Belial

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Belial is a name for an evil power in the Jewish and Christian traditions — originally not a name at all but a Hebrew common noun, bĕliyyaʿal, meaning roughly worthlessness, ruin, or wickedness. In the older layers of the Hebrew Bible the word is abstract: “sons of bĕliyyaʿal” are scoundrels, “men of bĕliyyaʿal” are the lawless, and the phrase carries no implication of a distinct being behind the noun. What happened to the word over the following centuries is a small case study in how a quality becomes a person.

By the last centuries before the Common Era the term had been personified. In the writings of the Dead Sea community — the sectarian scrolls found near the shore of that sea — Belial is a proper name: the prince of an empire of darkness, ranged against God and the “sons of light,” commanding lesser spirits and snaring the righteous through what the texts call the dominion of Belial. Here the figure does real theological work. The community read its own embattled situation through a cosmos split between two opposed powers and the lots assigned to each, and Belial is the head of the adversary lot — less a tempter than a wartime sovereign whose reign is fixed to end.

The Greek-speaking world inherited the name in the spelling Beliar. It appears once in the New Testament, where Paul asks what concord Christ has with Beliar, setting the name as a near-synonym for the satanic. In the apocalyptic literature around the turn of the era the figure grows more elaborate: a spirit of lawlessness, sometimes an antichrist-like deceiver expected to work false wonders before the end. These are tradition-internal pictures, and they do not all agree; what they share is the use of the old word as the title of a single great opponent.

Much later, and along a different track, the name entered the demonology of the early-modern magical handbooks. There Belial is enrolled as one of the named kings or princes of a hierarchy of demons, given a sigil, a legion count, and an office — the sort of bureaucratic infernal order that the grimoire tradition built by reading scattered scriptural names back into a catalogue. The continuity with the biblical figure is mostly the name itself; the rank, the seal, and the procedure for summoning belong to the later literature and its own conventions.

Scholarship treats the whole arc as a development rather than a discovery — the gradual reification of an abstract noun into a personal adversary, driven by the dualism that ran strong in Second Temple Judaism and passed from there into early Christianity. The traditions that used the name did not experience it as development; they spoke of Belial as something real and present, a power to be resisted now and defeated later. The word for worthlessness had become the name of an enemy.

→ Related: Zephaniah · Gnosis