fallen angels chapter one

8/10/2019 Fallen Angels Chapter One

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CH PTER ONE

Introducing the Theme

veryone likes tales of adventure. A more maturetaste finds interest in the study of character and

the d evelopm ent of personality. This book, how-ever, traces the evolution of an idea and its adventures throughthe centuries.

The study of ideas may be both interesting and practical: it isimportant to know, for example, how the democracy of FranklinD . Roosevelt differed from the democracy of Thomas Jefferson.But w ha t value can the re be in the history of a mythological idea,a belief in angels, and in sinful angels at that? Can such a storybe of interest to anyone but a student of antiquity or a dabbler inthe curious vagaries of the human mind?

An obvious answer is: The myth of the rebel angels has had agreat influence on world literature. The figure of Prometheus,


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4 Fallen Angels

staunchly defying the omnipotent Zeus, even though he is fore-doomed to defeat, has fascinated many poets. The drama isheightened when the rebel against Deity is not a human being,but an angelone of God's holiest creatures. Such a paradox wasbound to stir the poetic imagination. Its most notable result isthe massive epic of John Milton. The depiction of Satan is one ofhis greatest successesthe desperate fallen angel is more vividand interesting, sometimes more appealing, than his unspottedfellows. Paradise Lost is, as the saying goes, more famous thanwidely read; but its rich music and dramatic power still rewardanyone old-fashioned enough to open its pages.

We need not mention the Faust literature, nor the countlessworks of imagination in which the Devil plays a part. Our con-cern is not with his manifold activity, but only with his rebellionand fall. To Milton, indeed, this was no mere literary theme. Hemay have embellished Paradise Lost with poetic fancies; but tohim this was only the adornment of profound and literal truth.Later authors, however, have utilized this subject matter morefreely for their own special purposes.

The romantic pessimist, Alfred de Vigny, tells in his poem,Le Deluge, of one Emmanuel, son of an angel whose name hebears and of a mortal woman. Emmanuel learns from the starsthat the flood is coming, and seeks refuge in the company of hisbeloved on Mount Ararat. She had been offered marriage andsecurity by Japhet, son of Noah, but remained faithful to Em-manuel. The pair hope that his angel father will rescue them;but no help comes and they are overwhelmed by the risingwaters.

De Vigny's longest poem, ffloa, is about a female angel, bornof a tear dropped by Jesus. (In the authentic tradition, angelsare exclusively masculine.) Deeply moved by the spirit of divinepity, Eloa is obsessed by vague reports about an exiled rebelangel. She goes forth to seek and comfort this unfortunate being.Satan, however, is not redeemed by her good offices; loa iscaught in the net of his blandishments and dragged down toperdition.

Utterly different again is Anatole France's La Chute des Anges.Here much curious learning is combined with fantastic imagina-tion and mordant wit, the whole presented in France's limpidstyle, to expose the evils and follies of French society and to


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Introducing the Them e 5

advance the cause of social and spiritual revolution. The ancientlegend is only the vehicle of the author's satirical aim.

The varied uses which creative writers have made of this oldbelief testify to its fascination. But we have to do with muchmore than a fantastic tale suitable for poetic treatment. Fantasticit is, sometimes grotesque; but as we trace its development, weshall find ourselves standing at some critical points in the historyof the human spirit. Most of those who have previously investi-gated this subject have dealt chiefly with its folkloristie aspect*The present study is more properly theological, not to say apolo-getic. Following the fortunes of the belief in fallen angels, weshall gain a deeper insight into the character of Judaism and thecharacter of Christianity, and into their divergences. Before wefinish, we shall have to confront contemporary issues of majorimportance.

Our study will lead us through many and varied writings, in adozen languages, composed through the centuries in many partsof the world. Some of our sources are queer indeed, many ofthem confusing. So at the start it will be well to outline the natureof our undertaking.

Man has always had to contend with physical and moral evil,with wickedness and with pain. But the existence of evil, how-ever unpleasant, presented no theoretical problem to the primi-tive mind. Everyone knew that there are good, friendly gods,and also wicked, cruel deities and demons. It is the latter whocause all our woes and worries. The purpose of religion wasto conciliate (and strengthen) the powers of good and to placateor defeat the spirits of evil. Of course one had to deal cautiously

even with the kindest gods, for they too could be dangerous ifoffended. One might even utilize the powers of evil for his ownpurposesthat is, practice witchcraftbut this was hazardous inthe extreme. The general division of the supernatural beings intokind and cruel powers was familiar to all the pagan peoples; thisdualism found its most extreme and dramatic expression in Persia.

The religion of Israel affirmed that the whole world is the crea-tion and domain of one God, who is all good. We need not dwell

here on the sublimity of this conception or its liberating effectson the human spirit. But there is no denying that it posed newproblems. If God is unique, and if He is perfectly good, how arewe to account for the evil in the world? This question still gnaws


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6 Fallen Angels

at our hearts; it was soon perceived by Israel's more thoughtfulspirits.

Originally, the difficulty was put thus: Why do the righteoussuffer and the wicked prosper? The prophet Jeremiah raised the

question in these terms, and his perplexity is echoed in many oftiie Psalms. The Book of Job states the problem with unequaledpower and passion, and attempts a noble and dignified solution.But the answer which Judaism later adopted, and even made offi-cial, was that all the apparent inequities we encounter in this lifeare adjusted by reward and punishment in the life beyond thegrave.

Yet the problem in its broader sense remained. Granted that

the wicked will be punished and the righteous rewarded afterdeath, why are men wicked at all? Why did God create a worldwhich is not entirely good? In the centuries preceding the Chris-tian era, so much hardship and tragedy befell the Jewish peoplethat they were bound to ponder these questions; and many wholacked philosophic training felt the sting of the questions no lesskeenly. And so some of them attempted a mythological explana-tion.

God, they said, created everything good. But certain angelswhom He made for His service were faithless to their high call-ing. The story of the fallen angels appears in two general forms.

One version tells that a group of angels became enamored ofmortal women, succumbed to lust and defiled their heavenlyholiness with earthly love. Their human consorts bore them giantoffspring, violent and cruel. Having sinned first in weakness, thefallen angels went on to deliberate rebellion. A terrible punish-ment overtook them and their violent children; but the corrup-tion they had wrought continued to taint all mankind.

The other form of the story concerns one of the mightiest ofthe angel host, who rebelled against God at the time of Creation,or, according to some, even before. His sin was pride, and heeven dreamed of usurping the place of the Almighty. Cast downfrom heaven, he became Satan, the adversary; and out of hishatred of God and his jealousy of man, he led Adam to sin.

Both these stories appear in Jewish writings dating from thelast few centuries before the Christian era. At the same time,we meet two related ideas. One is the existence of a demonicpower, called Satan and also by several other names, who is op-


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8 Fallen Angels

The passages we must consider are few and brief so we mayquote them in full. The first is Genesis 6.1-4:

1. And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on theface of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2. thatthe sons of God (b9ne haElohim) saw the daughters of menthat they were fair; and they took them wives, whomsoeverthey chose. 3. And the Lord said: 'My spirit shall not abide(? yadon) in man forever, for that he also is flesh; thereforeshall his days be a hundred and twenty years/ 4. The Neph-ilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, whenthe sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and theybore children unto them; the same were the mighty men thatwere of old, the men of renown.

Who were the "sons of God"? Some ancient commentators haveinsisted that the phrase is no more than an honorific title for hu-man beings, meaning "the sons of the rulers/' But they had spe-cial motives (as we shall see) for adopting this interpretation.Both the present context, and the other cases where this phraseoccurs in the Bible, compel us to explain "sons of God" as divine,angelic beings.1 This little paragraph tells of the marriage of

mortal women to superhuman spouses.Verse 3 is obscure. The translation of the word yadon is nomore than a guess; the whole sentence does not seem to haveany bearing on the rest of the section. But certainly it is not acondemnation of the action of the sons of God.2

The most significant fact about the passage is a negative fact:the Bible does not suggest that these intermarriages were sinful,or the issue of them bad. It gives no hint that any punishmentresulted. Ancient teachers supposed that this little tale accountsfor the Flood, the story of which follows our paragraph. But theTorah nowhere suggests such a thing. The Flood was a punish-ment for human wickedness.

These four verses have no clear connection with the rest ofthe book of Genesis. They seem rather to be a mythological frag-ment, which accounts for the origin of the famous ancient heroes.Such mighty men, whose fathers were gods and whose motherswere mortal, are found in the lore of many peoples. Such was theBabylonian hero Gilgamesh; such was Hercules, among many ex-amples in Greek mythology. And the Canaanite epic of TheBeautiful and Gracious Gods tells how the great god El begot


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The Hebrew Scriptures 9

Shahar and Shalim on mortal women.3 Of course the Bible repre-sents the fathers not as gods, but as angels. The Gibborim orheroesso our text seems to sayare not identical with theNefilim* (T he latter are a breed of primeval giants who are men-tioned elsewhere in the Bible under such names as Refaim andZamzumim.) The Nefilim were on earth before the heroes wereengendered as well as later on.

Beyond question, the tale of the fallen angels was based onthis passage; it is a kind of Midrash upon it. But the Torah sup-plied only the starting point of the story, not the story itself.

The second passage is from a doom-song upon the King of

Babylon; it dates, then, at the earliest from the Babylonian exile,perhaps later. It runs (Isaiah 14.12-15):

How art thou fallen from heaven0 day-star, son of the morning (Helel ben Shahar)How art thou cast down to the ground,That didst cast lots over the nationsAnd thou saidst in thy heart:'I will ascend into heaven,

Above the stars of God (El)Will I exalt my throne;And I will sit upon the mount of meeting,In the uttermost parts of the north;1 will ascend above the heights of the clouds;I will be like the Most High (Ely on)Yet thou shalt be brought down to the nether-world,To the uttermost parts of the pit.

Christian tradition has regularly adduced this passage as aproof-text for the fall of Satanvery rarely, the same interpreta-tion appears in Jewish literature.5 But leaving this tradition aside,the modern scholar must recognize that the poem has a strongmythological flavor. El, Elyon, and Shahar are now known to usas members (the first two as leading mem bers) of the Canaanitepantheon. "The mount of meeting in the uttermost parts of thenorth" is the abode of the gods, corresponding to M ount Olympus

in Greek myth. It is very tempting then to see in this poem anallusion to a Canaanite or Phoenician myth concerning one Helel,son of the god Shahar, who sought to usurp the throne of thechief god and for his audacity was cast down into the abyss.


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10 Fallen Angels

This would be a parallel to the Greek legend of the revolt ofZeus against Kronos, and of the unsuccessful attempt of theTitans to unseat Zeus in his turn.

But all this, though plausible, remains conjecture. No extant

Canaanite source tells us about Helel ben Shahar, nor of a revoltagainst Elyon. It is still possible that "Shining one, son of thedawn" was a poetic phrase coined by the author of the prophecy.In any case, the writer was exulting over the fall of a humanking. Even if he is alluding to a myth, we need not suppose thathe believed in it.6 English litera ture is full of allusions to classicalmythology, but for the purposes of ornament only.

The last passage we must consider is Psalm 82:

1. God standeth in the Congregation of God (El);In the midst of gods (elohim) H e judgeth.

2. How long will ye judge unjustlyAnd respect the persons of the wicked?

3. Judge the poor and the fatherless,Do justice to the afflicted and the destitute.

4. Rescue the poor and the needy;

Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.5. They know not, neither do they understand;

They go about in darkness.All the foundations of the earth are moved.

6. I said: Ye are gods,And all of you sons of the Most High (Elyon).

7. Nevertheless ye shall die like men,And fall like one of the princes (sarim).

8. Arise, O God, judge the earth;For Thou shalt possess all the nations.

Scholars have been at loggerheads concerning this brief Psalm.Some insist tha t it is directed against wicked earthly rulers; othersare just as positive that it describes a judgment upon sinful an-gels. Dr. Julian Morgenstern has now brought us closer to a solu-tion of the difficulty.7 He points out that, whichever interpreta-tion one may adopt, part of the Psalm will fit his view and

another part will not. Look at the Psalm again: the lines which(following Dr. Morgenstern) have been indented refer unmis-takably to human rulers. They have been substituted for part ofa mythological poem, of which only the beginning and end have


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been preserved. The older verses contain the names of El andElyon, and their subject matter is plainly mythological. It is thejudgment by the God of Israel upon the wicked angels. The partof the poem that has been suppressed must, among other things,have stated the sin for which the angels were punished.

Thus far Dr. Morgenstern's analysis seems to be correct beyondquestion. But he has indulged in some other conjectures whichare less convincing.8

What, says Dr. Morgenstern, was the sin of the angels? It isthe sin related in Genesis 6, of marrying mo rtals an d eng end eringchildren. The order of the universe is that celestial beings aredeathless: therefore they need no offspring. Indeed, were theyto reproduce their kind, the increase of the immortal populationwould soon overcrowd heaven and earth. Only earthly creatureswho taste death need to achieve immortality in their children.The elohim upset this wise dispensation by begetting offspring;therefore Elyon punished them by stripping them of immortality.

Curiously enough, Dr. Morgenstern's reasoning was anticipatedby the Midrash. When Hannah prayed at Shilohso the rabbisrelateshe said: "Lo rd of the Un iverse Th e celestials neve r die,and they do not reproduce their kind. Terrestrial beings die, butthey are fruitful and multiply. Therefore I pray: Either make meimmortal, or give me a son " 9

But the ancient mythographers were not so logical. The godsof Canaan, like those of every folk but Israel, begot children withblithe indifference to any quasi-Malthusian considerations. Noone ever questioned their right to marry among themselves, or toconsort with mortals. If Hera objected to the flirtations of Zeus,it was not because his lady-loves were human. Hephaestus wasno less indignant when his wife betrayed him with the god ofwar. At her m arriage to Eros, Psyche was transformed into a god-dess; and Artemis was not condemned for loving Endymion.

In short: Genesis 6 tells that the angels married women, butnot that this was a sin. Psalm 82 reports that the elohim sinned,but not that they married women. There is no biblical evidenceto warrant a combination of the two items. On the assumption

that these mythological materials came from North Semiticsources, the probability is all the other way. A more reasonableguess is that the sin of the angels described in the part of thePsalm now lost was an attempt to usurp the power of El and


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12 Fallen Angels

Elyon. This would fit in with the (adm ittedly conjectural) inter-pretation of Isaiah 14.

The Bible, then, contains some of the materials of which themyth of the rebel angels was fashioned. But the story itself andthe ideas it expresses are found neither in the Bible nor in theheathen sources which Scripture occasionally echoes. As for themyth of the fall of Satan, there is no hint of it in the HebrewBible. Satan appears a few times, but always as a member ofGod's entourage, an agent entrusted with special duties, never asa rebel. The serpent of Eden is neither a devil nor the agent of adevil. He is just an animal, although a crafty and maliciousanimal.

But the belief in guardian angels of the nations is found in afew late passages of the Bible. These passages occur in apoca-lypsesvisions of the end of days and the last judgment, whichwere composed in the Maccabean period or close to it. ThusDaniel receives a revelation from the angel Gabriel after a longperiod of fasting and prayer. Gabriel explains that he could notcome to him sooner because he had to struggle for twenty-onedays with the prince (sar) of Persia. At length Michael, one of

the chief sarim, came to his aidthis, presum ably, enabled Gabrielto answer Daniel's call. Later, he adds, he will have to return tohis combat with the guardian of Persia and then with the princeof Greece; "and there is none that holdeth with me against theseexcept Michael, your prince." Further on, in the account of thefinal redemption, M ichael, "the great prince who standeth up forthe children of thy people," is to play a leading role (Daniel10.13-21,12.1).

The Book of Daniel does not say that the angelic rulers ofPersia and Greece will be punished along with their peoples; bu tthe author probably took this for granted. In another biblicalapocalypse (a brief and enigmatic document which cannot beexactly dated) we read: "The Lord will punish the host of thehigh heaven on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth;and they shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered inthe dungeon, and shall be shut up in prison, and after many daysshall they be punished" (Is . 24.21 f.).10

This same little prophecy declares that in the end of days Godwill punish "Leviathan the slant serpent and Leviathan the tor-tuous serpent" (Is . 27.1). This creature is described in almost ex-


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actly the same words in the Canaanite poems discovered at HasShamra.11 Leviathan, or as these poems spell it, Lothan, is theNo rth Semitic nam e for the primeval sea serpent w hom th e Baby-lonians called Tiamat. Did our apocalyptic writer believe then in

a mythological power of cosmic evil? Probably not. Throughouthis booklet the root of evil seems to be in the pagan nations andtheir angelic patrons, not in the universe itself. Leviathan is mostlikely only a figure of speech designating the great heathen em-pires, not a concrete embodiment of the satanic.

This interpretation is the more probable because the nameRahab, by which the primeval serpent is also known, is twiceapplied by the Bible to Egypt. There are indeed several passages

which speak of God's triumph over Leviathan-Rahab in the daysof old.12 They celebrate the power of God over nature, not overevil. In any case, they imply that the serpent was completelydestroyed in ages past, so that God will have no new battle tofight at the end of time. The Hebrew Bible does not know anorganized realm of spiritual evil arrayed against the Kingdomof God.

fallen angels chapter one

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