Demons in the Ancient
Near East
As Milgrom notes,
Israel’s neighbors had a robust demonology. One of the most important
demonological works, the sixteen-tablet book known as Udug-hul (Evil
Demons), shows how early and widespread was the belief that the demonic world could
possess people. This work contains materials dating from the Old Akkadian
(2300-2200 BCE) to the Seleucid period (300-200 BCE), thus demonstrating the
long-standing fears that many people in the ancient Near East had of the
demonic. For instance, one apotropaic text from the composite work states,
Do [not say, “let me]
stand [at the side].”
[Go] out, [evil Udug-demon,] to [a distant place],
[go] away, [evil Ala-demon], to [the desert]. (Udug-hul 8.73-75)
Here we see, like in
Leviticus 16, the association between the demonic and the wilderness, as well
as a spell to exorcise the demonic presence. Another text portrays the
possession of a man and the rite needed to remove the demon from the man’s
body:
Go, my son, Asalluhi,
Pour water in an anzam-cup,
And put in it tamarisk and the innuš-plant.
(He cited the Eridu [incantation]). Calm the patient, and bring out the censer
and torch for him,
so that the Namtar demon existing in a man’s body may depart from it. (Udug-hul
7.669-74)
Yet another illuminating
text describes the nature of the demonic in the following terms:
Neither males are
they, nor females,
They are winds ever sweeping along,
They have not wives, engender not children,
Know not how to show mercy,
Hear not prayer and supplication. (Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets
in the British Museum 16, plates 15, v. 37-46) (Matthew Thiessen, Jesus
and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within
First-Century Judaism [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2020], 127)
