Demons

On the road to Meron, where the Safed kabbalists believe Jesus is buried, R. Hayyim Vital (16^th cent.) encounters a dangerous spirit, who overpowers him in a moment of spiritual weakness. The spirit later tosses him in the air and exhausts him nearly to death, but Vital makes it to his master, the great R. Isaac Luria, the Arizal, who, fearing the spirit will kill Vital and thwart his plans to bring about the messianic age, exorcises it.

Why would God make righteous people suffer just to test their faithfulness? With Job, the Bible is explicit that it was in response to Satan’s challenge, but what about Abraham? Jubilees (2^nd cent. C.E.), and later the Talmud and midrash, reimagine the Akedah to have been instigated by Mastema, the Satan, or jealous angels. The midrash goes further and envisions the demon Samael tempting Abraham to make him fail.

In Priestly law, impurity is stripped of its mythic origins in the demonic realm but still retains its dangerous, physical presence, and must be mitigated by specific acts of ritual cleansing and banishing, depending on the type of impurity. Purification from the skin disease tzaraʿat (Leviticus 13–14) offers the starkest example of such a ritual.

Leviticus (17:13) requires covering the blood of undomesticated animals; Deuteronomy (12:15) requires pouring out the blood of slaughtered domesticated animals onto the ground. How do these laws reconcile with each other? The sectarians in Qumran have one answer, the rabbis another, the academics a third.