The Mesopotamian Talmud: Good Demons and Evil Gods in Rabbinic, Zoroastrian, Manichean, and Babylonian textual traditions

• In Event: Rabbinic Texts in Comparative Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Like many religious groups in Late Antiquity, the Babylonian rabbis believed that the world was filled with malevolent, benevolent, and neutral intermediary beings that acted upon and interacted with human beings. This paper argues that, in their construction of intermediary beings understood as dangerous, i.e. the demonic, the rabbis were part of a complex network of religious thinkers t that included contemporaneous Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and Christians, in conversation with earlier Mesopotamian religious texts about demons.
In recent years, the relationship of the Babylonian rabbis to the surrounding cultures of Sasanian Babylonia has been explored by scholars such as Yaakov Elman, David Brodsky, and Shai Secunda. These scholars have demonstrated the conceptual and hermeneutical links between rabbinic themes and worldviews, and those of the Zoroastrian elite of the Sasanian empire. However, while parallels between the Bavli and contemporaneous cultures have been explored, the relationship between the Bavli and earlier Sumerian and Akkadian literary traditions is still not fully understood. In this paper I examine interrelationships between the Babylonian rabbis, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and earlier Mesopotamian writings on the subject of demons. Specifically, by doing close readings of selections of the Bavli, the Vīdēvdād, Manichaean cosmologies, and the Akkadian epic of Atrahasis, I demonstrate that the monotheistic rabbis adapted the trope of demons as neutral servants of the divine plan from an earlier Mesopotamian worldview, in contrast to the beliefs of their dualistic contemporaries. In other words, while the choice to treat demons as subjects of religious law is paralleled in Zoroastrian and Manichaean texts, the rabbinic construction of demons as non-evil and essentially passive actors who respond harmfully to perceived human aggression is firmly within the earlier Mesopotamian literary tradition.
Situating the rabbis within this thick web of ideas and relationships brings to light the unique synthesis apparent in the rabbis’ understanding of the demons with which they shared their world. The rabbis adopted and adapted both ancient and contemporaneous tropes about demons in order to reconcile demons with monotheism, and subjugate demons to rabbinic halakhah.

author

• Sara Ronis, Yale University