Belial

Belial does not begin as a name. In biblical Hebrew, bĕliyyaʿal is a common noun usually broken down into bĕlî, «without», and yaʿal, «to be of use»: literally «without worth», «worthlessness». Those whom almost every translation calls «sons of Belial» are, in the original, «sons of worthlessness», and «son of» is an ordinary Semitic turn of phrase indicating not descent but condition, exactly as the same Hebrew says «sons of death» for «the condemned». The men who surround the house in Judges 19:22 and those who drag the people into idolatry in Deuteronomy 13:13 are nobody's offspring: they are scoundrels. Other readings of the etymology have been proposed, «without yoke» or «that from which none comes up», which would point to the underworld, and none of them changes the essential point: for centuries the word qualifies people and does not designate a being. The first text to use it as though it were somebody is the New Testament, when 2 Corinthians 6:15 asks what concord there is between Christ and Belial, and there the opposition already requires two persons.

Belial is the sixty-eighth spirit of the Ars Goetia and the twenty-third of the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum that Johann Weyer published in 1577, seventy years before the former. The two agree and are terse: he is a mighty king, he rules eighty legions, he «taketh the form of a beautiful angel sitting in a chariot of fire», and he speaks with a comely voice. His office is to distribute senatorships, to win the conjurer the favour of friends and foes, and to furnish him with good familiar spirits. And he comes with a condition that is usually left out: he demands offerings and sacrifices, and if they are not given he does not answer truthfully. It is worth stating too what the grimoires do NOT say, because it circulates everywhere attributed to them: there is no spear, no winged dragon spitting fire, no naked man riding a dragon and no team of horses: the chariot goes alone. The horses usually drawn hauling it come from elsewhere, and from somewhere very recognisable, because «chariot of fire» is the exact formula with which 2 Kings 2:11 tells of Elijah's being carried off, and there horses of fire certainly do appear. That a fallen angel should turn up in the vehicle of the ravished prophet is, in all likelihood, the point of the detail. Of the angel there is one in Weyer and in the older English manuscripts, and two in the edition S. L. MacGregor Mathers published in 1904, which is the one almost everyone reads and the source of the formula «two beautiful angels».

In «Paradise Lost», published in 1667, Belial speaks second in the council of Pandemonium, after Moloch and before Mammon, and what he proposes is to do nothing. Milton presents him as the fairest of the fallen, «a fairer person lost not Heaven», and adds in the same breath that he was false and hollow; his speech, elegant and reasonable, is a plea against returning to war, and the poet disarms it in a single line by saying that he counselled «ignoble ease and peaceful sloth, not peace». That is: exactly the opposite of a satanic warlord. That he should be painted as the general of the infernal armies or as the great rival of the archangel Michael comes from laying three traditions on top of one another that do not say the same thing. At Qumran he really does command, at the head of the sons of darkness. In the Goetia he commands nobody beyond his eighty legions, and the only thing he claims regarding Michael is to have fallen before him. And in Milton he commands nothing, because his whole argument is that commanding is a bad idea.

The step from adjective to person does not happen in the Hebrew Bible nor in the grimoires: it happens in the Judaean desert, between the second century BC and the first AD. In the manuscripts found in the caves of Qumran from 1947 onward, Belial is no longer a quality but a general. The War Scroll, preserved in the roll known as 1QM, names him eleven times and gives him an army: he is the prince of darkness who leads the sons of darkness against the sons of light in a battle of forty years, and facing him stands the prince of light, identified with Michael. There, and not in the Goetia, the opposition between the two is born. The Book of Jubilees names him twice, at 1:20 and 15:33, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs eleven times, always in the form Beliar, and in them he is simply the devil. It is worth stating where he does NOT appear, because the attribution is frequent and false: Belial does not figure in the Book of Enoch. The watchers who fall there are called Semyaza, Azazel and their company, and not one of them bears this name.

The grimoires credit him with two statements about himself that are almost never quoted, and both are more interesting than the generic rivalry with Michael. The first is in the Ars Goetia and is put in his own mouth: he declares that he «fell first, and among the worthier and wiser sort, which went before Michael and other heavenly angels». He does not say he is Michael's rival: he says he stood above him, and was lost earlier. The second is Weyer's, who in 1577 describes him as created immediately after Lucifer, that is, the second being of creation. Weyer adds the episode that most modern compendia leave out: Solomon shut Belial and his companions in a glass vessel and buried it, and centuries later the Babylonians dug it up believing it held treasure, broke it, and let them out. It is a tale of curiosity punished, sister to Pandora's jar, and it explains why a king of hell is at large in a sixteenth-century handbook.