Friday, August 28, 2020

Matthew Thiessen on Demons and Demon Possession in the Pre-Exilic Era

  

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)