Whenever the evil spirit of God came upon Saul, David
would take the lyre and play it; Saul would find relief and feel better, and
the evil spirit would leave him. (1 Sam 16:23 | 1985 JPS Tanakh)
Then he showed me the
high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at
his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you,
O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this man a brand
plucked from the fire?” (Zech 3:1-2 | ΝRSV)
Exorcism in the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint
In the Hebrew Bible, exorcism finds its closest analogies
in two passages: David's soothing of Saul in 1 Samuel, and God's rebuke of
Satan in the book of Zechariah. In the first instance, although the evil spirit
is not actually said to possess Saul's body, David's lyre playing serves an
exorcistic function by causing the evil spirit to depart, and thus restores
Saul to a state of well being, however temporary. From this story we can see
how exorcistic psalms were attributed to David among the scrolls from Qumran.
David's own reputation for soothing the soul, combined with his successor's
vast wisdom, led to Solomon's reputation as the exorcist par excellence. A
passage from the Septuagint's Wisdom of Solomon attests to this reputation,
where Solomon gives thanks to God for having given him "unerring knowledge
of what exists, to know ... the powers of spirits" (πνευμάτων βίας).
Solomon is also apparent as a great exorcist in the later pseudepigraphic Testament
of Solomon, in the magical papyri, and in the artifacts of magical rings
and charms from the early centuries of the Common Era.
In the second passage, God's rebuke of Satan offers a
confrontational context and language similar to what one later finds in the New
Testament exorcisms. Zechariah 3:1-2 occurs within a court proceeding where the
high priest Joshua stands before the angel of the Lord with Satan as his
prosecutor. The second verse reads:
And the Lord said to Satan, "The Lord rebuke you, O
Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you (ינער יהוה בך השׂטן;
Έπιτιμήσαι κύριος έν σοί, διάβολε)! Is not this man a brand plucked from the
fire?"
This passage has a parallel in the New Testament epistle
of Jude, where the archangel Michael contests with the devil (διάβολος) over
the body of Moses, and says to him "The Lord rebuke you!" (επιτιμήσαι
σοι kúploç). Both Zechariah and Jude use the same term for "rebuke"
that one finds in several exorcistic passages in the New Testament. The
passages from Zechariah and Jude also converge with the New Testament exorcisms
in their appeal to the Lord's higher authority in controlling the offending presence.
(Eric Sorensen, Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early
Christianity [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe
157; 2002], 53-54; this interpretation is also followed by Michael J. Morris, Warding
Off Evil: Apotropaic Tradition in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Synoptic Gospels [Wissenschaftliche
Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 451; Tübingen: Mohr SIebeck, 2017],
41-42 nn. 181-182)
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