Magic was prohibited among the Israelites from very early times, for already the oldest collection of laws, the Book of the Covenant, contains the command: "You shall not tolerate a sorceress" (Ex. Israel's official religion contrasts sharply with contemporary polytheisms in the role assigned to demons, which in the Bible is practically nil.
Details of the text and iconography have close parallels in Mesopotamian, Arabic, classical, and later Jewish folklore, and illustrate the wellnigh universal character of many superstitions about demons (Gaster, in: Orientalia, 11 (1942), 41–79). A Phoenician amulet of the seventh century B.C.E., from Arslan Tash, begins: "Incantations: O Flying One, O goddess, O Sasam… O god, O Strangler of Lambs! The house I enter you shall not enter the court I tread you must not tread." Intended to protect women in childbirth, it goes on to invoke the protection of the gods, and contains depictions of the demons mentioned: a winged sphinx, labeled "Flying One, Lil," and a wolf devouring a child. In a mythological text from Ugarit, the father of the gods, El, is frightened almost to death by a demon "having two horns and a tail," like the devil in later representations. In general features Canaanite demonology probably resembled that of Mesopotamia, to judge from the rather meager evidence preserved. Good demons are mentioned much less frequently. 34:14 see below), and in later Jewish demonology.
Lilitu, the Mesopotamian succubus, is mentioned once in the Bible as Lilith (Isa. Like many other demons, she is depicted as a composite monster. Sickness may be thought of as caused by demonic possession, and some demons have the name of the specific disease they bring, thus "Headache," or "Fever." Lamashtu is the hag who kills children in the womb and newborn babies. They live in deserts and near graves, and many of them are ghosts, spirits of the dead, especially of those who died by violence or were not properly buried. Demons are messengers of the lord of the underworld, and march before him. Incantations often list four, or even seven, classes of demons. There is no qualitative difference between great gods and demons one name for demon is "an evil god." Demons, however, have less power, though occasionally myths depict them as rebelling against the great gods, with some success. Demonology in the Ancient Near Eastĭefense against evil spirits was a concern in Mesopotamia from earliest times, beginning with the Sumerians, to whom much of the terminology and praxis connected with demons may be traced.
Whereas the great gods are accorded regular public worship, demons are not they are dealt with in magic rites in individual cases of human suffering, which is their particular sphere. Moreover, in none of the languages of the ancient Near East, including Hebrew, is there any one general term equivalent to English "demon." In general, the notion of a demon in the ancient Near East was of a being less powerful than a god and less endowed with individuality. In monotheistic systems, evil spirits may be accepted as servants of the one God, so that demonology is bound up with angelology and theology proper, or they may be elevated to the rank of opponents of God, in which case their status as diabolic powers differs from that of the demons in polytheism. In polytheistic religions the line between gods and demons is a shifting one: there are both good demons and gods who do evil. This definition is, however, only approximate. A demon is an evil spirit, or devil, in the ordinary English usage of the term.
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