Belial

The chariot comes out of the dark already burning, and sitting in it, side by side, are two beautiful angels. One of them speaks. The voice is pleasant and unhurried, the voice of somebody long accustomed to being believed. That is the only physical description of Belial that anyone has ever committed to paper, and it was written in seventeenth-century England, something close to two thousand years after his name first entered the record.

For most of his existence he had no face because he was not a person. He was a word. Beliyya’al turns up twenty-seven times in the Hebrew scriptures and not once as anybody’s name. Fifteen of those are the idiom “sons of Belial”, and the men it lands on are unpleasant but entirely mortal: the mob at Gibeah pounding on the door after dark, the sons of Eli helping themselves to raw meat from the sacrifice, Nabal refusing David’s men a meal, Shimei throwing stones and curses down a hillside. Translators reach for worthless, scoundrel, good-for-nothing.

Where the word came from has never been agreed. Gesenius read it as beli plus ya’al, without value. The Talmud at Sanhedrin 111b splits it as beli plus ‘ol, without a yoke, which makes a son of Belial a man who has thrown off the yoke of heaven, and Rashi accepted that reading; the Septuagint translators clearly had something similar in mind, because they kept rendering the word as lawlessness. Then there is the reading Bäthgen proposed and T. K. Cheyne argued through the 1890s, which takes it as the place from which there is no return and matches it to an Assyrian phrase for the underworld. That one has a passage behind it. In the psalm preserved at 2 Samuel 22, the poet describes the torrents of Belial closing over him, and torrents are not a character flaw. Nobody has settled it.

The first time the word stands up and walks is in Nahum, where ruined Judah is promised that Belial will never pass through her again. Grammatically it could still be an abstraction. It does not read like one. It reads like an army.

By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls he is fully upright and has acquired a title. The Community Rule contains a dense piece of cosmology known as the Treatise on the Two Spirits, which holds that God made two spirits for humanity to walk in, one of light and truth and one of darkness and deceit, and set them in equal measure until the appointed end. The spirit of darkness has a commander, called in that passage the Angel of Darkness and named elsewhere in the same scroll Belial. The War Scroll is blunter about the arrangement: you made Belial for the pit, angel of enmity, in darkness is his domain, and his counsel is to bring about wickedness and guilt. Under him are angels of destruction, and under them an army.

The community handled him liturgically, once a year. The priests would bless the men of God’s lot, and then the Levites would turn and curse the men of Belial’s lot, working through the whole catalogue of them, and everyone entering the covenant answered amen, amen. Twice, so that nobody could later pretend they had not said it.

His characteristic weapon is not a weapon. The Damascus Document describes three nets of Belial, attributed to something Levi son of Jacob had said, and the three are fornication, wealth, and the defilement of the sanctuary. The line that follows is the cold part: whoever escapes the first is caught by the second, and whoever gets clear of that one is taken by the third. No claws anywhere in the description. Just a man walking into an arrangement that was set up before he arrived.

The other Second Temple books agree on the method. Jubilees prays that the spirit of Belial not be allowed to rule over Israel and accuse them, and calls the uncircumcised nations his sons. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs make him the source from which seven spirits of seduction come, and those spirits enter a person at birth, which is to say the contest starts before the contestant does. The same collection calls him the spirit of darkness and the origin of impurity and lying, and promises that the Messiah will bind him, cast him into fire forever, and take back off him every soul he ever captured. In the Ascension of Isaiah he is Beliar, identified with Samael, styled the angel of lawlessness and the ruler of this world, and given the strange corrupted name Matanbuchus.

Paul needed only one line. Writing to Corinth he asked what concord Christ has with Belial, and with that rhetorical question the name crossed permanently into Christian usage, no longer a Hebrew insult and no longer confined to a desert sect’s scrolls.

What Christianity did with him next was put him in court. Around 1382 an Italian canon lawyer named Jacobus de Teramo, later bishop of Monopoli and then of Taranto, Florence and Spoleto, wrote the Consolatio peccatorum, which German printers would sell as Das Buch Belial. It stages a lawsuit. Lucifer sues Jesus Christ for trespass, on the grounds that the descent into hell was an unlawful entry, and Solomon sits as judge. Moses appears as counsel for Christ. Belial appears for hell, and he is very good at it, arriving with a procedural bow and an argument built out of citations, a devil who has read the statute and brought the paperwork. Augsburg printed it in 1472 and added woodcuts the following year. The Church eventually put it on the Index of Prohibited Books, which slowed nothing down.

The grimoires crowned him. The Lesser Key of Solomon, compiled in seventeenth-century manuscripts and printed in 1904, lists Belial as the sixty-eighth spirit, a mighty and powerful king created next after Lucifer, who declares that he fell first among the worthier sort that stood before Michael and the other heavenly angels. His office is to distribute presentations and senatorships and to cause the favour of friends and of foes. He gives excellent familiars and governs fifty legions. He also comes with a caution: he must have offerings, sacrifices and gifts from the exorcist or he will not answer honestly, and even bought he does not remain in the truth for one hour unless divine power holds him there.

Set against the ordinary run of hell, his abilities are oddly bloodless. He has no strength worth mentioning and nothing to bite with. What he has is an age, held on lease, and the patience to work inside it. He can put seven spirits into an infant. He can lay three nets across the whole width of a life so that the exits are covered. He can get a man a seat in the senate, and the favour of people who dislike him, and a familiar spirit that actually works. He is the one who arranges things, and the arranging is done long before anyone notices a hand in it.

The limits are built into the same design. That lease has a term written into it, and the Community Rule is explicit that the two spirits run in equal measure only until the appointed end, an end fixed by somebody else. The scroll known as 11QMelchizedek has Melchizedek rise and destroy him outright. The Testaments have him bound and burned and stripped of everything he took. The magicians, working much later and with far less confidence, found a cruder handle on the same weakness: he can be bought, which means he can be dealt with, and he cannot hold a lie together indefinitely under pressure. And there is the odd little coda the grimoire attaches to the whole seventy-two. Solomon shut them all in a brass vessel and sank it in a lake at Babylon, and the locals, certain that anything sealed that carefully must be full of treasure, broke it open. The spirits came out and went back to where they had been before. All of them except Belial, who walked into a statue instead, and stayed there, and took sacrifices from people who worshipped the image as a god.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Belial?

Belial is a demon of Jewish and Christian tradition who began as a Hebrew word meaning worthlessness and became a named supernatural figure during the Second Temple period. In the Dead Sea Scrolls he is the Angel of Darkness who leads the sons of darkness, and in later Christian demonology he appears as a king of hell. Paul refers to him by name in 2 Corinthians, which carried the name into Christian usage.

What does the name Belial mean?

Belial comes from the Hebrew beliyya’al, most often translated as worthlessness or without value. A rabbinic tradition preserved in the Talmud splits it instead as “without a yoke”, meaning someone who has thrown off the yoke of heaven, and the Septuagint consistently renders the word as lawlessness. A third proposal, argued by Cheyne in the 1890s, reads it as the place from which there is no return, which would make it a name for the underworld.

What are the three nets of Belial?

The three nets of Belial appear in the Damascus Document, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they are fornication, wealth, and the defilement of the sanctuary. The text says that a person who escapes the first net is caught by the second, and whoever gets past that one is taken by the third. They describe Belial’s method, which relies on arrangement and seduction rather than force.

Is Belial the same as Satan?

The sources treat them as the same figure in some places and keep them apart in others. The Ascension of Isaiah uses Beliar, Samael and Satan interchangeably for the leader of the forces of evil, and Jubilees casts Belial in the accuser’s role that elsewhere belongs to Satan. The grimoire tradition, by contrast, makes Belial a distinct king created immediately after Lucifer, which implies two separate beings.

What does Belial look like?

No ancient text describes Belial’s appearance at all, because for most of his history he was an abstraction rather than a body. The single surviving description comes from the Lesser Key of Solomon, compiled from seventeenth-century English manuscripts, which says he appears in the form of two beautiful angels seated in a chariot of fire and speaks with a comely voice. Everything earlier, including all the Dead Sea Scrolls material, leaves him faceless.

Related Entries

Satan, Samael, Azazel, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Lilith, Agrat bat Mahlat, Antichrist, Nephilim, Grigori, Michael, Demons, Angra Mainyu, Iblis