Unit 11 · The Satan, Demons and Dark Powers

Start with Numbers 22. A foreign prophet named Balaam rides his donkey toward Moab. The text says the angel of the LORD stood in the road "as an adversary" against him. The Hebrew word there is satan. Here the adversary is God’s own messenger. He blocks the road to stop Balaam from doing wrong.

The same word is used for people. In 1 Samuel 29:4, Philistine commanders worry that David might become a satan against them in battle. In 1 Kings 11:14, God raises up Hadad the Edomite as a satan against King Solomon. In these verses the word just means an enemy or opponent. Nobody in them is a spirit being.

So satan in the Hebrew Bible is first a common noun, like the English word "opponent". It describes a role, not one fixed person. Anyone can be a satan to someone else: a soldier, a king or an angel. Scholars call this the word’s plain meaning, and it is the starting point for everything else in this chapter.

Peggy L. Day made this point in An Adversary in Heaven (1988). She studied each place the Hebrew Bible uses the word. She argued that it does not yet name one single enemy of God there. Many scholars share her starting point. First ask who is opposing whom in each passage.

Job 1:6 opens a heavenly scene. The sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD, and the satan comes among them. In Hebrew the word has the article: ha-satan, "the satan". Many scholars read this as a title, like "the prosecutor" or "the challenger".

The setting is what scholars call the divine council: God’s heavenly court, where spirit beings stand before him. In Job, the satan reports that he has been roaming the earth. God points to Job as a man without equal. The satan answers that Job is good only because God protects him and his family.

God allows a test, but sets clear limits. In chapter 1 the satan may not touch Job himself. In chapter 2 he may not take Job’s life. The satan can only act inside the bounds God gives. After chapter 2 he never appears in the book again.

Many modern scholars argue that this satan is not the devil of later writings. They see an officer of the court doing a hard job, perhaps with a bad attitude. Many Christian readers have long read Job’s satan as the devil himself. Both readings look closely at the same two chapters.

Zechariah was a prophet in Jerusalem around 520 BCE. His people had come back from exile in Babylon and were rebuilding the temple. In Zechariah 3 he sees a vision set in a heavenly court. Joshua the high priest stands before the angel of the LORD. The satan stands at his right hand to accuse him.

Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. In the vision, that dirt pictures the people’s guilt. The satan’s job seems to be to point it out. But the accuser does not get the last word. The LORD rebukes the satan and calls Joshua a burning stick snatched from the fire.

Then the dirty clothes are taken off. Joshua is given clean robes and a clean turban. The vision says his guilt has been taken away. The scene moves from accusation to cleansing and a fresh start.

Like Job, this text uses the article: ha-satan. Scholars point out that in both books the satan acts inside God’s court, as an accuser. In both, God has the final say. Readers have noticed that the accuser in Zechariah ends up rebuked, a step toward the enemy of God pictured in later writings.

In Hebrew, as in English, people’s names usually do not take "the". Nobody says "the Moses" or "the Sarah". But Job and Zechariah say "the satan". Heiser argued in Demons (2020) that this small word is a clue. It shows the word is working as a title, a description of a role, not a proper name.

Think of "the judge" or "the coach". Those words tell you what a person does, not who the person is. Heiser read ha-satan the same way: the one whose job was to challenge. This is why he said the Old Testament does not use satan as a name the way the New Testament uses Satan.

One verse is harder. In 1 Chronicles 21:1 the word appears without "the": satan stood up against Israel and moved David to count the people. Many translations print it as the name Satan. Other scholars translate "an adversary", which could mean a human enemy or an unnamed spirit. The retelling of the same story in 2 Samuel 24:1 says the LORD’s anger moved David.

Readers handle this in different ways. Some see the Chronicler naming the devil for the first time. Others doubt the verse gives a personal name. The debate shows how much one small word can matter when reading ancient texts.

Around the 200s BCE, Jewish scholars began to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. That translation is called the Septuagint. In Job, the translators wrote ho diabolos for ha-satan. Diabolos means slanderer, someone who speaks lies or accusations against another. Brenton’s English version of the Septuagint (1844) reads Job 1:6 as "the devil came with them".

The English word devil comes from diabolos. So does the Spanish diablo. When the New Testament was written in Greek, its writers used both words. Sometimes they wrote Satanas, the Hebrew word in Greek letters. Sometimes they wrote diabolos. By then both had become names for one enemy of God.

Revelation 12:9 pulls the names together in one line. It calls one figure the great dragon, the old serpent, the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. Scholars often point to this verse. It links the serpent of Eden with Satan and the devil, something the Old Testament never spells out.

So the path runs like this. A Hebrew word for adversary became a title in God’s court. Greek translators rendered it slanderer. By the time of the New Testament, Satan and the devil were names for one leader of evil.

Genesis 3 tells of a serpent in the garden of Eden. It speaks to the woman and questions God’s command. The Hebrew word for serpent is nachash. Genesis 3 never calls it Satan. It is simply the serpent, more crafty than any creature God had made.

Heiser argued in The Unseen Realm (2015) that Eden was more than a garden. He read it as God’s home on earth, where God met with his council. So he saw the serpent as a divine being, not just an animal. He noted that nachash is related to Hebrew words for shining and for divination. To him this hinted at a bright, heavenly figure.

In Heiser’s reading, this being rebelled against God’s plan for humans. His punishment was to be cast down to the ground, below the heavenly realm. Heiser called him the Eden rebel, and he saw him as the one the New Testament names Satan and the devil.

Other readers differ. Many Jewish readers treat the serpent as a clever animal in a story about human choices. An early link to the devil appears in the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish book written in Greek before the New Testament. Many Christians, following Revelation 12:9 and Romans 16:20, identify the serpent with Satan, as Heiser did, though not always for his reasons.

Isaiah 14:4 tells Israel to take up a taunt song against the king of Babylon. A taunt song mocks a proud enemy who has fallen. The poem imagines the dead in the underworld stirring to greet this king. They say he has become as weak as they are.

Isaiah 14:12 calls the king helel ben shachar in Hebrew. That means "shining one, son of the dawn", likely the morning star we now know as the planet Venus. Modern translations often say Day Star or morning star. The King James Version used Lucifer, a Latin word for the morning star meaning light-bringer.

In the poem, the king says in his heart that he will climb to heaven. He will set his throne above the stars of God and sit on the mount of assembly in the far north. He wants to be like the Most High. Instead, he is brought down to the pit.

Scholars have noticed that this language fits old stories from Canaan and Ugarit. Those stories told of gods meeting on a mountain in the north. The poem borrows that picture of a heavenly council to show how far the proud king falls.

Tyre was a rich port city on the coast of what is now Lebanon. Its merchants traded across the Mediterranean Sea. Around the 580s BCE, the prophet Ezekiel spoke against its king. In Ezekiel 28:2 the king claims to be a god, sitting in the seat of the gods. Ezekiel answers that he is only a man.

Then, in 28:12–19, Ezekiel sings a lament, a sad poem for the dead or the fallen. He says the king was in Eden, the garden of God. He was covered with precious stones. He is called an anointed cherub on the holy mountain of God. He was blameless until wrong was found in him.

His heart grew proud because of his beauty. His trade filled him with violence. So God cast him from the mountain of God to the ground. The poem ends with the king as a warning to other rulers.

The lament mixes two pictures. One is a real king growing rich through trade. The other is a shining being in Eden who is thrown down. Readers have argued for centuries about how these two pictures fit together.

Many Jewish readers and many modern scholars read both poems as being about human kings. Isaiah names Babylon; Ezekiel names Tyre. In their view, the heavenly language is poetry. It shows how high these kings raised themselves and how far they fell.

Many Christian readers, from early church writers such as Origen and Tertullian onward, also saw the fall of a spirit being in these poems. They read them as telling how Satan fell through pride. That is why the name Lucifer, from Isaiah 14, became a popular name for the devil.

Heiser took a middle path in The Unseen Realm (2015). He agreed that the poems are aimed at real human kings. But he argued they borrow the story of a divine rebel who was cast down. For Heiser, the pattern behind both poems was the rebel of Eden: a shining being who wanted to rise, and fell.

All three readings take the words seriously. They differ on how poetry works and on what the poets had in mind. A careful reader can explain each view and point to the verses each one leans on.

The Second Temple period runs from about 516 BCE, when the temple was rebuilt, to 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed it. In these centuries Jewish writers wrote many books outside the Hebrew Bible. Some of them gave names to a leader of evil powers.

One name is Belial. In the Hebrew Bible, beliyya’al is a word meaning worthlessness. The KJV prints phrases like "sons of Belial" for wicked men, as in 1 Samuel 2:12. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, Belial becomes a leader of evil. The War Scroll describes a coming battle of the sons of light against the sons of darkness, who belong to Belial.

Another name is Mastema, from a Hebrew word for hostility. The book of Jubilees, written around 160 BCE, calls him the chief of the spirits. In Jubilees 10, Noah prays against the evil spirits troubling his grandchildren. Mastema asks God to leave some spirits under his control. God allows a tenth to stay and binds the rest.

Paul uses the name Belial once. In 2 Corinthians 6:15 he asks what agreement Christ could have with Belial. Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan (1995), is one of many scholars who trace how Jewish thinking about a chief enemy grew in these centuries.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell of Jesus being tested in the wilderness. In Matthew 4:1–11 the devil offers him bread, a leap from the temple and all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus answers each time with words from Deuteronomy. The devil leaves.

Notice the offer of kingdoms. In Luke 4:6 the devil claims that authority over the kingdoms has been given to him. Some scholars read this against Deuteronomy 32, where the nations were placed under other heavenly powers. Other readers see it as the devil’s boast, not a true claim.

In Luke 10:18, when his followers return from their mission, Jesus says he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. In John 12:31 he calls the devil the ruler of this world and says he will be cast out. The New Testament pictures Satan as a real enemy whose power is being broken.

Revelation 12 then shows a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight the dragon, who is thrown down to the earth. Many readers see the New Testament gathering the threads of the Old: the serpent, the accuser and the fallen king. It gives them one name.

Many people use the words Satan, fallen angels and demons as if they meant the same thing. The ancient texts are more varied than that. Start with Genesis. It tells three stories in which the order God set up is broken. Readers often call them the three rebellions of Genesis.

The first rebellion is in Eden, Genesis 3, where the serpent turns humans away from God. The second is Genesis 6:1–4, where the sons of God take human wives and the Nephilim, or giants, are born. The third is Babel, Genesis 11, when God scatters the nations.

Michael Heiser, in Demons (2020), linked each story to a group of dark powers. First is the Eden rebel, whom the New Testament calls the devil. Second are the sons of God set over the nations, who became corrupt. Paul’s letters call powers like these principalities, or rulers. Third are demons, which he read as the spirits of the dead giants.

Not every scholar sorts things this way. Many Christian teachers treat all these as one group of fallen angels led by Satan. Heiser’s map is one way to organize the texts this chapter reads next.

Deuteronomy 32:8, in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, says God divided the nations by the number of the sons of God. Many scholars read this to mean God placed the nations under lesser heavenly beings. Israel stayed God’s own portion. You met this reading in the unit on the gods of the nations.

A few verses later, Deuteronomy 32:17 says Israel sacrificed to shedim, not to God. Shedim is a Hebrew word for spirit beings. It is related to a word in Akkadian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia. The Greek Septuagint translated it daimonia, demons. The KJV says "devils".

Daniel 10 speaks of a prince of Persia and a prince of Greece who resist a heavenly messenger. Paul, writing in Greek, uses words like rulers, authorities and powers. Ephesians 6:12 says the struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers and powers of darkness in the heavenly places.

Scholars read Paul’s powers in different ways. Some see the sons of God of Deuteronomy 32, who turned corrupt, as Psalm 82 describes. Clinton E. Arnold, in Powers of Darkness (1992), read them as real spirit beings opposed to God. Walter Wink, in Naming the Powers (1984), argued they have an inner spiritual side and an outer side in human institutions.

The Gospel of Mark often uses the phrase unclean spirit. In Greek it is pneuma akatharton. Mark also uses daimonion, demon, for the same beings. The KJV usually translates daimonion as "devil", so it can say Jesus cast out many devils. Modern translations usually say demons.

Why unclean? In the Law of Moses, being unclean did not mean being dirty or bad. It meant not being ready to come near God’s holy presence. Touching a dead body made a person unclean for a time, as Numbers 19 says. Certain animals, like pigs, were unclean to eat. There were ways to become clean again.

Scholars have noticed how many unclean things fill the story of the man from the tombs. The tombs held the dead. The land was outside Israel. A herd of pigs fed nearby. In that setting, Mark says an unclean spirit troubled the man, and Jesus set him free.

So the name tells readers something. In the Gospels, these spirits stand against God’s holy presence. Jesus, in the stories, has authority over them. That is why Mark tells the story of the man from the tombs the way he does.

1 Enoch is an ancient Jewish book, written in parts between about 300 BCE and the time of Jesus. Pieces of it in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. J. T. Milik published them in 1976. The full book survives in Ge’ez, the old language of Ethiopia. It is part of the Bible only in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches.

Its first part, the Book of the Watchers, retells Genesis 6. In 1 Enoch, the Watchers are heavenly beings who came down to earth, took human wives and fathered giants. The giants brought violence, and God sent judgment. In chapters 12–16, the Watchers ask Enoch to plead for them, and God gives Enoch a reply.

In 1 Enoch 15:8–12, God explains what happens to the giants. They were born from spirits and flesh. So when their bodies die, the spirits that come out of them will be called evil spirits on the earth. The earth will be their home. They will trouble people, because they came from people.

This is one of the earliest explanations of evil spirits that survives. It appears in a Jewish book that many people read in the centuries before the Gospels were written. Many scholars think it helps explain why the Gospels speak of unclean spirits so often.

The Hebrew Bible says little about demons like those in the Gospels. Then, in the Gospels, unclean spirits appear often. Where did the idea come from? Many researchers point to the Book of the Watchers and to other books that retell it.

The evidence starts with the documents. Copies of 1 Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, so the book was read in the Second Temple period. Jubilees 10 retells the story, with evil spirits troubling Noah’s grandchildren. The New Testament knows 1 Enoch too: Jude 14–15 quotes it by name.

Archie T. Wright, in The Origin of Evil Spirits (2005), studied how early Jewish writers received the Genesis 6 story. He traced how the giants’ spirits became a way to explain evil spirits. Loren Stuckenbruck, in The Myth of Rebellious Angels (2014), also studied these traditions. Michael Heiser made the same link for general readers in Demons (2020).

Scholars offer this link as the best explanation of the evidence, not the only one. The Gospels themselves never say where demons come from. The link rests on reading them alongside the Jewish books their first readers knew.

A common Christian view says demons are fallen angels themselves. On this view, when Satan rebelled, some angels joined him. Readers point to Revelation 12:9, which says the dragon’s angels were thrown down with him. Matthew 25:41 also speaks of the devil and his angels.

Other early Christians held views close to 1 Enoch’s. Justin Martyr, a Christian writer around 150 CE, wrote about this in his Second Apology. He said angels fathered children with women, and that these children are the ones called demons. So the 1 Enoch reading has ancient company.

Jewish writings give still more accounts. The book of Jubilees, from about 160 BCE, tells of evil spirits that trouble Noah’s grandchildren. God binds nine-tenths of them and leaves one-tenth under Mastema. Later rabbis wrote about spirits in many different ways.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 70s CE, gives yet another view. In Jewish War 7.6.3 he says that what people called demons were the spirits of wicked people who had died. The texts do not agree. Readers can weigh each view by the passages it uses.

Capernaum was a fishing town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mark 1:21–28 says Jesus taught there in the synagogue, a Jewish meeting place for prayer and study, on the Sabbath. The people were amazed. He taught with authority, not like the scribes.

Then a man with an unclean spirit cried out. The spirit asked what Jesus wanted with them, and called him the Holy One of God. Jesus told it to be silent and come out. Mark says the spirit shook the man, cried out and left him.

The crowd’s question is the point of the story. They asked what this new teaching was, since even unclean spirits obeyed him. News about Jesus spread through all of Galilee. Mark puts this story near the start of his Gospel. It sets up Jesus’s authority as a main theme.

Some readers see these stories as part of a larger picture. In that view, Jesus came to take back what the dark powers had claimed. Other readers focus on what the story shows about Jesus’s teaching or about the man. All agree that Mark wants readers to ask who Jesus is.

Mark 5:1–20 is set in the country of the Gerasenes, east of the Sea of Galilee. A man lived among the tombs, apart from his town. When he saw Jesus, he ran and knelt before him. Jesus asked the spirit’s name. It answered Legion, the word for a Roman army unit of thousands, "for we are many."

The spirits asked to be sent into a herd of pigs on the hillside. Jesus allowed it. Mark says about two thousand pigs rushed down the steep bank into the sea. The herders ran to tell the town. When people came, they found the man sitting with Jesus, dressed and calm.

The townspeople were afraid and asked Jesus to leave. The man begged to go with him. Jesus said no. He sent the man home to his friends, to tell them what the Lord had done and how he had shown him mercy. The man told his story in the Decapolis, the Ten Cities, and people were amazed.

The story ends with a person back among his people. He has a home, friends and a town. Instead of being avoided, he is the one telling the news. The people who once stayed away now come to hear what happened to him.

Read Mark 1:32–34 closely. At sunset, people bring to Jesus those who were sick and those troubled by demons. Mark then says he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons. Mark lists these as two separate groups. Matthew 4:24 does the same.

This matters for how the stories are read today. Illness, disability and differences in how people’s minds work are a normal part of human life. They are never a sign of an evil spirit, and no one should ever be treated that way. The Gospel writers themselves kept healing and freeing apart.

Look also at how the stories end. The man in Capernaum is freed right in his own town’s synagogue. The man from the tombs goes home to his friends. In Mark 5:34 a woman who is healed is called daughter. The people in these stories have names, homes and families. The stories end with restoration: a person welcomed back.

This course studies how these texts were read. It does not teach any spiritual practice. Readers from many backgrounds notice two things in these stories: Jesus’s authority and his care for people.

Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Once a year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, the high priest entered the Most Holy Place. The day was set aside to make the people and the sanctuary clean before God. Jews still keep Yom Kippur today as a day of fasting and prayer.

The ceremony used two goats. The high priest cast lots over them. One lot was for the LORD, and the other was for Azazel. The goat for the LORD was offered as a sin offering. Its blood was used to cleanse the sanctuary.

Then the high priest laid both hands on the head of the living goat. He confessed over it all the sins of the people. A man led the goat away into the wilderness. Leviticus 16:22 says the goat carried the people’s sins to a land cut off from people.

The picture is clear even to a first-time reader. The people’s wrongs are not just forgiven. They are carried away, far from the camp, out of sight. Readers have long asked the same question: who or what is Azazel?

The Greek Septuagint called the second goat the one "sent away". In 1530 the English translator William Tyndale read Azazel the same way, as "the goat that goes away". He made up a new word: scapegoat. The King James Version kept it. Today scapegoat means someone blamed for others’ wrongs.

Some later rabbis read Azazel as the name of a place: a rough, steep cliff in the wilderness. The Talmud, in tractate Yoma, describes the goat being taken to a high rocky place. On this reading, Azazel names where the goat went.

1 Enoch gives Azazel a different role. In 1 Enoch 8, Azazel is one of the leaders of the Watchers. He taught people to make weapons and jewelry. In 1 Enoch 10:4–5, God tells the angel Raphael to bind Azazel and cast him into darkness in the desert, under rough, jagged rocks.

Many scholars read Azazel as a wilderness spirit being, as 1 Enoch does. Even so, they note that the goat was not a gift to Azazel. It carried the people’s sins out of the holy camp. It sent them back to a wild place, far from God’s presence.