After my piece on the development of the understanding of demons ran on Monday, a number of people had some interesting questions in the comboxes:

Baruch and Tobit are the only OT books that mention demons, and they are part of the Deuterocanon and are very late in OT history

Hi Mark, I realize this is sort of off-topic, but I wanted to ask you a question about Tobit. As you probably recall, I’m a Protestant, but I’m starting to take interest in the Deuterocanonicals as I’ve become aware of their history, and of how the Church Fathers accepted them as inspired.

In the case of Tobit in particular, I read on Catholic Answers that the question the Sadducees asked Jesus about a “hypothetical” woman who was widowed by seven brothers was likely a reference to Tobit.

I was just wondering if you could give me some information on Tobit in current Catholic thinking. You mention here that it’s “very late,” but what time period do Catholics believe it to have been written in, and are the events in it believed to have really happened?

As is typically the case, the Church leaves matters such as the dating of Tobit to biblical scholars.  And, as is also typical, biblical scholars vary in their assessment.  The Jerome Commentary puts the date of composition around 200 BC.  As to whether the events recounted in Tobit really happened, the general concensus is that Tobit is a work of inspired fiction.  So, for instance, the author tells us that Tobit is the uncle of Ahikar, a clever character in a tale popular in the ancient Near East.  It’s the sort of literary cue which signals that we are reading a tale, not a chronicle, sort of like if I began a story by announcing I am the uncle of Jack the Giant Killer.  This does not mean that every detail of the tale is therefore without grounding in history or reality.  The book mentions the angel Raphael, whom Jews (and Christians) honor.  Similarly, I might write a fictional work which involves JFK.  The fact that the work is fiction does not mean JFK did not exist.  I’ve not heard of the connection between the NT story about the woman widowed seven times, but I can certainly see where the Sadducees might have mined the idea from Tobit.

I’ve read that demons start to appear in the Old Testament roughly the time of the Babylonian captivity, as the Babylonians had a firmer concept of them (if more erroneous). Much of the Old Testament is written or edited to rebut Babylonian religion, which in no way detracts from the OT’s inspiration.

In line w/Mark’s discussion, the OT has the stories of the giants of old (Nephilim) who were fathered by the Sons of God, the deceiver who challenges God regarding Job, the serpent in the garden, and a notion of evil spirits coming over a man (King Saul? don’t recall exactly).

Yes, it’s quite possible the Jews picked up the idea of demons from Babylonians.  They were human beings and influenced by ideas from other human beings.  So, for instance, both the idea of a king and a temple (not to mention sacred arks) were all notions the Jews got from the peoples around them.  They also shared a flood story with ancient near eastern culture.  But, of course, as the Jews were the Chosen People, so their mythology and sacred liturgical practices become the Chosen mythology and liturgical practices, and hone and purify ideas that pagans intuit.  I would be cautious about trying to put much weight on the murky reference to the Nephilim.  It might just be a reference to intermarriage between children of Seth and other branches of the human family.  Ancient Israel has a great concern for ethnic purity because in antiquity the mission of the Chosen people is to prepare for the coming of the Messiah.  Since marrying outside the People means marrying the family—and the family gods—of the Gentiles, this is regarded with great fear.  But once Messiah comes and the Gentiles themselves become part of the covenant people, the concern for ethnic purity is no longer necessary and, in fact, becomes a hindrance to acceptance of the gospel.

Um… correct me if Im wrong, but even though he wasn’t refered to by name in scripture, don’t we believe that the serpent in the garden was the devil? And the one who challanged God to the bet that Job would crumble?

I would also be cautious about reading too much too soon into the story of Job or Genesis.  With the light of the Spirit, we can now see that the serpent in Genesis is “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan” (as Revelation tells us).  But that is something only fully understood after the establishment of the New Covenant.  His identity is veiled in the Old Testament.  In the same way, the “satan” in Job, while certainly patient of a Christian interpretation as the Devil, is not called a devil or a demon in the text of Job.  Rather, the name refers to something like a prosecuting attorney.  He is part of the heavenly court and is bringing charges against Job, but there is no suggestion in the text that he is a fallen angel.  Later Christian revelation will make this clearer (and so Revelation will call Satan “the accuser of the brethren”).  But that’s not clear in the text of the Old Testament itself.  It only becomes clear when Jesus and the apostles use “Satan” and “the devil” as synonyms.  So, yes, Satan and the demonic appear in the Old Testament.  But they are presented in a veiled form.  Judaism does not arrive at the concept of the “demonic” as we understand it until quite late in the Old Testament.

In Moses we have a “spirit of jealousy”, the NT tells us to “test the spirits”, and in the case of king Saul, “the spirit of God” at one time “an evil spirit”  another. If we consider demons to be the disembodied offspring of the preflood “sons of God” and “daughters of men”, then even though the Bible doesn’t say it directly, the founding of Babylon by Nimrod, and the obsession with “making a name” there, and the 1st world kingdom, that isn’t destroyed until Revelation, would be my best guess.

This illustrates the point I was making in my piece, that the ancient Jews are, rather like the ancient pagans, fairly fuzzy in how they understand the spiritual world.  Sometimes evil spirits are evil spirits.  Sometimes they are spirits sent by God.  Similarly, we are sometimes told that God “creates good and evil” (a notion the later tradition will clarify to mean that God “creates all that is good and permits evil”).  Likewise, Exodus will speak sometimes of Pharaoh hardening his heart and sometimes of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart.  The Old Testament is, never forget, a gradual revelation and so things are often not fully clear there.  So Ecclesiastes (and Psalmists will talk as though death is the end and there is no afterlife (or perhaps just a shadowy underworld rather like the Greek Hades called “Sheol”), but elsewhere in the Old Testament the revelation of some sort of afterlife will gradually take shape till, by the time of the Maccabees, we see Jews undergoing horrific persecutions by Antiochus Epiphanes in the conviction that they will receive a better body at the Resurrection of the Just.  That conviction will, of course, be dramatically validated by the Resurrection of Jesus, even as that Resurrection adds a new dimension to Jewish faith by interposing his Resurrection between us and the Resurrection on the Last Day.  Our own Resurrection will be entirely predicated on our relationship to His Resurrection.  This truth too is present in the Old Testament, but is also veiled rather than fully revealed.  That is why the Risen Christ tells the disciples on the Emmaus Road that everything which has happened was written in “Moses and the Prophets” (Luke 24).

One of the things the Christian revelation does is illuminate with terrifying power the stakes we are playing for (nothing less then eternal bliss or everlasting horror) and the Enemy we are up against—a host of mighty fallen angels—versus a God who has actually taken on human flesh, died, and risen to save, not merely us, but the entire universe in a New heaven and earth.  It’s precisely because this was far beyond what the inspired authors of the OT imagined as they were guided by the Spirit that Peter says, “The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory” (1 Peter 1:10-11).  In short, precisely because they were writing under inspiration and not from their merely human power, they didn’t quite know what they were talking about.  They themselves wondered about the meaning of their own prophecies.  Nor, by the way, do we fully understand revelation either.  As Peter continues, “It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12).  This is why Catholic teaching continues to develop.  There is too much packed into it for the Church to comprehend all at once.