God Summoned Demons in the Bible – Translators Covered It Up!

Does religion kill curiosity?

Thomas Westbrook: Your book opens with a comparison between the Bible and a safari. It's easy for people to forget when they're in a Jeep that they are surrounded by dangerous wild animals. And then you compare that to people reading the Old Testament and not realizing the monsters surrounding them in the text. You teach a course called Monster Heaven. If someone walked into your class and they've only ever encountered the Precious Moments version of angels and the "John 3:16 God is love" version of the deity, what is the first thing that you would show them that would shatter that image and make a modern Christian say, "That can't be God"?

Esther Hamori: In a way, it's hard to say because the truly shocking thing, I think, is the pattern that we see in the Bible of God deploying monsters to attack human beings he opposes. That's what I mean when I say that it's easy to forget that we're in dangerous terrain in the Bible. God commands an entourage of monsters in the Bible, and the pattern is that God ratchets up the violence with each monster. I think that's already shocking to some Christian readers. But if I had to pick, I suppose my personal favorite is the spirit of falsehood. God dispatches these spirits in a bunch of texts in the Hebrew Bible. They're like gaslighting spirits sent to mess with people's minds. And in the New Testament, there's a text in Thessalonians in which God sends out this supernatural figure of deceit. I mean, it doesn't get translated that way, of course, but I take the reader through the key Greek words and how those words are exclusively used in other texts to show that this is a supernatural figure of deceit. And to up the ante a little bit, in this Thessalonians text, God sends out the spirit of falsehood in tandem with Satan, making his best attempt to deceive people. It's great teamwork, honestly. But possibly disturbing to readers who want things to be a little bit neater.

Thomas Westbrook: I find that fascinating because I've talked a little bit about how the devil has been rebranded and really changed, and that the notion of hell has been changed from the Hebrew Bible to what it is today. But a lot of people don't realize that God as well has gone through this massive rebranding campaign as religion has evolved. And I want to look a little bit at that, specifically focusing on a story where God incites David to take a census. We don't usually think of taking a census as something that's evil. But David does, and then God punishes him for it by massacring 70,000 Israelites with a plague angel. How has this story been changed over time, and how has Satan been given the blame for it? And what does this editorial swap tell us about the sanitization process and the rebranding of God's image?

Esther Hamori: There's been so much theological PR work done to clean up God's image. And, you know, kudos — it's a big job. But a lot of that PR work has been in post-New Testament early Christian literature. But to get to see that kind of sanitizing even within the Bible itself is pretty cool. So yeah, these two stories, First Chronicles 21 and Second Samuel 24. In the Chronicles text, Satan incited David to number Israel, and whatever exactly the problem with numbering Israel is — like maybe relying on their own strength instead of God, whatever — the punishment is horrific. As you said, 70,000 people. An angel comes and shoots pestilence at them. But at least we can blame Satan. Except that in the Samuel text, it's God. It's even the same verb in Hebrew: God incited David to number Israel, and it's the same fallout. It's the same story. But clearly the Chronicler — that's our scholarly, cute nickname for the person who wrote Chronicles — clearly the Chronicler had this Samuel text and was like, "Oh, shoot. This isn't a good look for the Almighty," and made some careful adjustments. It's real sanitization. I say in the book, it's like a faithful remake of an old movie, but there is one ideological change. And in this case, it's a big one. Imagine that you could watch these two stories happening in split screen, like parallel actions throughout, only the divine instigator is swapped out. God is discreetly ushered out of the picture. We can see that some of God's actions — some of the ones that I find monstrous — some ancient editor did too.

Thomas Westbrook: Can I push back on that just a little bit? Because I've noticed that throughout other parts of the text you have, like in the story of Job, Satan coming and going from God's divine counsel. Would it really be that much of a stretch to say that they're actually saying the same thing — it's just that one is saying that the Lord incited David to do this census, and the other, it's still the Lord, but he's using Satan as his minion?

Esther Hamori: Yeah, I think it's a fair question in the abstract. If a text in the Hebrew Bible refers to this Satan — that's just a Hebrew noun, "adversary" — working for God, what's the difference between this Satan doing something and God doing something? So in this case, it's really well recognized: they retell stories but with a different ideological bent, and it's often to clean up King David's image. And that all needs a fair bit of elbow grease. But another role that the Chronicler has is sometimes to clean up God's image. And Chronicles is written so much later than Samuel that by this point the role of the Satan is starting to change, and we can start to see some differentiation — maybe a step away from the divine entourage. So I think you put those things together, and it does look like the Chronicler is saying, "Oh, the person said to be responsible for this is not responsible for this. It's not God, it's Satan." And therefore David is not so guilty. But it also means that the Chronicler is saying God is not so guilty.

Thomas Westbrook: Speaking of God being guilty, we have this image of God as this loving father who loves the world so much. And we place ourselves kind of at the center in an almost egocentric way. And yet, when you look at the story of the Exodus, it explicitly says in Exodus 7:3–5 that God hardens Pharaoh's heart multiple times, and he admits that he could have ended it earlier, but he wants to demonstrate his power. Rather than simply resolving conflict, it's a flex. He in a way manufactures a crisis just to show off and then caps it off by sending the Destroyer to slaughter children. What does this tell us about God's character and the actual motivations in the text? And are there any other stories in the Hebrew Bible that reinforce this image of God?

Esther Hamori: Both great questions. I'm going to maybe separate those out a little bit. For what God is like in this text: he's like a dude picking a fight to prove how tough he is. I mean, the toxic masculinity is out of control. As you quoted, he literally says in this text that he's in it to prove his power. Now, he also wants to save the Israelites. Sure. That's very nice. But the text does have him literally say that he's doing it to show his power — to flex divine muscle. And given the horror of what he's doing just to prove his power — yeah, you ask what it shows about God. Well, I think one thing it shows is that modern ideas about God being good, good all the time, are not super compatible with what it actually says in the Bible.

You asked about other texts. There's one time God sends an angel to slaughter 185,000 Assyrians in their camp while they sleep. Which, between you and me, sounds a bit weak — but okay. I mean, weak of the angel to do this while they're unconscious. And in the verse before this horrific angelic massacre, God says he's going to do it for Jerusalem and, in one breath, for his own sake. I say in the book, I think God's like one of those smug perps on a detective show who can't help talking tough to the point that they incriminate themselves. So here again, we have God sending an angel to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people for his own sake, to show his own power. Flex a little divine muscle.

Thomas Westbrook: It's not just the Egyptians or the Canaanites or people that are labeled as these evil, immoral people. Oftentimes it's God's own people, his chosen people, that feel the brunt of his wrath. You talk about how he leads them into the desert in order to test and afflict them. And then when they complain, he sends snakes to bite them. And then it's kind of like, "Oh, look at how merciful I am. I gave you a way out to be healed with this little totem that you can look up at," but he's the one that brought all of this on in the first place.

Esther Hamori: Yeah, that's terribly unfair and abusive. But when it's God, you know, there are a lot of justifications. But no, it's just as horrific when it's the God character in the ancient texts doing this as if it were human beings.

Thomas Westbrook: There's another story that hits on the same vein, and it's the story of Balaam. It might be the most absurd example of this kind of behavior from God in the entire Hebrew Bible. Can you briefly walk us through it? Because from what I understand, God gives Balaam a direct order. He obeys it, and then God tries to kill him for his obedience. And then after the angel nearly murders him, its final instruction is, "Oh, y'all keep doing what you're already doing." Am I missing something? Help me make this make sense.

Esther Hamori: I cannot. Doesn't it seem like it would be missing something? So, that is exactly what happens in the story. Balaam is a foreign diviner and prophet. He seems to be something of a curse-for-hire specialist. And the King of Moab wants to hire him to curse Israel. He refuses. And the messengers of the king ask him again. He consults God. This happens a few times. He consults God, and finally God says, go with the messengers of the King of Moab. And so Balaam goes, at which point the anger of God burns against him for going. This is the point where we want to turn back a page and make sure we didn't miss a line, right? God sends an angel then to try to kill Balaam. There's a logical leap there, but there is nothing missing in the text. The leap is just that there is no logic to it. There is no justification. And then the best part is when the angel does not succeed in killing Balaam — which is a whole story unto itself, involving a talking donkey. So when the angel can't kill Balaam, the angel orders Balaam to do exactly what he's already doing. Balaam even asks, "So should I go back home?" And they're just like, "No, keep going with the King's men." So Balaam keeps going, which is exactly the point he was at when the anger of God burned against him for going in the first place, after telling him to go. I mean, it's a terrible cycle. You could imagine it going on over and over again — like a very, very dark Groundhog Day. And there's simply no logic to it.

Juicy tidbit for you: the angel who comes to kill Balaam — it actually says that the angel takes his stand as an adversary against Balaam. In Hebrew, that is, as a satan. Which is the same Hebrew noun meaning "adversary" that later becomes the name Satan. Only it's the angel of God acting as a satan, because this time, why not?

Thomas Westbrook: There are so many great references to the character of God and how it has been morphed over time, but I want to take that as a segue into talking about the rebranding of Satan and also of demons, because you cast a light on demons in a way that really made me think in a way I've never really done before. But first, looking at Satan: a lot of times people will picture him as the snake in the Garden of Eden. He's ruling over Hell, God's eternal enemy. But none of that is in the Hebrew Bible. So who or what was the Satan originally?

Esther Hamori: I'll preface this even by saying that there is no devil or hell in the Hebrew Bible. That comes later.

Thomas Westbrook: And for Christians listening, the Hebrew Bible basically is — with some differences — essentially the Old Testament.

Esther Hamori: Yes. So in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, there is no hell. There is no devil. There isn't even Satan, capital S, by name until pretty late in the game. But even there, he's not the devil by that term, or the way Christians conceived of him later. What we do have in the Hebrew Bible is a kind of development. The common noun satan, meaning "adversary." And in the text we see it used just to describe a function. First it's said of the angel, that the angel comes as an adversary. Then the angel sort of repeats it himself, doubles down. And then there are a couple of texts — the text of Job famously, Zechariah 3 much less famously — that use the word as sort of like a title. The Satan, the Adversary. You might imagine a capital A there, like "the President." Where we see this role as a functionary in God's heavenly court. You can think of this Satan in those Hebrew Bible texts as being like the divine prosecutor in the heavenly court. And one thing that means is that this is part of the heavenly bureaucracy. This is a functionary under God's command.

I write a lot about what God and the divine prosecutor are doing together as a team in Job. But we do get a really clear picture of the Satan as part of the heavenly court system. And I think what's especially disturbing about that is that this figure's specialty seems to be to go after the innocent. So the figure is called the Adversary, but at this stage, not because he's an adversary to God. He's not. He's working for God as an adversary — to people.

Thomas Westbrook: So this idea that Satan and God are enemies butting heads is not in the Hebrew Bible. It's not in the earlier text. But there's also this assumption that there's this light-versus-dark dichotomy, that demons fight angels, that they serve Satan, and that angels serve God. You also say in your book that none of that is in the Bible. Demons never fight angels anywhere in Scripture. They're not fallen angels. So what actually are biblical demons? And whose side are they on?

Esther Hamori: When the angels fall in the Bible, they fight other angels. Demons never fight angels. Demons never have anything to do with the devil or the Satan in the Hebrew Bible. They're their own category. They're like animated forces of harm from the natural world — things like plague, pestilence, hail. For people who want the Bible to be very black and white with neat distinctions between good and evil, this can get a little awkward. Different biblical texts just say very different things about demons. So there are some texts — Psalm 91 is a great one — where the psalmist says that God will protect people from specific demons. But in other texts, the demons are part of the divine entourage, and God's the one dispatching them to attack people.

Thomas Westbrook: In the New Testament, when you have Jesus casting out demons, it's the demon of epilepsy. Were demons more of an early attempt to make sense of and understand disease and calamity and natural disasters?

Esther Hamori: Yeah, for sure. In Mesopotamian writing, we can see that demons were basically manifestations of different kinds of deadly power, of deadly harm. Mesopotamian demons were like low-level supernatural entities whose basic role was to intervene in some way in human activity, to act upon human beings. And in Mesopotamian thought, that could be positive or negative. There were benevolent demons, and demons you certainly did not want interfering in your day-to-day life. And we see the same idea in biblical writing — that demons are sort of manifestations of natural harm, disease, weather — but in the Bible it's all negative. Demons are only there to do harm. But with the same core ideas underneath.

Thomas Westbrook: One of the most jaw-dropping claims in your book is that the Hebrew Bible contains the actual names of Canaanite gods and demons in God's employ — Resheph, Dever, Qetev, Mavet (Mot), Barad, Hebyon — but the English translations have almost entirely hidden them behind generic words like "plague," "pestilence," "hail," and "destruction." Who actually were these figures? And how does an understanding of the culture at the time change the way that scholars understand these verses?

Esther Hamori: So these demons, who again are animations of harmful forces — some of those are related to disease, like pestilence, which in Hebrew is Dever. Sometimes we just get the word Dever in a story, but sometimes Dever is clearly personified. And in some of those cases, we're seeing a reference to the demon Dever. Some of those animations of harmful forces are weather related, like Barad is hail. And there are a few others. So we see them in a lot of different contexts in the Hebrew Bible. And when we excise the Hebrew Bible from its cultural and literary context, then of course we might think we're just seeing a nice poetic reference to plague or pestilence. But when we understand more about West Semitic literature and thought, it changes the picture pretty dramatically and maybe disconcertingly.

Thomas Westbrook: Can I push back on that a little bit? Because when I used to be religious, I would have argued that these are just poetic metaphors. How do we know that that's not the case when the texts say that pestilence "stalked before him"? Is this not potentially just vivid imagery and language for an actual plague? How do we distinguish between poetic personification of the text and actually naming animate supernatural beings?

Esther Hamori: I love that question. I'm teaching a biblical poetry seminar this semester, so in recent weeks I have found myself talking a lot about how flattening poetic metaphor is an insult to the ancient poet. Metaphor is in poetry for a reason, and we don't want to squelch it. But there are ways that we can tell — maybe not always, but there are often ways that we can tell if something is a metaphor or a reference to something that people believed was real. There are different categories of evidence we can use to think about that in order to make a strong argument. If we can identify not just a bunch of evidence, but evidence across a variety of categories, then we really have solid ground to stand on.

Maybe let me take Habakkuk 3 as an example. This is a fantastic poem in the prophetic book of Habakkuk — which half my class this semester said they had never heard of, so take a look at Habakkuk. It's nice. In Habakkuk 3, the prophet describes God rolling into cosmic battle. The NRSV probably says something like "before God went pestilence and plague followed after" or something like that. And so it sounds like you might be dealing with metaphor. Maybe you'll see some capitalization — "before him went capital Pestilence" — so maybe you get an idea that there is some sort of figure there, but you have to be able to think through how to tell what's what.

So I would say there are maybe three or four major categories of evidence we can think about.

The first would be the broader cultural context — that is, West Semitic literature. The writings of the Bible are ancient West Semitic literature. And in West Semitic literature, these words — the words for pestilence and plague here, Dever and Resheph — are the names of known regional demons. So as a starting point, we'd have to be saying that the references in Habakkuk 3 are, what, just a coincidence? Not just to have pestilence, but to have Dever and Resheph acting together, personified as a pair. Also in the category of considering the broader context of West Semitic literature — and in fact, this is true across ancient Southwest Asian literature — there's a tradition of high gods, chief gods, rolling into battle with divine backup: low-level deities, demons, monsters. So looking at Habakkuk 3 within its cultural context, it's already getting a little hard to support the idea of plague and pestilence acting together there just as a coincidence. I think that's already a little hard to justify, but we do need more types of evidence.

These are in no particular order, but I think the next type of evidence I would want to look for would be the context of biblical literature overall. This kind of poetry — biblical poems about God in the cosmos, which includes poems about God in divine battle, God in creation, all of creation praising God — these kinds of poems in the Bible really, really often make reference to other divine beings, heavenly figures, sea monsters. So we should expect to see them in this text. So let's say we have angels in one of these poems. Are we going to set that aside as just metaphor? My point in that question is that I think you want to be careful of starting from what suits your theology — what has a high theological comfort quotient — then concluding that that must also be exactly what the ancient poet meant. In Habakkuk 3 we see God riding into a cosmic battle and know that contextually we should expect to see subordinate divine minions. You might just hope that it would be angels at least, but no such luck. Instead, we get these other regionally similar names. So the evidence across a couple of categories — and maybe this was only our first two categories — the evidence is already starting to stack up.

I think then we would want to think about the amount of evidence that we have within the Bible. For example, if we had one text with a poetic personification of, like, hay fever or whatever, I think we'd want to be very cautious about calling it something other than poetic metaphor. But when we see the personification of the same destructive elements — pestilence, plague — in multiple unrelated biblical texts, and they happen to be the names of known regional demons, and especially in the kind of poem where we should expect to see divine minions, then at a certain point we might find that we're having to work too hard to say these are just metaphors.

Maybe I'll throw in one last category of evidence. In some cases, we can see through early reception of a text how a text was read early on. For example, Psalm 91. In some translations you'll see that the poet says God will protect you from "the pestilence who stalks in darkness," and you might say, "I don't know, looks pretty metaphorical." But we can see so much early evidence — the Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic incantation bowls (which are beautiful — look those up), evidence in the Talmud, evidence in the New Testament — of Psalm 91 being understood to have something to do with protection from demons. There's this text in Luke 10 where the disciples say such and such about demons, and Jesus responds by quoting part of Psalm 91. So for Luke, Jesus understood Psalm 91 to have to do with demons.

So just to draw it back to Habakkuk: in Psalm 91, the poet reassures the reader that God will protect them from deadly Dever. "You need not fear Dever who stalks in darkness." Stalks. A lot of modern translations use that word in Psalm 91, where Dever/pestilence is the harmful force that God will protect people from. Cut over to Habakkuk 3, and all of a sudden translations are going to say things like "Dever went before God." It's the same verb in Hebrew. Dever stalked in front of him. If it's stalking in Psalm 91, it's stalking in Habakkuk 3. Dever stalked in front of him. Resheph headed out behind him.

So between the early reception of this material — where we can see that people understood the texts to refer to demons — and the biblical context where we expect to see minions, and the cultural context where these are known names, you put it all together, and I think we do end up having to work too hard to say, "No, it's different here. It's only metaphor here." Because why would we say that? Well, because it's the Bible. And I never think that's a good enough reason.

Thomas Westbrook: Another instance that you mentioned in your book is how in Psalm 78, when it's talking about the plagues of Egypt, the poet introduces Resheph alongside Barad, using the specific Hebrew phrase "handed over to," which in Biblical Hebrew always takes an animate indirect object. In other words, you don't "hand it over to" a hailstorm. You hand it over to a person or a demon or some animate entity.

Esther Hamori: Exactly. Except for the hailstorm bit — because hail (Barad) is another demon sometimes. But right, in Hebrew, in the Bible, things don't get "handed over" to a rainy day. "Handed over" is to an entity. In the prose Exodus story, the word for plague is different. In Psalm 78, the poet uses the word Resheph, which sometimes means plague. So the god Resheph killed people in all sorts of ways, not just through plague. The poet of Psalm 78 piles on these names of known demons, one after another, after another, and says the people will be "handed over" to them. When you immerse yourself in the literature of the broader context, it suddenly feels very clear what's happening in this text. And again, I think the only reason to read it differently would come from a prior commitment to reading the Bible as being definitely different than those other things. And it is just not.

Thomas Westbrook: I love that you highlighted Resheph because outside of the Bible, he is an actual god worshiped across Canaan. A foreign deity, often called the Lord of the Arrow, or Resheph of the Army. And yet in the Bible, he's literally marching at God's feet into cosmic battle. And God later sends him out to do his bidding and devour people. In Habakkuk 3:5 you have him marching behind God into cosmic battle. In Deuteronomy 32:24, God sends him to devour his own people, the Israelites. But he's now been downgraded from a god into a demon at God's service. How does a foreign deity end up as a demon in God's entourage?

Esther Hamori: I think first we would want to think about the word "foreign" and what we're assuming about how people in the broader context were related to one another. These people — the people we're reading about in the local texts, the people responsible for writing these ancient texts — they were part of their broader cultural context. And the literature is one example of literature from the broader literary world. So of course there are differences. Of course there are ways in which Israelite literature differed from Ugaritic literature and ways in which the Ugaritic literature differed from, say, Mesopotamian literature. But it's not like the Bible is different from all of the other ancient Near Eastern literature, which is very often how it's portrayed.

So this is the case with the divine figures themselves also. Resheph, a god venerated really around the region, around the ancient Middle East, is definitely demoted in the Bible. But I'm not sure I agree that he's a foreign god. I think he's one of the popular venerated divine figures in the region. And each group adapts local tradition and inherited lore for their own purposes. So here we have Resheph, who is still Lord of the Arrow, Resheph of the Army, but here he's not fighting against God. He's part of God's entourage. And to be fair, you can see he's still someone you might want rolling into battle with you.

Thomas Westbrook: I know that we're going to get pushback here from people who see the Bible as a monotheistic book, and they're going to push back and say these aren't instances of other deities. And yet there are so many instances — and this is not a fringe position. The scholarly consensus at this point is that the Bible emerged out of a polytheistic milieu, and the Bible itself was monolatrist, where Yahweh rose to this position above the other gods, similar to how Baal does in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. And you hear so many mentions of these other deities, and all the traces of this are still all throughout the Hebrew Bible if you know how to look for them. And one instance that blew my mind was Hebyon. This is a demon whose name was sitting in the text of Habakkuk 3 for millennia, but nobody could make sense of the verse until tablets were found in Ugarit, discovered just in the 20th century. Can you tell us a little bit about that discovery, and how it shed some light on this text?

Esther Hamori: That was a huge moment in the history of scholarship. In 1928, a Syrian farmer accidentally discovered what turned out to be part of an ancient tomb. And this led to a series of excavations of what turned out to be the ancient city of Ugarit — modern Ras Shamra in Syria. We know now that Ugarit flourished from about 1400 to 1200 BCE. In the Bible we see a lot of anti-Baal rhetoric, which, you know, fair enough. But then you flip over to the Ugaritic tablets and you get the perspective of the Baal worshipers, which is very different than how the Bible portrays it. So being able to read the ancient epic of Baal — the Baal Cycle — fleshed out so much of what we know about the story of Baal, the character of some of these other deities. But it also gave us access to vocabulary that we did not have any evidence of. Let's say a word shows up in Biblical Hebrew one time — it's going to be hard to figure out what that is from context alone. But if it shows up eight times in the Ugaritic tablets, then all of a sudden we can understand something that we didn't have a way to know before. These are very, very closely related languages, these Northwest Semitic languages.

Thomas Westbrook: So who specifically was Hebyon in the context of the Ugaritic tablets?

Esther Hamori: Hebyon was a colorful character. In some texts called Hebyon, in some Haby — I prefer Haby because it's such a cute name for a demon. We see aspects of his character in a few different texts. But what happens is that back in Habakkuk 3, one of our sample texts this morning, we can see Dever and Resheph — we can understand who they are and how they're functioning. But then there was this reference to Hebyon, and it was baffling until understanding that as a name, as a demon. All of a sudden the text makes perfect sense. If you read some of that Habakkuk 3 text, there are some key lines that don't make sense in any translation that is trying to be faithful to the Hebrew. You insert the name Hebyon or Haby, and everything falls into place.

Thomas Westbrook: So here we have a verse in the Bible that was essentially untranslatable for centuries — or at least you couldn't accurately translate it — and a single archaeological find suddenly makes perfect sense of it. Are there other cases where digs and archaeological findings have cracked open passages like this?

Esther Hamori: I'm sure there are a lot of examples of that. My favorite type of text to read in this way is one that's also illuminated by the Ugaritic texts, and in fact even by the Baal Cycle. It's not a matter of understanding words that we didn't understand before, but of being able to see a biblical text and how it relates to the broader cultural literary context. There's this line in Isaiah about God slaying Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent. And lo and behold, there's a line in the Baal Cycle — which is much, much, much older — about a deity slaying Litan. Litan being the cognate name — Leviathan. The languages are very closely related. The god slaying Litan, the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent. The same really specific epithets, even in the same combination, describing this sea monster called in Hebrew Leviathan, in Ugaritic Litan. So that's an example of where some archaeological textual find shows us just the extent to which the biblical texts — that is, the ancient Hebrew texts — were part of their broader West Semitic literary environment.

Thomas Westbrook: I love that example because it just highlights how much of the Hebrew Bible is pulled from, borrows from, or is influenced by other texts. We could spend all day talking about the flood narratives and the various versions of them — the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Atra-Hasis — and the influence from the surrounding areas. But I've never really seen someone go this deep into the demons of the surrounding cultures and the gods of the surrounding cultures, and how their names are all throughout the Hebrew Bible in God's employ. I want to touch, though, on the book of Job, where you have God and the devil collaborating and scheming together. There's this remarkable continuity that you trace into the New Testament, where God and Satan are still collaborating. Jesus tells Peter that Satan has obtained permission to test the disciples — like he still has to go to God to ask. Paul says that God gave him a messenger of Satan as a thorn in his flesh. It comes from God. And early Christians are handing sinners over to Satan to achieve God's purposes. Is there a point where this partnership actually ends in the New Testament?

Esther Hamori: Yeah. You got me. It definitely doesn't end within the New Testament. I would want to ask a specialist in post-New Testament early Christian literature whether there's any kind of clear break. I suspect that it's more a matter of the quality teamwork between God and Satan getting pushed to the side gradually over time. But I think this is one of those areas where we can see that core aspects of common modern Christian ideas about God and God in the Bible actually are not from the Bible. They're from much, much later thinking.

Thomas Westbrook: Your book goes into extensive detail about other monsters — the sea monster, the Leviathan, various other kinds of deceiving spirits, giants, and the terrifying Cherubim and Seraphim and the horrific things that they do for God. But I want to ask you one final question about the angels in God's employ and the horribly gruesome actions and massacres they carry out on his behalf. Somehow these monsters have been sanitized over time and turned into cute little guardian angels on Hallmark cards. But in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, the angel who shows John this beautiful vision of the New Jerusalem — the river of life, the hope of restoration — is one of the same seven angels who has just poured out plague bowls to destroy Earth, who harvested humans in a winepress, literally trampling them and popping them beneath his feet until blood flowed for hundreds of miles, as high as a horse's bridle. They poison water, burn people with the sun, unleash locust monsters. And then one of them shows John a vision of hope, a river of life and a river of death. But the two flow from the same source. You describe this as "the angel who comforts is the angel who kills." Here we have these horrific tasks being carried out not by devils, but by angels. Is this the Bible's final word on what angels are?

Esther Hamori: Yeah, you could say that. In the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, that's what angels are, and that's the spectrum of things that God tasks angels with doing. And it's pretty common, I think, for Christians to imagine that the New Testament is somehow more peaceful than the Hebrew Bible. I think in truth, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have beautiful, uplifting, enriching passages, and both are filled with violence. And the New Testament — or for Christians, the Bible — could hardly close with a clearer picture of the very disturbing range of angelic behavior as part of the entourage at God's command.

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