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Before the grimoires

What the Hebrew Bible actually says about demons and angels, and what later tradition projected onto it.

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The methodological problem

Almost everything popular culture calls "biblical demonology" is not in the Bible. This is not a provocation but the majority position in current textual criticism: the Hebrew Bible has no demonological system. There is no infernal hierarchy, there are no fallen angels, there is no Devil. There is a handful of obscure terms — several of them hapax legomena, words that occur only once — which later tradition filled with content.

The standard study is Judit M. Blair's De-Demonising the Old Testament (University of Edinburgh, 2008; Mohr Siebeck, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2.37). Blair applies strict contextual reading instead of the usual route — locating a Mesopotamian or Ugaritic parallel and projecting it onto the Hebrew text — and concludes that none of the five terms she examines functions as the name of a demon: Azazel is a personification of chaos; Lilith, plausibly a night bird; Deber, Qeteb and Resheph are personified destructive forces acting as agents of Yahweh's punishment, not as autonomous powers.

The mechanism of the later deposit is, to a large extent, an accident of translation. Hebrew Psalm 96:5 says that "all the gods of the peoples are elilim", nonentities; the Septuagint (Ps 95:5 LXX) translates: "all the gods of the nations are daimonia". The same happens with shedim in Deuteronomy 32:17. In Hebrew the foreign gods are non-existent; in Greek, real demons. Paul inherits the reading (1 Corinthians 10:20) and from there it passes to the Church Fathers and to the grimoire: the monotheism that denied the other gods became, on crossing into Greek, a dualism that preserved them in degraded form.

The "demons" of the Hebrew Bible

The se'irim (שְׂעִירִים, "the hairy ones", from sa'ir, he-goat) appear in Leviticus 17:7, 2 Chronicles 11:15 and Isaiah 13:21 and 34:14: Leviticus forbids sacrificing to them, Chronicles says that Jeroboam appointed priests for them, and Isaiah has them dancing in the ruins of Babylon and Edom alongside jackals and ostriches. The Targums and 3 Baruch already read them as demons, and the Jewish Encyclopedia compares them to satyrs and to the jinn; but the Hebrew text never defines them: they are images of threatening beasts outside civilized space.

The shedim (שֵׁדִים) appear exactly twice: Deuteronomy 32:17 and Psalm 106:37, both about sacrifices to foreign divinities. The most widely accepted etymology links them to Akkadian šēdu, a tutelary spirit that could be protective or maleficent: closer to a genius than to a Christian demon. Deuteronomy calls them "gods they had not known": the term disqualifies foreign cults, it does not describe an infernal zoology. The Jewish Encyclopedia flatly denies that Jewish demonology derives from an earlier Hebrew belief: it regards it as a Babylonian and Persian import assimilated in the diaspora.

Azazel (עֲזָאזֵל) appears only in Leviticus 16, the Yom Kippur ritual: two goats, one sacrificed "for YHWH", the other sent into the wilderness "for Azazel" laden with the confessed transgressions. The text does not say what Azazel is. Proposals have included a place name, a lexical reading ez-azel — "the goat that goes away", whence the English scapegoat — a desert demon, and desolation personified. What is decisive is chronological: neither the demonic sense nor the root עזל is attested before the Second Temple period. The demon Azazel does not precede the text: it follows it.

Lilith (לִילִית) appears only once in the Hebrew Bible: Isaiah 34:14, in the catalogue of creatures that will occupy devastated Edom; translations waver between "screech owl", "night hag" and "Lilith". The Mesopotamian background is ancient: the female demons lilītu and ardat lilî, dangerous to pregnant women and newborns, documented for some four thousand years; the Arslan Tash plaque (8th–7th century BCE), the Songs of the Sage from Qumran (4Q510–511) and the incantation bowls of Nippur (c. 600 CE) conjure her. But the Lilith popular culture knows — Adam's first wife, who demands equality, pronounces the ineffable Name and flees to the Red Sea — is neither biblical nor ancient: it comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical Jewish text from before the year 1000 CE. Her entire mythology is medieval; her feminist reading, twentieth-century.

Resheph (רֶשֶׁף) is the cleanest documented case of degradation. He was a Canaanite god of war and plague, worshipped from the third millennium BCE and with an important cult at Ugarit. In the Bible he survives hollowed out: in Habakkuk 3:5 he marches in Yahweh's retinue alongside Deber ("plague") as a servant, not as a rival, and in Deuteronomy 32:24 and Psalm 78:48 he is an instrument of divine wrath. At the end of the process, resheph is a common noun: "flame, spark". That is demythologization, not demonization: two operations that later tradition confused.

Baal: from rival god to first demon in the catalogue

This section matters more than the others because out of it comes Bael, the first of the 72 spirits of the Ars Goetia.

Ba'al is not a proper name. It is a Northwest Semitic noun meaning "lord", "owner" — a husband is his wife's ba'al — and as a divine title it requires an article, a genitive or context to know which god is meant. In the Late Bronze Age Levant it designated above all Hadad, god of storm and fertility, whose proper name came to be considered too sacred to pronounce; the Ugaritic Baal Cycle narrates his combats against Yam (the sea) and Mot (death). The biblical polemic is therefore the polemic against Yahweh's direct competitor for the same functional niche: the duel on Carmel (1 Kings 18) is not a struggle against evil but a test of meteorological efficacy between two storm gods.

Baal-Zebub (בַּעַל זְבוּב) appears in 2 Kings 1:2-16: king Ahaziah, injured, sends to consult "Baal-Zebub, god of Ekron", a Philistine city, and Elijah rebukes him. The name literally means "lord of the flies", and therein lies the problem. Since Thomas Kelly Cheyne it has been argued that the original form was Baal-Zebul, "Baal the prince", a title documented at Ugarit (zbl b'l arṣ), and that zebub is a deliberate polemical distortion by Israelite scribes: "the Prince" is degraded to "the lord of the flies". A Ugaritic text moreover shows Baal driving away disease-causing flies, which suggests a healing aspect: precisely what Ahaziah was going to consult him about.

The New Testament preserves the form Beelzeboul (not zebub) and promotes it: in Matthew 12:24 and Mark 3:22 he is "the prince of demons", and the identification with Satan is consolidated in the Church Fathers. From there to Weyer and the Lemegeton the road is straight: Bael, first king of the Ars Goetia, who governs the East with 66 legions and appears with three heads — cat, toad and man — is the storm god of Ugarit after three thousand years of cumulative degradation: theological rival, scribal caricature, prince of demons and, finally, entry number 1 in a catalogue. Western demonology begins, literally, with a defeated god.

1 Enoch and the invention of the fallen angel

None of the above explains the fallen angel, because he is not in the Hebrew Bible. He is in 1 Enoch, a compilation of five works whose first section, the Book of the Watchers (chs. 1–36), is dated to the 4th–3rd centuries BCE; the other four range from the 3rd to the 1st century BCE. At Qumran eleven Aramaic manuscripts turned up in Cave 4 (1948); significantly, the Book of Parables is not attested there. The work was composed in Aramaic, circulated in Greek and survives complete only in Ge'ez.

The myth is simple and devastating. Two hundred angels led by Semyaza (Shemihazah) desire the daughters of men and swear a mutual pact on Mount Hermon. They descend, take wives and beget giants — the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 — who devour humanity's resources and then humanity itself. In parallel, Azazel teaches the metallurgy of weapons and cosmetics, and others teach enchantments, astrology and meteorology. The archangels Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel intercede; God orders Raphael to bind Azazel in darkness until the judgement, Gabriel to destroy the giants and Michael to shut up the Watchers for seventy generations. And — a detail decisive for all later demonology — the spirits of the dead giants, who because of their mixed nature cannot wholly die, are left wandering: they are the demons.

Specialists distinguish two strata: the Shemihazah strand, where the sin is illicit sexual mixture, and the Azazel strand, where it is the revelation of forbidden knowledge. Note that Azazel, a term without definition in Leviticus 16, here receives a biography, a crime and a punishment — he is bound in the desert, like the goat: exegesis created the character out of the gap.

The text had real authority: Jude 14-15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 as prophecy. Rejected by rabbinic Judaism and by almost all of Christianity, it remains canonical in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches. It vanished from the West until James Bruce brought three Ge'ez copies back from Ethiopia in 1773: the foundational text of the fallen angel was lost to Europe for more than a thousand years while the doctrine it had engendered went on living without its source.

Asmodeus, Tobias and the *Testament of Solomon*

Asmodeus enters in the Book of Tobit (c. 3rd–2nd century BCE; with Hebrew and Aramaic fragments at Qumran). Sarah has lost seven husbands: Asmodeus kills them on the wedding night. Tobias, instructed by the archangel Raphael, burns the heart and liver of a fish; the smoke drives off the demon, who flees to Egypt, where Raphael binds him. The etymology points to Avestan aēšma-daēva, "demon of wrath": it is one of the clearest Persian imports in Jewish demonology. Tobit's structure is already a complete magical protocol — name / affliction / repellent substance / subduing angel / place of confinement — and that scheme is exactly the one in the Testament of Solomon and, from there, in every grimoire.

The Testament of Solomon is a Greek pseudepigraphon of disputed date — proposals range from the 1st to the 5th century CE, and recent scholarship (Sarah L. Schwarz, 2007; Todd Klutz) insists that what survives is the product of successive recensions — preserved in scattered manuscripts (Mount Athos, Bologna, Vienna) and divergent versions: there is no single text and no author.

The plot: the demon Ornias torments a boy who is a favourite of Solomon; the king prays and the archangel Michael hands him, on God's behalf, a ring with an engraved seal that gives him power over the spirits. With it he captures Ornias; through Ornias he subdues Beelzeboul, prince of demons; and through him, all the rest. With that enslaved army he builds the Temple in Jerusalem. Under interrogation, each demon declares its name, the harm it causes and the angel or formula that nullifies it: Asmodeus, who confesses to being the son of a human mother and an angel father, is neutralized by Raphael and by the liver of a certain Assyrian fish, a direct citation of Tobit. In chapter 18 the 36 decans of the zodiac appear, each with its ailment and its incantation.

The entire Western Solomonic system is already here: the seal-ring, the delegated divine authority, the interrogated catalogue, the astrological correspondence, the demon–constraining angel pairing and the forced labour of the spirits. The Clavicula Salomonis, the Lemegeton and the Ars Goetia are developments of this late-antique skeleton, with the Greek magical papyri, the Sefer ha-Razim and the Liber officiorum spirituum as intermediate links.

The angelic hierarchies: a sixth-century bureaucracy

The nine choirs are so familiar that they are assumed to be biblical. They are not. The scheme comes from De coelesti hierarchia, by the author tradition called Dionysius the Areopagite and who is today designated Pseudo-Dionysius: a Syrian writer of around 500 CE, a Neoplatonist with evident debts to Proclus. Until Lorenzo Valla (1457) he was identified with the Athenian converted by Paul in Acts 17:34, which gave the system a quasi-apostolic authority it did not deserve. The order is: seraphim, cherubim, thrones; dominions, virtues, powers; principalities, archangels, angels.

The scriptural basis of each choir is uneven and sometimes almost nil:

• Seraphim: a single appearance, Isaiah 6:2-6, six-winged beings beside the throne.
• Cherubim: abundant (Genesis 3:24, Exodus 25, Ezekiel 1 and 10), but as guardians and support of the divine throne, closer to the Assyrian lamassu than to winged children.
• Thrones, dominions, powers, principalities, virtues: these come from two Pauline lists, Colossians 1:16 and Ephesians 1:21 (plus Romans 8:38), which are not an angelic hierarchy but polemical enumerations of cosmic powers whose rhetorical function is to declare them subject to Christ — Colossians 2:15 says that Christ "disarmed the principalities and powers". Paul names them in order to subordinate them, not to organize them.
• Archangels: the term archangelos appears twice in the whole New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and Jude 9.

Pseudo-Dionysius thus turned a polemic into an organizational chart. Its reception was not unanimous: Gregory the Great (Homily 34 on the Gospels) proposed a different order, swapping virtues and principalities, and Thomas Aquinas discussed both in the Summa Theologiae (I, qq. 106–114) before coming down for Dionysius, granting him scholastic legitimacy. Dante enshrined it in Paradiso XXVIII: Beatrice sets out the Dionysian order and adds that Gregory, on seeing the actual arrangement of heaven, laughed at his own mistake. That smile is the moment when an anonymous Neoplatonic treatise became fixed as the imaginative doctrine of the West.

The Shem HaMephorash: where Kabbalah ends and French occultism begins

Here the layers urgently need separating, because this is where they have been mixed most. Shem HaMephorash (שֵׁם הַמְּפֹרָשׁ) means "the explicit Name"; in tannaitic usage it designated the Tetragrammaton, and only over time was it extended to divine names of 12, 22, 42 and 72 letters.

The mechanics. Exodus 14:19, 20 and 21 each have exactly 72 letters in Hebrew. Verse 19 is written in the normal direction, v. 20 in reverse order and v. 21 normally again — a boustrophedon reading, "as the ox ploughs". Stacked one above another, the three are read in vertical columns of three letters: 72 trigrams. This is a classical, documented Jewish technique: Rashi explains it in his commentary on b. Sukkah 45a and the Sefer ha-Bahir (c. 1150–1200) describes it; legend says Moses used that name to part the sea, and the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh (printed in Amsterdam in 1701 on the basis of earlier materials) treats it as a central element of the practice.

What classical Jewish Kabbalah does NOT do. It does not turn the trigrams into 72 angels with names, offices, planets, zodiacal degrees, psalms and date ranges of the year: they are fragments of a Name of God, not a staffing template for heaven. And the Jewish sources are explicitly uncertain — Maimonides and Rashi state that the 42-letter name is unknown, and Solomon ibn Adret (1235–1310) documents that Sephardim and Ashkenazim used different methods and letter permutations.

Where the 72 angels are born. The decisive turn is Johann Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica (1517): he reinterprets the trigrams as "names of angels, individuated products of God's will" and — a crucial step — adds the suffixes -el or -yah ("God") to make them pronounceable as angelic names. That suffixation is not in the classical Jewish sources: it is an invention of Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. From Reuchlin it passes to Cornelius Agrippa (De occulta philosophia, 1531–33) and to Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652–54). Blaise de Vigenère and Thomas Rudd begin to propose the 72 names as a counterweight to the spirits of the Ars Goetia: the one-to-one angel–demon pairing comes from this line, not from Kabbalah.

The nineteenth-century French layer. Lazare Lenain (1793–1877), a bookseller from Amiens, published in 1823 La Science cabalistique, ou l'Art de connaître les bons génies, in a print run of 500 copies. It is he who fixes the system as it circulates today: the 72 angels as "good genii" around the throne, with talismans, invocations and a governing angel according to date of birth, plus the correlation of each angel with a word for "God" in various languages, an innovation absent from the medieval Jewish sources. Papus devotes a chapter to him in La Cabbale (1903) and declares him "the highest degree of Judaeo-Christian Kabbalah"; Robert Ambelain repeats the operation in La Kabbale pratique (1951), the immediate source of almost all contemporary literature on "the 72 angels".

The honest genealogy: Jewish and classical are the boustrophedon of Exodus 14, the trigrams and their status as a divine Name; Christian-Renaissance, their conversion into 72 angels by means of suffixes; nineteenth-century French occultist, the complete system of natal angels, talismans, psalms, zodiacal degrees and point-by-point opposition to the 72 Goetic demons. To call the third of these "Kabbalah" is a historical error, however widespread the usage.

Satan: from prosecutor to Devil

Hebrew śāṭān (שָׂטָן) is a common noun: "adversary", "accuser", from a root meaning to obstruct; in 1 Samuel 29:4 it designates a human adversary. With the article — ha-satan, "the accuser" — it is not a proper name but an office.

The key passages confirm this. In Numbers 22:22 it is Yahweh's own angel who stands "as a satan" against Balaam. In Job 1–2, ha-satan enters with "the sons of God" into the heavenly court and acts as a prosecutor: he proposes testing Job and acts only with God's express permission. He is not God's enemy: he is God's official. In Zechariah 3:1-2 (February 519 BCE) he accuses the high priest Joshua in a heavenly trial and is rebuked, again within the procedure. The most eloquent case is the comparison between 2 Samuel 24:1, where it is Yahweh who incites David to number Israel, and its rewriting in 1 Chronicles 21:1 (4th–3rd century BCE), where the one who incites is "a satan": the Chronicler shifts onto an intermediary a theologically uncomfortable action, and that displacement shows how the figure is born.

The Septuagint translates ha-satan as diabolos, "slanderer", a term that passes into the New Testament and, by way of Latin, into the modern "devil". In Second Temple literature — 1 Enoch, Jubilees (c. 150 BCE) with its Mastema, the Qumran texts with Belial — the adversary becomes chief of the fallen angels and the active principle of evil, under the perceptible influence of Iranian dualism. In the New Testament he is already a character: tempter, "prince of this world", chief of the demons.

Lucifer is an accident of translation. Isaiah 14:12 is addressed, according to the heading of the chapter itself (14:4), to the king of Babylon: "how you have fallen from heaven, helel ben shachar?", "bright star, son of the dawn". It is a taunt song over the fall of a monarch, built out of Canaanite imagery: the god of the morning star, Athtar, who tries to occupy Baal's throne, fails and descends. The Vulgate translates lucifer, "light-bearer", the ordinary Latin name for the planet Venus as the morning star. Origen and Tertullian linked the passage to the fall of Satan; Jerome fixed it by keeping Lucifer; Augustine consolidated pride as the primordial angelic sin, and to these were added Ezekiel 28 — addressed to the king of Tyre and read as a portrait of the fallen cherub — and Luke 10:18. The current scholarly consensus is unequivocal: Isaiah 14 speaks neither of Satan nor of any angel. The Devil called Lucifer exists because a Latin astronomical metaphor was read as a proper name.

WarningHistorical and artistic content. We do not recommend performing any ritual, invocation or practice involving these entities. This is outreach about texts from the 15th to the 20th century, not an operative guide.