Another question about demons interests me that I’ve never seen addressed: where did they come from, anyhow?

Read through the whole Old Testament. There’s not a mention of demon oppression anywhere. The closest we get is Saul who is oppressed by an evil spirit from God. (This is not “evil” in the moral sense, but evil in the sense of causing injury.) There’s mention of a “demon” in Leviticus, but it’s not explained, and doesn’t seem to be the sort that oppresses people. In Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar is driven from human society in a fashion that looks kind of like demon oppression, but it’s not described as such. In the Old Testament, we just don’t see demon oppression as a phenomenon.

Yet in the gospels, Jesus can’t step outside without tripping over a demoniac. We go from a world with no mention of demons in it, to demons everywhere you look. It’s pandemonium! And Matthew, Mark, and Luke also feel no need to explain to the audiences what’s happening, “Oh, this was during the great dimensional cross-rip of the Judean Tetrarchy.” They just assume their audiences know what’s up with all the demons and go on with telling their stories.

(John, on the other hand, doesn’t mention any demons, which is an interesting point in itself.)

It’s a little better (???) when we look at the Second Temple literature, in between the Old and New Testament. In Tobit, about 200 BCE, a Jewish woman living in Ninevah after the Assyrian deportation is oppressed by a demon who kills every man she marries, until her final husband exercises the demon by burning fish organs. (The Deuterocanon is trippy sometimes!) And 1 Enoch from about the same time period elaborates at length on how the spirits of the Nephilim from Genesis 6 became evil spirits tormenting mankind. One might assume the writers of 1 Enoch feel a need to explain the origin of the demons they encounter in the world. And there are other second-temple-era references to demons, such as Solomon having knowledge of how to drive them out.

Clearly the original audiences of the (synoptic) gospels were expected to not be surprised that Jesus casts out demons, nor that there are so many demons to cast out. If we assume the biblical texts genuinely describe demons, it seems like either 1) at some point a bunch of demons showed up in Israel that just weren’t there before, or 2) demons were all over Israel in the Old Testament period too, but nobody wrote anything about it.

So what changed?

Here’s a guess, and it’s only a guess. But when Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the first temple was destroyed, Ezekiel had a vision of God’s glorious presence up and leaving. And while a second temple was constructed, that presence of God was never understood to have returned. Indeed, the Jewish people of the second temple period understood themselves to still be in exile, despite having bodily returned to the promised land.

Perhaps during the Old Testament period, demons really were everywhere in the world. Everywhere except Israel, because Israel was protected by the presence of YHWH. When he withdrew his presence, that protection was lost. So in the second temple period we read about in the gospels, Israel was subject to the same demonic “infestation” as the rest of the world always had been. And after Pentecost, when God’s presence returned to his new temple, the Church, demons have again been largely driven out of the entire world.

None of that explains why John doesn’t talk about demons, of course. That’s another post.