vision, Daniel sees
a horned ram that the angel Gabriel explains to him “is the king
of Greece.” Throughout the visions of Daniel, such monstrous
animals represent foreign rulers and nations who threaten Israel.
When Daniel, trembling with awe and terror, prays for his
people, he is rewarded with divine assurance that all Israelites
who remain true to God will survive (12:1-3). Thus the book of
Daniel powerfully reaffirms the integrity of Israel's moral and
ethnic identity. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Daniel, unlike
such other apocalyptic books as the Book of the Watchers and
Jubilees , is included in the canonical collection that we call the
Hebrew Bible and not relegated to the apocrypha.
The majority of Jews, at any rate those who assembled and
drew upon the Hebrew Bible, apparently endorsed Daniel’s
reaffirmation of Israel’s traditional identity’, while those who
valued such books as 1 Enoch and Jubilees probably included a
significant minority more inclined to identify with one group of
Jews against another, as Daniel had refused to do. Most of those
who did take sides within the community stopped far short of
proclaiming an all-out civil war between one Jewish group and
another, but there were notable exceptions. Starting at the time
of the Maccabean war, the more radical sectarian groups we have
mentioned—above all, those called Essenes—placed this cosmic
battle between angels and demons, God and Satan, at the very
center of their cosmology and their politics. In so doing, they
expressed the importance to their lives of the conflict between
themselves and the majority of their fellow Jews, whom the
Essenes consigned to damnation.
Many scholars believe that the Essenes are known to us from
such first-century contemporaries as Josephus, Philo, and the
Roman geographer and naturalist Pliny the Elder, as well as from
the discovery in 1947 of the ruins of their community, including
its sacred library, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus, at the age of
sixteen, was fascinated bv this austere and secretive community:
he says that they “practiced great holiness” within an extraordi-
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 57
narily close-knit group (“they love one another very much”).31
Josephus and Philo both note, with some astonishment, that
these sectarians practiced strict celibacy, probably because they
chose to live according to the biblical rules for holy war, which
prohibit sexual intercourse during wartime. But the war in
which they saw themselves engaged was God’s war against the
power of evil—a cosmic war that they expected would result in
God’s vindication of their fidelity. The Essenes also turned over
all their money and property to their leaders in order to live
“without money,” as Pliny says, in a monastic community.32
These devout and passionate sectarians saw the foreign
occupation of Palestine—and the accommodation of the majority
of Jews to that occupation—as evidence that the forces of evil
had taken over the world and—in the form of Satan, Mastema, or
the Prince of Darkness—infiltrated and taken over God’s own
people, turning most of them into allies of the Evil One.
Arising from controversies over purity and assimilation that
followed the Maccabean war, the Essene movement grew during
the Roman occupation of the first century to include over four
thousand men. Women, never mentioned in the community
rule, apparently were not eligible for admission. Although the
remains of a few women and children have been found among
the hundreds of men buried in the outer cemetery at Qûmran,
they probably were not community members.33 (Since the whole
cemetery has not yet been excavated, these conclusions remain
inconclusive.) Many adjunct members of the sect, apparently
including many who were married, lived in towns all over
Palestine, pursuing ordinary occupations while striving to
devote themselves to God; but
a horned ram that the angel Gabriel explains to him “is the king
of Greece.” Throughout the visions of Daniel, such monstrous
animals represent foreign rulers and nations who threaten Israel.
When Daniel, trembling with awe and terror, prays for his
people, he is rewarded with divine assurance that all Israelites
who remain true to God will survive (12:1-3). Thus the book of
Daniel powerfully reaffirms the integrity of Israel's moral and
ethnic identity. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Daniel, unlike
such other apocalyptic books as the Book of the Watchers and
Jubilees , is included in the canonical collection that we call the
Hebrew Bible and not relegated to the apocrypha.
The majority of Jews, at any rate those who assembled and
drew upon the Hebrew Bible, apparently endorsed Daniel’s
reaffirmation of Israel’s traditional identity’, while those who
valued such books as 1 Enoch and Jubilees probably included a
significant minority more inclined to identify with one group of
Jews against another, as Daniel had refused to do. Most of those
who did take sides within the community stopped far short of
proclaiming an all-out civil war between one Jewish group and
another, but there were notable exceptions. Starting at the time
of the Maccabean war, the more radical sectarian groups we have
mentioned—above all, those called Essenes—placed this cosmic
battle between angels and demons, God and Satan, at the very
center of their cosmology and their politics. In so doing, they
expressed the importance to their lives of the conflict between
themselves and the majority of their fellow Jews, whom the
Essenes consigned to damnation.
Many scholars believe that the Essenes are known to us from
such first-century contemporaries as Josephus, Philo, and the
Roman geographer and naturalist Pliny the Elder, as well as from
the discovery in 1947 of the ruins of their community, including
its sacred library, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus, at the age of
sixteen, was fascinated bv this austere and secretive community:
he says that they “practiced great holiness” within an extraordi-
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 57
narily close-knit group (“they love one another very much”).31
Josephus and Philo both note, with some astonishment, that
these sectarians practiced strict celibacy, probably because they
chose to live according to the biblical rules for holy war, which
prohibit sexual intercourse during wartime. But the war in
which they saw themselves engaged was God’s war against the
power of evil—a cosmic war that they expected would result in
God’s vindication of their fidelity. The Essenes also turned over
all their money and property to their leaders in order to live
“without money,” as Pliny says, in a monastic community.32
These devout and passionate sectarians saw the foreign
occupation of Palestine—and the accommodation of the majority
of Jews to that occupation—as evidence that the forces of evil
had taken over the world and—in the form of Satan, Mastema, or
the Prince of Darkness—infiltrated and taken over God’s own
people, turning most of them into allies of the Evil One.
Arising from controversies over purity and assimilation that
followed the Maccabean war, the Essene movement grew during
the Roman occupation of the first century to include over four
thousand men. Women, never mentioned in the community
rule, apparently were not eligible for admission. Although the
remains of a few women and children have been found among
the hundreds of men buried in the outer cemetery at Qûmran,
they probably were not community members.33 (Since the whole
cemetery has not yet been excavated, these conclusions remain
inconclusive.) Many adjunct members of the sect, apparently
including many who were married, lived in towns all over
Palestine, pursuing ordinary occupations while striving to
devote themselves to God; but
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