JEWISH EXORCISM BEFORE AND AFTER THE DESTRUCTION

OF THE SECOND TEMPLE

Gideon Bohak

In the Testament of Solomon, an ancient Christian demonological

compendium with much data on the pernicious activities of demons
and on the different manners in which they may be thwarted, there
is a clear connection between the Jerusalem Temple and the war on
demons. On the one hand, the Testament recounts the story—which
is well known from many other late antique sources—of how Solomon
subdued various demons and used them for the construction of his
Temple. On the other hand, it also relates how Solomon subsequently
locked the demons up below the Temple’s foundations, and how, many
centuries later, when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple they inad-
vertently let loose a hoard of wild demons who caused much afflic-
tion to the humans they encountered. But if we take the Testament
of Solomon seriously—although it is extremely difficult for a modern
reader to take the Testament seriously—we should also note that when
it comes to the destruction of the Second Temple (as against the First),
we find no hair-raising stories about the release of pent-up demons.
For the author of the Testament, the real watershed event in the his-
tory of demonology had come some forty years before the Destruction
with the appearance of the Jewish Messiah, the Emanuel, the Savior
who was crucified and rose to heaven, and at whose name(s) all the
demons tremble. For the author of the Testament, Nebuchadnezzar’s
destruction of the First Jewish Temple was an important event in the
history of humanity’s fight against the demons, but Titus’ destruction
of the Second Jewish Temple made no difference to the demons or
those who fought them. Accordingly, it is not even mentioned in the
entire work.
Leaving such Heilsgeschichte behind and turning to more secular—
and hopefully more objective—history, we may ask whether Jewish
demonology and Jewish exorcism underwent any major changes in the
period after the destruction of the Temple, the failure of the Diaspora
revolt, and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt, and whether such
changes may be attributed to the direct or indirect influences of these
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events. But before turning to the question itself, we may ponder its
wider nature. A first point to consider is that whereas some aspects
of Jewish culture were directly influenced by the destruction of the
Temple—most notably, all sacrificial activity and all Temple-related
cultic activity either ceased completely or were entirely transformed—
the belief in demons and the use of special techniques to fight them
does not seem like something that had to change after 70 ce. That
is: although the three Jewish revolts brought many changes to Jewish
society, including the destruction of much of the priestly class and
its most important powerbase, the decimation of Diaspora Jewry, the
shift of the centers of the Jewish population in Palestine from Judea
to the coastal plain and to the Galilee, and the gradual rise of a rival
Jewish center in Babylonia, such major transformations need not have
had a strong impact on the exorcistic practices of those Jewish exor-
cists who survived the revolts or on the transmission and actual use
of the oral and written knowledge relating to demons and the war
against them. Thus, asking whether 70 or 135 ce are meaningful dates
in the history of Jewish exorcism is one way of asking whether these
events entirely transformed all aspects of Jewish society and culture; or
rather, whether their impact was greatly felt in some spheres, but was
more, or even mostly, imperceptible in others.
A second preliminary observation has to do with the sources at our
disposal. One obvious change that took place after 70, and especially
after 117 and 135 ce, has to do with the nature of the sources avail-
able for historians studying the periods before and after these events.
For whereas the Second Temple period, and especially its later centu-
ries, is well endowed with a variety of literary sources—including the
writings of Josephus and Philo, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,
the Dead Sea Scrolls and most of the New Testament—for the period
after 135 ce we must rely mostly on rabbinic literature, which is a
much more unidimensional, and much less historian-friendly, body
of texts. Thus, it is much easier to write a history of the Jewish people,
or of most aspects of Jewish society and culture, in the Second Temple
period than to write a similar history for the period from the end of
the Bar Kokhba revolt to the Muslim conquest, and this imbalance in
our sources often makes it hard to say what changed after 70 or 135
ce and what did not.
Nevertheless, when it comes to Jewish exorcism we happen to be
blessed with quite a few sources, and—what is even more important—
with a great variety of different types of sources that supplement and
complement each other, both from the Second Temple period and from