Spirits and demons
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There are all sorts of examples of demon oppression in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts (though notably almost none elsewhere). The language here is different. This isn’t described as a demon or an unclean spirit. Instead, it’s a spirit of divination. In Greek it’s a spirit of Python, which as a programmer I just find hilarious.
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This spirit doesn’t torment the girl. It seems to do nothing at all to harm her. In fact, the spirit doesn’t seem to do anything objectionable! Paul really is a servant of the most-high God proclaiming the way of salvation! At a glance, this girl/spirit is helping!
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Paul doesn’t drive out the spirit on sight. He waits days, and finally only drives it out because it annoys him enough.
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This spirit has enough people convinced that it can tell the future that the girls' enslavers are making a profit. How? Does it just put on a good show? Or can this thing actually tell the future? Or maybe somewhere in between, it doesn’t know the future, but it knows things the girl couldn’t otherwise know, like how demons would recognize Jesus on sight.
Where did all these demons come from?
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.
Spirit of Python
I’m a fan of the late Dr. Michael Heiser. If you want to spend four hours listening to an exquisite exposition comparing the early and late dates of the Exodus, he’s your guy. What he’s probably best known for is his study of the spiritual world-view of the biblical authors, which is the kind of thinking that leads me to posts like this.
Acts 16 has a particularly interesting story.
16:16 Now as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave girl met us who had a spirit that enabled her to foretell the future by supernatural means. She brought her owners a great profit by fortune-telling. 16:17 She followed behind Paul and us and kept crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” 16:18 She continued to do this for many days. But Paul became greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out of her at once. 16:19 But when her owners saw their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.
A few things catch my attention about this passage.
I suggest that this spirit is an example of something not found elsewhere in scripture: a neutral spirit. It isn’t working directly for God, but it also isn’t trying to be a force of chaos and death by harming people. Maybe it wants to serve God but doesn’t know how to do it well, maybe it has some other tiny agenda. But it’s just hanging out in this girl and making her life… interesting.
Now, this girl can’t be running around all day not making a profit. Her enslavers wouldn’t let that go on. And we note that Paul driving out that spirit isn’t an obvious solution to his annoyance; the girl can still run around proclaiming exactly what she has been! Yet she apparently stops when her profitability is removed. Presumably this spirit is calling out Paul as a servant of God because that will somehow make money, and when the money stops, so does the proclamation.
I suggest this group is using Paul as a draw for larger audiences. The spirit’s declarations bring people to Paul, and the bigger the crowd, the more people are going to want to pay for a foretelling from the girl. If the enslavers think Paul is a huckster like they are, then they might just see this as synergy between their two “acts.” In short, they’re making a profit off Paul’s spread of the gospel. And there’s no way Paul will put up with that for long.