by Brian Godawa
Revelation 18:2
2“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.”[33]
Because of the exile under the Babylonians, Jews would use Babylon as the ultimate symbol of evil. So when John attacks his contemporaries in Israel for rejecting Messiah, he describes them as demonic Babylon worthy of the same judgment as that ultimate evil nation.
But regardless of one’s eschatological interpretation, the “wild beasts” or “monsters” and “hyenas” of Isaiah and Jeremiah are interpreted as demons, unclean spirits and detestable beasts, along with the unclean animals that will scavenge over the ruins of the judged nation.
Lilith
Another strange creature that occurs in Isaiah 34:14, in the same passage as the satyrs, is the “night hag,” or “night bird” that “settles and finds for herself a resting place.” The Hebrew word is actually Lilith, which the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible explains is a Mesopotamian demoness residing in a tree that reaches back to the third millennium BC.
Here we find Inanna (Ishtar) who plants a tree later hoping to cut from its wood a throne and a bed for herself. But as the tree grows, a snake [Ningishzida] makes its nest at its roots, Anzu settled in the top and in the trunk the demon makes her lair... Of greater importance, however, is the sexual aspect of the—mainly—female demons lilitu and lili. Thus the texts refer to them as the ones who have no husband, or as the ones who stroll about searching for men in order to ensnare them.[34]
Lilith was also known as the demon who stole away newborn babies to suck their blood, eat their bone marrow and consume their flesh.[35] In Jewish legends, she was described as having long hair and wings, and claimed to have been the first wife of Adam who was banished because of Adam’s unwillingness to accept her as his equal.[36]
The passage we previously looked at, Isaiah 34:11-15, after mentioning the satyrs, then talks about the “night bird” or “owl” that nests and lays and hatches her young in its shadow. But lexicons such as the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament and Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew Lexicon contest this Hebrew word for owl (qippoz) with more ancient interpretations of an “arrow snake.”[37] If they are correct, then the poetry of the passage would be more complete as the NASB indicates.
Isaiah 34:14–15 (NASB95)
14 Yes, the night monster (Lilith) will settle there And will find herself a resting place.15The tree snake (qippoz) will make its nest and lay eggs there, And it will hatch and gather them under its protection.
The snake of verse 15 would match the Lilith myth (v. 14) with the snake in the roots making its nest. The correlation is too close to deny that this is another Biblical reference to a popular mythic creature that the Bible writers refer to in demonic terms.
The Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran evidence a preoccupation with demonology that includes reference to this very Isaianic passage. In The Songs of the Sage, we read an exorcism incantation,
“And I, the Instructor, proclaim His glorious splendor so as to frighten and to terrify all the spirits of the destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers, and [desert dwellers…] and those which fall upon men without warning to lead them astray[38]
Note the reference to “spirits of the bastards,” a euphemism for demons as the spirits of dead Nephilim who were not born of human fathers, but of angels.[39]
The God of This World
Chronicles of the Nephilim has largely been based upon the Divine Council worldview that has been explained in several previous Chronicles appendices. This involves the fallen Watchers from God’s heavenly host who are called the Sons of God. They led the world astray in the Days of Noah, that led to the Flood as Yahweh’s judgment. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, then speaks of how at the Tower of Babel, Yahweh divided the seventy nations according to the number of the fallen Sons of God and placed them under their authority. They became the “princes” (Dan. 10:13, 20-21) or “gods” of those pagan nations (Deut. 32:17; 4:19-21), rulers of those geographical territories.[40]
When earthly rulers battle on earth, the Bible describes the host of heaven battling with them in spiritual unity. In Daniel 10, hostilities between Greece and Persia is accompanied by the battle of heavenly Watchers over those nations (described as “princes”).
Daniel 10:13, 20-21
The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia.” …Then he said, “Do you know why I have come to you? But now I will return to fight against the prince of Persia; and when I go out, behold, the prince of Greece will come. 21 But I will tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth: there is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince.
When Sisera fought with Israel, the earthly kings and heavenly authorities (host of heaven) are described interchangeably in unity.[41]
Judges 5:19–20
“The kings came, they fought; then fought the kings of Canaan…From heaven the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Sisera.
When God punishes earthly rulers, he punishes them along with the heavenly rulers (“host of heaven”) above and behind them.
Isaiah 24:21–22
On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison, and after many days they will be punished.[42]
This notion of territorial archons or spiritual rulers is Biblical and carries over into intertestamental literature such as the Book of Enoch (1 En. 89:59, 62-63; 67) and others.[43] In the New Testament Greek world, heavenly rulers seem to transform into a more generic reference to spiritual “principalities and powers.” The notion of the host of heaven being spiritual powers was foreshadowed in the Old Testament Greek Septuagint with the common translation of “Yahweh of Hosts” into “God of the Powers” (Psa. 88:9 LXX).[44]
Walter Wink points out that the picture of Watchers over nations is hinted at in 1 Cor. 4:9 where the apostle explains their persecution has “become a spectacle (theatre) to the world, to angels and to men.” He explains that “the image of the Roman theater conjures up hostile and jeering crowds,” and the angels are “heavenly representatives of the Gentile nations and people, who watch, not without malicious glee, the tribulations endured by the apostle to their peoples.”[45]
The epistles speak of the spiritual principalities and powers that are behind the earthly rulers and powers to be sure (Eph. 6:12-13), but it appears to be more generic in reference. And after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, these spiritual powers have been disarmed and overthrown (Col. 2:15, Luke 10:18), at least legally losing their hegemony (Eph. 1:20-23). The fallen angelic powers are still around, but have been defanged with the inauguration of the Messianic kingdom of God.
But there is one of those fallen angelic powers that seems to rise up and grab extraordinary authority in the New Testament: The satan (which translated, means, “Accuser”). The Accuser’s choice of Belial as a proper name in Jesus Triumphant is well-attested in Scripture and other ancient Jewish writings, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran.[46] He is also called Beliar, Mastema, and Sammael in other Second Temple literature.[47] Throughout the Old Testament, the Hebrew word belial is used as a personification of death, wickedness, and treachery, as well as “an emotive term to describe individuals or groups who commit the most heinous crimes against the Israelite religious or social order, as well as their acts.”[48] The Apostle Paul uses the proper name of Belial for the satan (using language similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls) in 2 Corinthians 6:14–15: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?”
Three tim
es in the Gospel of John, this Accuser named Belial, is called “the ruler of this world” (Jn. 12:31, 14:30-31, 16:11), in 2 Cor. 4:4, “the god of this world.” In Eph. 2:2 he is called the “prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.” In fact, when Jesus was tempted by the satan in the desert, he offered Christ all the kingdoms of the world for his own “domain and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 4:6). It seems as if the satan is the only Watcher god in authority over the nations, like he has all the power. What happened to all the other ones?
Walter Wink points out a possible key to the solution. In the intertestamental period “much tradition identified Satan as the angel of Rome, thus adapting the angels-of-the-nations idea to the situation of Roman world-hegemony. Since Rome had conquered the entire Mediterranean region and much else besides, its angel-prince had become lord of all other angel-princes of the vanquished nations. This identification was already explicit at Qumran, where Rome and the Romans (the ‘Kittim’ of the War Scroll) are made the specific allies and agents of Satan and his host.”[49]
The Dead Sea Scroll 11QMelch interprets Psalm 82 as describing Satan/Belial as the chief of the gods in the divine council to be punished for his unjust authority over the nations.[50] Another Jewish intertestamental document, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, lists in several places Beliar, synonymous with Satan, as holding captive mankind.[51]
In the post-New Testament religious text The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah (1st century A.D.) the name of Satan is used synonymously with the names Sammael and Beliar.[52] But in the later text of 3 Enoch (5th century A.D.), Satan, Sammael, and Beliar are considered separate entities, with Sammael and Beliar being Satan’s underlings (3 Enoch 26:12).
But the real twist is that in this same text, Sammael is called the Prince of Rome, just as Dubbiel is called the Prince of Persia (remember the “Prince of Persia” from Daniel 10?).
3 Enoch 26:12
Every day Satan sits with Sammaʾel, Prince of Rome, and with Dubbiʾel, Prince of Persia, and they write down the sins of Israel on tablets and give them to the seraphim to bring them before the Holy One, blessed be he, so that he should destroy Israel from the world.[53]
Just like the satan in the New Testament, Sammael is called the “prince of the accusers who is greater than all the princes of kingdoms that are in the height [heaven]” (3 Enoch 14:2). And just like the satan in the New Testament, Sammael’s name means “god of the blind” (2 Cor. 4:4).[54]
So in these texts Sammael is the Watcher prince over Rome under the authority of the satan, or Sammael is the name of the Watcher prince over Rome who also has the heavenly position of being “the accuser” (the satan).[55]
But what about this notion of the ruler (archon), or god of this world? Is the world something bigger than the realm of this satanic Prince of Rome? To answer that, we will have to look at the idea of the world as presented in the New Testament.
It is common in the Bible to refer to the Roman Empire as “all the world” (oikoumene) which meant the known inhabited world under Rome’s power. Luke writes that when Caesar ordered a census of the Roman Empire, he made a decree that “all the world (oikoumene) should be registered” (Luke 2:1). Jesus said that the Gospel would be proclaimed “through all the world (oikoumene) as a testimony to all the nations” (Matt. 24:14). At that time, all the nations (and their allotted Watchers?) were under Roman rule. When Paul writes that within his own lifetime, the Gospel “has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven” (Col. 1:23), it is an obvious expression of the inhabited world of the Roman Empire, not the entire globe as we now know it.
Another Greek word occasionally used for the Roman world was cosmos. Cosmos was not the physical universe as we would understand it, but rather more like the zeitgeist or the godless “world system” or “world order” of estranged humanity.[56] And that world order was of course Rome. Paul writes that the very Gospel preached in the Roman Empire “has come to you, as indeed in the whole world (cosmos)” (Col. 1:6). The Roman Christian’s faith had been “proclaimed in all the world (cosmos)” (Rom. 1:8), the Gospel “has been made known to all the nations” (Rom. 16:26) at the time of Paul’s writing to those Romans in the first century.[57]
In the New Testament, the “world” (cosmos) and the “inhabited earth” (oikoumene) as well as other global language was used interchangeably to refer to the known inhabited world of the Roman Empire. All the known nations were encompassed in its power and worldview, so it seems those angelic entities over those nations would therefore also be under the authority of the Watcher of Rome.
If the satan therefore was “god” or “ruler” of that “world,” then most likely he had become the angelic authority over Rome, and it would make sense that the New Testament would focus on the satan over the other Watchers. Rome had become the ultimate enemy of God’s people and had authority over all the nations of the world. So much so that Daniel’s vision was of the Messianic stone (Jesus) that would hit the Roman empire and ultimately crush it as the apex of godless empire (Dan. 2:44-45).
This theory is further evidenced in the book of Revelation where the Dragon of Revelation 12, clearly described as “that ancient serpent, who is the devil and the satan” (20:2), is the angelic principality of power that gives authority to both the Beast of the Sea (13:1-2) and the Beast of the Land (13:11-12).[58] Readers of the Chronicles of the Nephilim will be very familiar with the sea beast of Leviathan and the land beast of Behemoth. As explained in previous appendices, these are chaos monsters, symbolic of both foreign nations and rulers against whom Yahweh battles to establish his covenanted order.[59] Leviathan’s sea dragon imagery is linked with the satan’s serpentine chaos nature.
Revelation is notoriously difficult to interpret, and there are a plethora of interpretations of who or what the Land and Sea Beasts represent. But there is a common thread for the interpretation of the Sea Beast among most all the interpretive schools. Robert Mounce explains it:
There is little doubt that for John the beast was the Roman Empire as persecutor of the church. It comes onto the land from the sea, just as the Roman troops did when they invaded the eastern Mediterranean. The beast is that spirit of imperial power which claims a religious sanction for its gross injustices.”[60]
In his book, The Beast of Revelation, eschatology expert Ken Gentry points out that the Beast imagery of Revelation paints a fluid picture of both an individual and a kingdom of spiritual chaos and oppression. That kingdom is the Roman Empire that was also embodied in its emperor.[61] The third of other angels that the Dragon’s tail cast with him to earth (Rev. 12:4) are then the Watchers of the other nations under Rome and therefore under the satan’s authority.
In this understanding, When Jesus the Messiah arrives and inaugurates the kingdom of God, he does so by “binding the strong man” the “god of this world,” the satan. His casting out of demons was a herald of casting down the satan’s power (John 12:31; Matt. 12:28-29), and taking authority over his world. It was as if one fell swoop of the highest heavenly power over the nations brought down all the enemies with him. He destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (Heb. 2:14). But why is he still prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour? (1Pet. 5:8).
Because his overthrow is not absolute. It’s a qualified binding. Let’s take a closer look at the “binding” of the satan.
Magic and the Binding of Spirits
Through the entire Chronicles series, I have used a concept called “binding” of angels, demons, and Watchers. This binding is accomplished through imprisonment in the earth or Tartarus.
This binding notion originates theologically from the binding of Satan in the ministry of Christ as noted above in Matthew 12, as well as the binding of angels in “chains of gloomy darkness” in Tartarus in Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4. And these New Testament Scriptures are paraphrases of the Enochian narrative of
the antediluvian Watchers who at the Flood were “bound” “for seventy generations underneath the rocks of the ground until the day of their judgment” (1 Enoch 10:12).
The idea of binding spirits is a common one in ancient religion and magic. Michael Fishbane notes that in the ancient Near East, incantations and spells were used by sorcerers and enchanters to bind people and spirits in spiritual “traps, pits, snares, and nets,” using venomous curses from their lips like serpents. In response to some of these verbal sorceries, the Psalmist himself calls upon Yahweh in similar utterances to reverse the spells upon his enemies that they would be trapped, ensnared and bound by their own magical devices (Psalm 140; 64; 57:4-6).[62] Exorcists of the first century used incantations to cast out demons in Jesus’ name (Acts 16:18), the same incantation used by Demons against Jesus before being cast out (Mk 1:27).[63]
Ezekiel 13:18 refers to a specific form of hunting and binding spirits in a practice of women “who sew magic bands upon all wrists…in the hunt for souls!” I reversed this pagan version of using magical armbands by creating a heavenly version of the archangels with armbands of indestructible Cherubim hair for their hunting and binding of evil spirits. The hair is wrapped as bands around the arms of archangels and used like a rope to bind the Watchers’ hands and feet.
Scholars have pointed out that the binding of Satan that occurs in Matthew 12 is evidently not an exhaustive or absolute binding, since he is still active after the ministry of Christ and even into the New Testament era (Acts 5:3; Rom. 16:20; 2Cor. 12:7; 1Thes. 2:18; Rev. 2:13). But then how does this continuing satanic activity fit with the notion that Satan “was thrown down to the earth” (Rev. 12:9), “fell like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18), was disarmed and overthrown in triumph (Col. 2:15), destroyed along with his power of death (Heb. 2:14), and all of this accomplished through the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ (Matt. 12:28-29; Heb. 2:14)?
