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UPDATE: James McGrath has posted a very thorough summary of yesterday's events: Enoch Seminar 2020 #OriginsOfEvil2020 Day 3. He says good things about my presentation. I found his paper, which he has pre-posted in a video here, very interesting. I look forward to the discussion later today.
Day 4 will open (at 9:00 EDT) with a public video recap of Day 3. I will link to it around the time it starts.
SECOND UPDATE: The public video recap is live here on Facebook. It will remain as a recorded file.
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I was a respondent to Gabriele Boccaccini's paper in the second session. His paper has not been published, but you can infer the main points from his title and my brief opening comments. Most of my response goes on a tangent, but, I trust, a profitable one. I post my response here:
ENOCH SEMINAR 2020This needs a more detailed exposition with footnotes, but it presents my basic argument. I posted some early thoughts on Beelzebul (Beelzeboul) here. For many other posts on the diabolical one in his various guises, see here and links.
Response to Gabriele Boccaccini, “Same Problems, Different Remedies: The Parables of Enoch and the Synoptics on Evil.”
Panel: How is the problem of evil and its origin addressed in the Parables of Enoch and the Synoptics?
Thank you, Professor Boccaccini, the organizers, and the presenters, for all your hard work preparing and carrying out this remarkable, fully-remote, Enoch Seminar. This is truly a ground-breaking event. I am very happy to be part of it.
First let me say that I agree overall with Gabriele’s conclusions. The Synoptic Gospels and the Parables of Enoch share a virtually identical doctrine of evil. Their interest is in the eschatology of evil rather than its protology. The solutions to the problem of evil are quite different. Both project the judgment of sinners to the eschaton, but only the Synoptics place repentance and redemption in the present.
I would nuance Gabriele’s discussion at a few points. The Parables are very interested in both good and evil angels, but only mention demons once in 69:12. The Synoptics show less interest in angels, and only mention evil angels once, in Matt 25:41. They are more interested in demons, specifically, the activity of demons during the time of Jesus. This focus is likely due to the tradition that exorcism of demons was a major feature of Jesus’ ministry.
The Synoptics show little interest in demonic origins. But one unique element of their demonology may involve primeval matters, if not exactly protology. This is worth exploring. The Synoptic passage about Jesus and Beelzebul (Mark 3:19b-30//Matt 12:22-37 (cf. 10:25)//Luke 11:14-23, 12:10) brings in a demonic figure who does not appear in the Parables. Beelzebul is a Greek transliteration of a Northwest Semitic phrase that means "Prince Baal." It appears as zbl bʻl in Ugaritic and is apparently behind the divine name baʻal-zebub, the god of Ekron, in the MT of 2 Kgs 1:2-3, 6, 16. The latter means "Lord of the flies," but this is probably a deliberate disrespectful corruption of Baal's title.
Evidently the name survived uncorrupted in some circles in Jesus' time. (Symmachus reads it correctly as baʻal-zebul in the Greek translation of 2 Kings 1.) The name had become applied to the chief evil spirit, the prince of demons or Satan. As far as I can ascertain, the use of the term as the title of an evil spirit is limited in antiquity to the Synoptic Gospels and literature dependent on them.
Where did the Beelzebul referred to by the scribes originate? A superficially plausible answer might be from the passage in 2 Kings. But the Beelzebub there is the local tutelary deity of the Philistine city Ekron. If he were demoted to demonic status in Jewish tradition, why would he be simultaneously promoted to “prince of the demons?” There is a better explanation.
We know that some of the Canaanite mythology found in the Ugaritic texts survived in the Hebrew literature of the Second Temple period. The premier example is Isaiah 27:1, which quotes nearly verbatim a line about the sea serpent Leviathan found in tablet 4 of the Baal cycle. In addition, Latin and Manichean traditions about the giants imply that the Enochic Book of Giants contained a now lost account of a battle between Leviathan, the archangel Raphael, and one of the giants. And it is likely that the vision in Daniel 7 draws on Baal mythology. If Beelzebul evolved out of Baal mythology, in which Baal functioned as ruler of the gods, his status of ruler of the demons makes sense. This is not a new point, but I wish to take it further here.
The Baal mythology also has intriguing connections with Jesus’ reply to the scribes. Jesus argues that Satan (Beelzebul) cannot survive opposed to himself. It is difficult to untangle mythology from metaphor here, but Jesus associates Beelzebul with both a kingdom and a house, which Jesus likens to a strong man’s house. Anyone who wishes to plunder that house must first bind the strong man. Elsewhere (Matt 10:25) Jesus also complains that some have “called the master of the house Beelzebul.”
The Ugaritic Baal cycle is set in the kingdom of the chief god El and involves territorial disputes between major gods in the pantheon. The Sea god fails in his attempt to subdue Baal and conquer the earth. After their conflict, a house is built for Baal, where he is enthroned and made king of the earth and ruler of the gods. Then Death does battle with Baal, but he too fails to subdue him. Baal retains his house and his rulership of the earth. Is it a coincidence that Jesus refers to Beelzebul’s kingdom, his house, and an effort to subdue him? Or is Jesus playing with surviving elements of Baal mythology? The parallels are at least suggestive.
In short, the Synoptics may preserve a fragment of another mythology of primeval evil, one in which the god Baal, who ruled the earth under the authority of El, was transformed in Jewish tradition into Beelzebul, prince of the demons. Jesus’ comments may imply that Beelzebul’s myth featured a demonic kingdom, his house, and conflict over control of his territory.
The Parables of Enoch show no awareness of the demonic figure Beelzebul and whatever mythology came with him, although the Enochic giants tradition may remember some Baal mythology involving Leviathan. In other words, the watchers myth and the Satan myth may not have been the only paradigms for primeval evil available to these authors.
If the Synoptics do allude to a late reflex of the Baal myth, we can only hope that new texts emerge which tell us more about the adaptation of Canaanite mythology in Second Temple Jewish tradition.
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