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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Daimonion
The New Testament word for demon, borrowed from a Greek word that was morally neutral.
Mark 1:34, in every translation this tool compares.
In ordinary Greek a daimon was neither good nor bad, a middling being between gods and people. The New Testament only ever uses it for the bad kind. Paul's line is that the idol itself is nothing, and the thing behind it is not nothing.
In classical Greek a daimon is a morally neutral intermediate being, and the New Testament uses the word only negatively. Paul says what is sacrificed to idols is sacrificed to demons: the idol is nothing, and the thing behind it is not. DDD (G. J. Riley) traces the negative turn to the same Persian dualism that reshaped Satan and the devil. Once the gods of the nations were demoted, the Septuagint rendered those old, neutral pagan gods as daimonia outright, for Deuteronomy's shedim (LXX Deuteronomy 32:17), for Israel's neighbors' national gods in general (LXX Psalm 95:5, "all the gods of the nations are demons"), and for the god of fortune, Gad, at Isaiah 65:11 ("preparing a table for the demon"). Revelation keeps the equation. Idol worship is demon worship (Revelation 9:20), and fallen Babylon becomes "a dwelling place of demons" (Revelation 18:2), an image lifted from Isaiah's oracle of desert ruin against the literal Babylon.
G1140 (δαιμόνιον), 63 occ; G1142 (δαίμων), 1 occ
In the literature the New Testament writers actually read, the most common account of where demons came from is genealogy, not abstract dualism. A group of angels came down, married human women, and fathered a race of violent giants; the Flood killed the giants' bodies but not their spirits, and those disembodied spirits, "neither angelic nor human," became demons, trapped in the air and looking for human hosts. Justin Martyr cites the tradition explicitly (2 Apology 5, quoting Genesis 6:1-4). Paul's "power of the air" for the ruling demonic authority (Ephesians 2:2) reflects this cosmology.
- Mark 1:34
- Luke 8:26-33
- Luke 11:14-20
- 1 Corinthians 10:20-21
- James 2:19
- Psalm 106:37
- Isaiah 65:11
- Revelation 9:20
- Revelation 18:2
- G. J. Riley, DDD s.v. "Demon," 235-239
