction, but others have argued that we should take seriously the possibility that these are the surviving spirits of fallen angels themselves. And there are other texts that make that possibility more interesting. 1 Enoch 19 speaks about the spirits of the angels who united with women and describes those spirits as standing upon the earth and corrupting humanity until the final judgment.
So the picture is broader than a simple equation in which all post-watcher demons are the dead giants. There are traditions in which the spirits of the giants continue to afflict humanity. And there are also traditions that appear to preserve or at least allow for the continuing activity of the spirits associated with the fallen watchers themselves. That makes the demonic landscape surrounding Mastuma considerably more crowded and considerably more interesting. Because once we reach Quran, supernatural evil is no longer one neatly defined species descended from one primordial catastrophe.
We find giant spirits, potentially watcher spirits, demons, lilith, destructive angels, and a variety of hostile beings, all appearing within an increasingly organized supernatural opposition. And that is exactly why we have to resist the desire to simplify Mastama into the ruler of, quote, the demons, as though everyone in the Second Temple period shared a single taxonomic chart. Jubilees gives him authority over the hostile spirits in its own retelling of the Watcher tradition. Other texts preserve overlapping but not identical populations of supernatural evil.
And eventually, Qumran will place those populations within an even more comprehensive dualistic structure. Before we get there, though, I want to return to one detail from Jubilee's chapter 10 that I think gets overshadowed by Mastama's negotiation. Noah's descendants are suffering from spiritual affliction. Most of the spirits are bound, some remain. So what happens to humanity? The answer is fascinating. Noah receives knowledge of healing. An angel teaches him medicines derived from plants so that the diseases and afflictions by the spirits can be treated.
And Noah records that knowledge for his descendants. I love this passage because it absolutely destroys our modern tendency to divide supernatural and physical explanations into two mutually exclusive boxes. If a disease has a supernatural cause, we assume medicine shouldn't work. If medicine works, then we assume the supernatural explanation must disappear. Jubilee sees no contradiction at all. A hostile spirit can cause the illness. A plant can treat it. The existence of medicine does not cancel demonology, and demonology does not cancel medicine. They belong to the same explanatory world.
And that becomes even more interesting when we remember what caused the original Watcher catastrophe. Knowledge. Or, more specifically, knowledge transmitted outside its proper boundaries. The Watchers teach forbidden arts, and those teachings contribute to humanity's corruption. Yet here an angel gives Noah legitimate knowledge that allows humanity to resist the consequences of that corruption. So the problem was never knowledge itself. It was authority who gives it. For what purpose? Within what boundaries? That question sits at the heart of Jubilees.
The right calendar matters because authority matters. The proper festivals matter because authority matters. Circumcision matters because covenantal boundaries matter. The law matters because obedience identifies where a person belongs. And Mastama exists almost as the supernatural negative image of that system. He works through corruption, temptation, pollution, misdirection, and the violation of proper boundaries. Yet even he cannot step outside the ultimate authority that defines those boundaries. This is one reason I hesitate to call Jubilees radically dualistic.
The book certainly moves us much farther toward a universe divided between opposing supernatural forces. But the opposition is profoundly unequal. Mastama is not God's opposite. He is not an eternal anti-God. He is a subordinate antagonist whose activity is tolerated within limits. That may sound like a technical distinction, but it changes everything. If you have two equal cosmic principles eternally opposed to one another, you have one kind of dualism. If you have one supreme God and a subordinate evil ruler who has temporary permission to operate, you have something else.
That is one reason the next episode is so important. Because when we enter the sectarian writings from Qumran, the language of opposing camps becomes much sharper. There we encounter the Prince of Lights and the Angel of Darkness, the spirits of truth and falsehood, the lot belonging to God and the lot belonging to Belial. And eventually the expectation of an eschatological war in which earthly history and supernatural conflict mirror one another. Mastama points toward that world, but he has not quite arrived there.
And I think the best way to understand why is to compare him once more with the Satan of Job. The Satan in Job has a role. Mastama has a domain. That is a major difference. The Satan questions. Mastama administers. The Satan tests Job after receiving permission. Mastema receives permission to maintain an entire portion of the hostile spiritual population. The Satan belongs to the divine court. Mastama increasingly presides over a hostile supernatural sphere while remaining subordinate to the same God he opposes. That is not merely the same character with a different name.
It is a different stage in the conceptual organization of supernatural evil. And this may be one of the most important developments in the entire history of demonology. Because once evil spirits possess leadership, the next conceptual step becomes much easier. They can possess ranks, territory, purpose, a shared identity, an opposing community, and eventually an army. I think we tend to underestimate how significant that development is because we have inherited the completed structure. If I say Prince of Demons, nobody finds the idea strange. Of course, demons have a prince.
Of course, evil spirits form hierarchies. Of course, the supernatural world contains opposing armies. Those assumptions have become so natural to later religious imagination that we forget someone had to develop them. Earlier, harmful spirits did not require a commander. The Mesopotamian demons we discussed previously could simply be dangerous powers encountered in illness, storms, death, or other threatening experiences.
Jacobson even notes that the great god An could be described as the father of innumerable demons and evil spirits, alongside the gods themselves, which is about as far removed from the later concept of a separate anti-divine kingdom as you can get while still maintaining supernatural beings that want to ruin your day. By the time we reach Jubilees, the picture has changed. The spirits have a prince. And once they have a prince, evil is beginning to acquire political structure. That phrase may sound strange, but I mean it quite literally.
Ancient descriptions of the divine world often borrow human social models. Gods have courts, kings, councils, messengers, armies, officials, territories. Once supernatural evil becomes organized, it begins borrowing the same imagery. There can be a prince because there can be subjects. There can be a kingdom because there can be jurisdiction. There can be war because there are now opposing communities capable of fighting one another. Mastama is therefore not simply an interesting demonic character, he is evidence of a conceptual transformation. Hostility has become political.
And that brings us back to his name one final time. Mastama means hostility. At first, it is simply a word. In some texts, it remains a word. In others, it becomes associated with supernatural hostility. Then we encounter the angel of hostility. Finally, in Jubilees, Mastom stands before us as a proper personality, commanding hostile spirits and negotiating for the continuation of his authority. The noun has become a prince. And maybe that is why Mastma feels simultaneously familiar and strange.
He resembles Satan because he performs adversarial functions that later tradition associates with Satan. He tests, he accuses, he tempts, he seeks destruction, he commands evil spirits. But he also preserves features of an older supernatural worldview that later popular demonology often forgets. He asks permission. He operates within limits. He cannot prevent his spirits from being bound. His authority exists because it is allowed to exist. He is an enemy without being an equal rival, which creates one last theological problem that Jubilees never completely resolves.
If Mastema is evil, why allow him to continue? Why permit one-tenth of the spirits to remain? Why permit Abraham to be tested? Why allow Moses to be attacked? Why allow supernatural hostility any jurisdiction whatsoever? And this is where the relationship between demonology and human moral responsibility becomes incredibly interesting. Mastema argues that humanity itself is wicked. His spirits tempt, but human beings remain capable of responding. The supernatural enemy does not eliminate human responsibility. Instead, evil becomes something that exists both outside and inside humanity.
There are hostile spirits, but there are also human choices. There is demonic temptation, but there is also covenantal obedience. And Jubilees never allows one to completely replace the other. That tension will become even more pronounced at Qumran. The community rule can describe human beings as belonging to opposing lots, while simultaneously describing two spirits operating within humanity. Belial can possess a dominion, yet individual human beings are still expected to obey or rebel.
Supernatural evil increasingly explains why the world is broken, but it does not completely excuse the people living inside that broken world. And perhaps that is one reason these figures become so useful. Mastama allows the author to say that evil has supernatural organization without saying that God has lost control of creation. He allows the author to create distance between God and hostile actions without removing divine sovereignty. He allows evil spirits to possess leadership without granting their leader equality with God.
He allows temptation to have an external source without erasing human responsibility. And he allows older biblical stories to be reread inside a newer supernatural framework. That is a tremendous amount of theological work for one demonic prince. So where does that leave us? In the previous episode, we watched the category of demon develop from a much older and messier supernatural landscape.
We saw that harmful spirit did not automatically mean morally evil rebel, and we followed the gradual development of a more dualistic taxonomy in which supernatural beings could increasingly be classified according to their alignment with a cosmic side. We then encountered the Watcher tradition, where the catastrophe of Genesis 6 became an explanation for the origin of hostile spirits.
The spirits of the dead giants survived the destruction of their bodies and continue afflicting humanity, while other Second Temple traditions, including material reflected in the Songs of the Sage and 1 Enoch 19, preserve the possibility of continuing hostile spirits associated with the Fallen Watchers themselves. Jubilees inherits that complicated supernatural world and gives part of it a prince. Mastama begins as hostility and becomes hostility. He commands evil spirits, proposes the testing of Abraham, attacks Moses, assists Israel's enemies, and seeks to corrupt humanity.
At the same time, his power remains limited, derivative, and temporary. He is not the sovereign of an independent kingdom. Not yet. What he represents instead is one of the most important transitional moments in the development of Jewish demonology. Evil has acquired leadership. And once evil possesses leadership, the movement toward a full supernatural kingdom becomes much easier. That is exactly where we are heading next. Because when we enter the sectarian world represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, we find a supernatural conflict that has become extraordinarily comprehensive.
There is Belial whose authority reaches across the forces of darkness. There are spirits assigned to opposing moral camps. Human beings themselves are described according to cosmic lots. History is moving toward a final confrontation in which earthly and heavenly warfare become inseparable. And the language is no longer merely about a prince bargaining to retain a tenth of some hostile spirits. It is about dominion. That is the word I want you to keep in mind for the next episode. Dominion. Until next time, my friends, stay safe out there.