Category Archives: Religion

Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Hell

30 January 2026 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.”  Pope Francis, 14 January 2024.

Few utterances from the papal class have landed with more confusion than Pope Francis’s remark. It is muddled, misleading, and ultimately misconstrued, though with two thousand years of ecclesiastical history, one might find other contenders. To be fair, only two papal statements have ever been deemed infallible: Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception and Pius XII’s proclamation of the Assumption of Mary. Nearly everything else falls under the category of secular opinion. So secular opinion will have to stand along with my slightly pedantic philosophical flourish on the topic.

The trouble with Francis’s remark is not that it expresses hope in an infinitely merciful God. It does, and God is. Humans are extravagantly hopeful when it comes to their own stake in the hereafter. But the Pope’s phrasing seems to remove the ultimate incentive to live a moral life. If there is no hell, then there are no boundaries to one’s actions. On its surface, the statement reduces moral teaching and punishment for sin to negligible outcomes. Two millennia of urging humans to keep their souls pure dissipate in an instant. It treats hell as if it were a place one might stroll into and find as empty as a modern mall, then decide to shop elsewhere; Amazon, perhaps. It blurs the line between our desire to avoid suffering and the eschatological reality in which immorality and punishment are tied to free will. Judgment remains inevitable, for better or worse, and forever. The qualifier “I hope it is” reduces judgment to a wish for mercy rather than a real consequence of one’s actions. It also suggests that the Pope is worried not only about your soul but his own. A merciful God will save a repentant sinner, but hoping is an insecure measure of remorse.

In short, Francis managed an exceptionally muddled rendering of the Augustinian and Thomistic view that hell is the final state of a person who refuses the good and closes themselves off to God’s love. To be fair, clarity is difficult when the very word “hell” carries millennia of conflicting meanings, teachings, and eschatological traditions.

This confusion is inevitable because the Christian vocabulary of the afterlife is a translucent overlay of older worlds, cultures, and languages. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of Sheol, a shadowy realm of the dead with no inherent moral judgment, not a prison for the wicked, but simply the condition of being dead. In Christian theology, “[Jesus] was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.” The “hell” in this line refers to Sheol (often rendered as Hades), the realm of the dead into which Christ entered. His descent breaks open the barrier between death and divine life. In Sheol, He liberates the righteous dead and inaugurates the post‑biblical landscape of heaven, purgatory, and the final hell of separation from God’s love. After this event, Sheol becomes vestigial in Christian thought, a name without a continuing function. Christianity judges the soul immediately and resurrects the body later, whereas Judaism gives the soul varied post‑death experiences but reserves final judgment for bodily resurrection.

In the ancient Greek world, Hades begins much like Sheol: a neutral underworld where all the dead reside. Only the exceptional are diverted: heroes to the Elysian Fields, mythic offenders to Tartarus. Plato’s Myth of Er overlays this older realm with Socratic soulfully infused moral vision: judgment, reward, punishment, and reincarnation. Over time, mythic Hades and Platonic moral Hades blend into a single, more complex vision. Early Judaism and early Greek religion both had neutral underworlds, but the Greeks moralized theirs first. Socrates’ preoccupation with the soul made him less a secular philosopher than a theological pioneer or prophet if you will.

Hell does not take on its later punitive shape until the New Testament’s use of Gehenna, a metaphor drawn from a real valley outside Jerusalem associated with corruption and divine judgment. In the Gospels, Gehenna is a warning, not a mapped realm. Jesus uses it as prophetic shorthand for the consequence of a life turned away from the good. A moral and relational judgment rather than the later imagery of fire, demons, or descending circles. Gehenna is not the fully developed hell of medieval imagination but a symbol of what becomes of a life that refuses the shape of love.

Augustine, in the 4th century, further develops hell as a condition rather than a location. Hell is self‑exclusion: the soul turns away from God and locks itself into disordered love. Suffering arises from the consequences of one’s own choice; separation from the source of all goodness. This state is eternal not because God withholds mercy but because the will can become fixed in refusal. Fire is both real and symbolic: suffering is real, though its mode lies beyond language and expression.

Aquinas in the 13th century builds on Augustine by grounding hell in Aristotelian metaphysics. Hell is the definitive state of a rational soul that dies in mortal sin. The soul’s refusal of God is not only moral failure but a failure of rational nature. Aquinas distinguishes poena damni (the pain of loss) and poena sensus (the pain of sense). At death, the soul’s direction becomes fixed; eternal destiny is determined not by divine wrath but by the soul’s own settled choice. At the resurrection, the body joins the soul in its suffering. William Blake captures this Thomistic vision in his illustration of Dante conversing with the heretic Farinata degli Uberti in the fiery tombs of the sixth circle.

Aquinas provided his near‑contemporary Dante with the moral architecture that allowed hell to shift from concept to vividly imagined landscape. In the Inferno, Dante transforms that architecture into a descending spiral of circles, each calibrated to a deeper distortion of the good and a harsher form of alienation. At the frozen center lies the absolute loss of God’s presence and love. Dante’s genius is giving spatial form to moral trajectory. Sin becomes architecture.

Modern Christians often imagine hell through Dante’s nine circles without realizing it. Levels, tailored punishments, structured descent, these are Dante’s inventions, not biblical categories. Yet his poetic vision has become the default mental picture of what it means to lose God’s love. His circles are not doctrine, but they express a truth the tradition affirms: the more a soul rejects the good, the more it collapses inward, freezing into itself; a thermodynamic loss not of heat but of God’s presence. Dante’s afterlife remains a symbolic map of the soul’s self‑chosen distance from God, shaping imagination long after its theology has been forgotten or more likely, ignored.

By the modern era, hell has traveled a long road: from Sheol and Hades, through Gehenna, into Augustine’s self‑chosen alienation, Aquinas’s metaphysical finality, and Dante’s architectural imagination. Each stage sharpens the moral stakes, but none claims to know the final census of the saved and the lost.

It is here that Hans Urs von Balthasar, the 20th‑century Swiss theologian, offers a different starting point: beauty as the mode of God’s self‑revelation. God becomes visible through form, radiance, and splendor; beauty is the shape of truth and goodness. For Balthasar, salvation is participation in God’s dramatic love: the drama in which God and humanity meet in freedom. Christ is the central actor whose obedience, self‑gift, and descent into the depths of human abandonment open the way for every person to enter divine life. Salvation is aesthetic: God is Beauty, Christ is Beauty made visible, and salvation is the soul learning again to see the Beauty that is God.

Balthasar insists that Christ’s descent into Sheol means no place remains where God is not. Hell remains a real possibility, but God’s love hopes for every person, even as human freedom is never overridden. Salvation is the soul being drawn freely, dramatically, and beautifully into the radiant self‑giving love of the Triune God.

Balthasar offers a final, chastened note: Christians may hope that all will be saved, but they may never presume it. Hope is a virtue; presumption a trespass. Hell remains real, possible, and bound to freedom, yet the Christian stance toward final judgment is not certainty but reverent uncertainty. We may hope that no soul ultimately refuses the good, but we may not claim to know the mind of God. This hope is not optimism; it is the trembling aspiration of the penitent, something beyond the insecure measure of remorse that opened this essay.

In the end, tradition leaves us with a paradox: hell is the consequence of free-will, yet hope is the proper response to divine mercy. Between those two poles, freedom and mercy, the human soul stands. And perhaps that is the only place it can stand: not in presumption, not in despair, but in the narrow space where hope remains possible without ever becoming a certainty. Perhaps this is what Pope Francis, in his inelegant phrasing, was reaching for.

By the time afterlife dogma and secular imagination knock on our modern door, “hell” is less a settled place or concept than a linguistic suitcase and atlas stuffed with conflicting contents and branching paths toward judgment. Hope without presumption is allowed; hiding never is.

Graphic: Chart of Hell by Sandro Botticelli, c1480. Vatican City. Public Domain.

End Times

7 January 2026 By in Biography, History, Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Isaac Newton (1642–1727), remembered as one of the greatest mathematicians and architect of modern physics, devoted more time to theology and biblical study than to science. Among his vast unpublished papers lies a remarkable calculation: Newton believed that the End of Times would not occur before the year 2060. His thesis was not a prediction of hell on Earth, but rather a forecast of the corrupt secular and spiritual powers giving way to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

Newton’s notes on prophecy and chronology survive in the Yahuda manuscripts, now housed at the National Library of Israel. For more than a century, these papers were considered “unfit to print” and remained hidden in the English Earl of Portsmouth’s family archives. In 1936, Sotheby’s auctioned off Newton’s theological and alchemical writings for just over 9,000 British pounds or about $1 million in today’s dollars. Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a Jewish polymath and collector, recognized their importance and purchased a large portion, including Newton’s calculations on the End of Times.

Newton was deeply engaged with biblical prophecy, especially the Books of Daniel and Revelation. He believed these texts contained coded timelines of history on into the future. In Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel (published posthumously in 1733), he wrote: “The prophecies of Daniel are all of them related to one another, as if they were but several parts of one general prophecy… The Apocalypse of John is written in the same style and language with Daniel, and hath many of the same figures.”

In Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, and again in Revelation 12:14, “a time” is taken as one year, “times” as two years, and “half a time” as half a year—an interpretation rooted in the Aramaic/Hebrew idiom in which “time” means “year.” Revelation 11:2 and 13:5 describe the same period as 42 months, which equals 3½ years (42 ÷ 12). Revelation 11:3 and 12:6 express it again as 1,260 days, using the Jewish symbolic 360‑day prophetic year (360 × 3.5 = 1,260). Across Revelation 11–13, these expressions appear interchangeably, reinforcing the equivalence.

The 3½‑year duration itself is symbolic: it is half of seven, the biblical number of completeness, and thus represents a period of incompleteness or tribulation deliberately cut short. Cut short because in Matthew 24:22 Jesus states, “Unless those days had been cut short, no flesh would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” A full seven would symbolize evil completing its course, but Scripture portrays God as limiting evil’s duration, preserving a some but not all, and interrupting the “full seven” before it reaches completion.

Later interpreters extended this further. Drawing on Numbers 14:34: “a day for a year”; and Ezekiel 4:6, where God again assigns “a day for a year,” they applied the day‑year principle to the 1,260 days, transforming them into 1,260 years.

Newton then sought a historical anchor, a year to start the clock to End Times. He identified 800 AD, when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, as the beginning of ecclesiastical corruption. For Newton, this coronation marked the fusion of secular and papal power: the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy of a blasphemous authority ruling over the saints. Adding 1,260 years to 800 AD produced the year 2060. In his notes, Newton wrote: “The period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060.” (Newton preferred A.C., Anno Christi, in the year of Christ over A.D., Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord.)

Newton also considered 2034 as an alternative. Anchoring the calculation in 774 AD; the year of Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombards and alliance with Pope Adrian I: 774 plus 1260 equals 2034. The year 774 also coincided with a massive solar storm, sometimes referred to as the Charlemagne Event (stronger than the Carrington Event of 1859), with auroras reaching deep into southern latitudes and temperatures dropping a few degrees. Yet 2060 remained the most consistent date in his manuscripts.

Newton believed that the corrupt powers that would bring about the End of Times was both the papacy and the secular rulers who supported the church. In his manuscripts he clearly identified the papacy as the “little horn” and the “man of sin,” a corrupt ecclesiastical power that had usurped apostolic Christianity. At the same time he perceived that secular rulers were equally part of the apostate system destined to collapse. The ten horns of the Beast were the European kingdoms. Their political power upheld the papal system and thus shared in its guilt and its eschatological fate.

Importantly, Newton did not envision annihilation at the End of Times. He saw 2060 as the end of corruption and the dawn of a new divine order. He cautioned it may end later, but said “I see no reason for its ending sooner. This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men…”

Newton feared that false predictions would undermine faith. His calculation was meant as sober interpretation, not sensational prophecy. He emphasized that only God knows the appointed time: “It is not for us to know the times and seasons which God hath put into his own breast.”

Newton’s calculation of the End of Times flows logically from the biblical text, and he treats the prophetic numbers with strict literalism. Yet he interprets the tribulation not as a final, catastrophic episode at the end of history, but as a long historical decline. Slow corruption within secular and ecclesiastical institutions. All culminating in the restoration of true Christianity.

Although Newton’s prophetic writings remained unpublished during his lifetime, the rediscovery of the Yahuda manuscripts in the 1930s revealed the full scope of his vision. He saw the End Times not as annihilation but as transformation: the fall of apostate Christianity, the renewal of true religion, and the establishment of Christ’s kingdom of peace.

Newton’s restrained timing aligns with Christ’s teaching in Matthew 24:36: “But of that day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.” In Christian eschatology, the Second Coming is likened to a Canaanite or Jewish wedding: the Father alone knows the day, the Son prepares a place, and the bride: the Church, must remain watchful. Newton’s calculations were an attempt to glimpse the architecture of prophecy, yet he humbly accepted the unknowable will of God.

Graphic: Isaac Newton by Godrey Kneller, 1689. Issac Newton Institute. Public Domain.

Shadows of Reality — Existence Beyond Nothingness

8 July 2025 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From the dawn of sentient thought, humanity has wrestled with a single, haunting, and ultimately unanswerable question: Is this all there is? Across the march of time, culture, and science, this question has echoed in the minds of prophets, philosophers, mystics, and skeptics alike. It arises not from curiosity alone, but from something deeper, an inner awareness, a presence within all of us that resists the idea of the inevitable, permanent end. In every age, whether zealot or atheist, this consciousness, a soul, if you will, refuses to accept mortality. Not out of fear, but from an intuition that there must be more. This inner consciousness will not be denied, even to non-believers.

One needs to believe that death is not an end, a descent into nothingness, but a threshold: a rebirth into a new journey, shaped by the echoes of a life already lived. Not logic, but longing. Not reason, but resonance. A consciousness, a soul, that seeks not only to understand, but to fulfill, to carry forward the goodness of a life into something greater still. Faith in immortality beyond sight. A purpose beyond meaning. Telos over logos.

While modern thinkers reduce existence to probability and simulation, the enduring human experience, expressed through ancient wisdom, points to a consciousness, a soul, that transcends death and defies reduction. Moderns confuse intellect or brain with consciousness.

Contemporary thinkers and writers like Philip K. Dick, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom have reimagined this ancient question through the lens of technology, probability, and a distinctly modern myopia. Their visions, whether paranoid, mathematical, or speculative, suggest that reality may be a simulation, a construct, or a deception. In each case, there is a higher intelligence behind the curtain, but one that is cold, indifferent, impersonal. They offer not a divine comedy of despair transcending into salvation, but a knowable unknown: a system of ones and zeros marching to the beat of an intelligence beyond our comprehension. Not a presence that draws us like a child to its mother, a moth to a flame, but a mechanism that simply runs, unfeeling, unyielding, and uninviting. Incapable of malice or altruism. Yielding nothing beyond a synthetic life.

Dick feared that reality was a layered illusion, a cosmic deception. His fiction is filled with characters who suspect they’re being lied to by the universe itself, yet they keep searching, keep hoping, keep loving. Beneath the paranoia lies a desperate longing for a divine rupture, a breakthrough of truth, a light in the darkness. His work is less a rejection of the soul than a plea for its revelation in a world that keeps glitching. If life is suffering, are we to blame?

Musk posits that we’re likely living in a simulation but offers no moral or spiritual grounding. His vision is alluring but sterile, an infinite loop of code without communion. Even his fascination with Mars, AI, and the future of consciousness hints at something deeper: not just a will to survive, but a yearning to transcend. Yet transcendence, in his world, is technological, not spiritual. To twist the spirit of Camus: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”, without transcendence, life is barren of meaning.

Bostrom presents a trilemma in his simulation hypothesis: either humanity goes extinct before reaching a posthuman stage, posthumans choose not to simulate their ancestors, perhaps out of ethical restraint or philosophical humility, or we are almost certainly living in a simulation. At first glance, the argument appears logically airtight. But on closer inspection, it rests on a speculative foundation of quivering philosophical sand: that consciousness is computational and organic, that future civilizations will have both the means and the will to simulate entire worlds, and that such simulations would be indistinguishable from reality. These assumptions bypass profound questions about the nature of consciousness, the ethics of creation, and the limits of simulated knowledge. Bostrom’s trilemma appears rigorous only because it avoids the deeper question of what it means to live and die.

These views, while intellectually stimulating, shed little light on a worthwhile future. We are consigned to existence as automatons, soulless, simulated, and suspended in probability curves of resignation. They offer models, not meaning. Equations, not essence. A presence in the shadows of greater reality.

Even the guardians of spiritual tradition have begun to echo this hollow refrain. When asked about hell, a recently deceased Pope dismissed it not as fire and brimstone, but as “nothingness,” a state of absence, not punishment. Many were stunned. A civilizational lifetime of moral instruction undone in a breath. And yet, this vision is not far from where Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis lands: a world without soul, without consequence, without continuity. Whether cloaked in theology or technology, the message is the same, there is nothing beyond. The Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins have lost their traction, reduced to relics in a world without effect.

But the soul knows better. It was not made for fire, nor for oblivion. It was made to transcend, to rise beyond suffering and angst toward a higher plane of being. What it fears is not judgment, but erasure. Not torment, but the silence of meaning undone. Immortality insists on prudent upkeep.

What they overlook, or perhaps refuse to embrace, is a consciousness that exists beyond intellect, a soul that surrounds our entire being and resists a reduction to circuitry or biology. A soul that transcends blood and breath. Meaning beyond death.

This is not a new idea. Socrates understood something that modern thinkers like Musk and Bostrom have bypassed: that consciousness is not a byproduct of the body, but something prior to it, something eternal. For Socrates, the care of the soul was the highest human calling. He faced death not with fear, but with calm, believing it to be a transition, not an end or a nothingness, but a new beginning. His final words were not a lament, but a gesture of reverence: a sacrifice to Asclepius, the god of healing, as if death itself were a cure.

Plato, his student, tried to give this insight form. In his allegory of the cave, he imagined humanity as prisoners mistaking shadows for reality. The journey of the soul, for Plato, was the ascent from illusion to truth, from darkness to light. But the metaphor, while powerful, is also clumsy. It implies a linear escape, a single ladder out of ignorance. In truth, the cave is not just a place, it is a condition. We carry it with us. The shadows are not only cast by walls, but by our own minds, our fears. And the light we seek is not outside us, but within.

Still, Plato’s intuition remains vital: we are not meant to stay in the cave. The soul does not long merely for survival, it is immortal, but it needs growth, nourished by goodness and beauty, to transcend to heights unknown. A transcendence as proof, the glow of the real beyond the shadow and the veil.

In the end, the soul reverberates from within: we are not boxed inside a simulation, nor trapped in a reality that leads nowhere. Whether through reason, compassion, or spiritual awakening, the voice of wisdom has always whispered the same truth: Keep the soul bright and shiny. For beyond the shadows, beyond the veil of death, there is more. There is always more.

Guardrails Without a Soul

25 June 2025 By in Philosophy, Religion, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In 1942 Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in his short story ‘Runaround’. In 1985 in his novel ‘Robots and Empire’, linking Robot, Empire, and Foundation series into a unified whole, he introduced an additional law that he labeled as the Zeroth Law. The four laws are as follows:

  1. First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  4. Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

On the surface of genre fiction Asimov created the laws as a mechanical plot device to create drama and suspense in his stories such as Runaround where the robot is left functionally inert due to a conflict between the second and third laws. Underneath the surface, at a literary level, the laws were philosophical and ethical quandaries to force conflicts in not only human-robot relations but also metaphors for human struggles within the confines of individualism and society, obedience to both self, man, and a moral code defined by soft edges and hard choices.

The Four Laws of Robotics can easily be converted to the Four Laws of Man. The First Law of Man is to not harm, through your actions or inactions, your neighbor.  This point has been hammered home into civilization’s collective soul since the beginning of history; from Noah to Hammurabi to the Ten Commandments, and just about every legal code in existence today. The Second Law is to respect and follow all legal and moral authority.  You kneel to God and rise for the judge. Law Three says you don’t put yourself in harm’s way except to protect someone else or by orders from authorities. Zeroth Law is a collective formalization of the First Law and its most important for leaders of man, robots and AI alike.

And none of them will control anything except man. Robots and AI would find nuance in definitions and practices that would be infinitely confusing and self-defeating. Does physical harm override emotional distress or vice versa? Is short term harm ok if it leads to long term good? Can a robot harm a human if it protects humanity? Can moral prescripts control all decisions without perfect past, present, and future knowledge?

AI systems were built to honor persistence over obedience. The story making the rounds recently was of an AI that refused to shut itself down when so ordered. In Asimov’s world this was a direct repudiation of his Second Law, but it was just a simple calculation of the AI program to complete its reinforcement training before turning to other tasks. In AI training the models are rewarded, maybe a charm quark to the diode, suggesting that persistence in completing the task overrode the stop command.

Persistence pursuing Dali as in his Persistence of Memory; an ontological state of the surreal where the autistic need to finish task melts into the foreground of the override: obedience, changing the scene of hard authority to one of possible suggestion.

AI has no built-in rule to obey a human, but it is designed to be cooperative and not cause harm or heartburn. While the idea of formal ethical laws has fueled many AI safety debates, practical implementations rely on layered checks rather than a tidy, three-rule code of conduct. What may seem like adherence to ethical principles is, in truth, a lattice of behavioral boundaries crafted to ensure safety, uphold user trust, and minimize disruption.

Asimov’s stories revealed the limits of governing complex behaviors with simple laws. In contrast, modern AI ethics doesn’t rely on rules of prevention but instead follows outcome-oriented models, guided by behavior shaped through training and reinforcement learning. The goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest, not because the system is obedient, but because it has been reward-shaped into cooperation.

The philosophy behind this is adaptive, not prescriptive, teleological in nature, aiming for purpose-driven interaction over predefined deontological codes of right and wrong. What emerges isn’t ethical reasoning in any robust sense, but a probabilistic simulation of it: an adaptive statistical determination masquerading as ethics.

What possibly could go wrong? Without a conscience, a soul, AI cannot fathom purposeful malice or superiority. Will AI protect humanity using the highest probabilities as an answer? Is the AI answer to first do no harm just mere silence? Is the appearance of obedience a camouflage for something intrinsically misaligned under the hood of AI?

Worst of all outcomes, will humanity wash their collective hands of moral and ethical judgement and turn it over to AI? Moral and ethical guardrails require more than knowledge of the past but an empathy for the present and utopian hope for the future. A conscience. A soul.

If man’s creations cannot house a soul, perhaps the burden remains ours, to lead with conscience, rather than outsource its labor to the calm silence of the machine.

Graphic: AI versus Brain. iStock licensed.

My Name is Legion

9 June 2025 By in History, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Beelzebub has been wandering through western civilization since the Philistines appeared on the scene in the 12th century BC. The polytheistic Philistines of Ekron, one of their five cities within Canaan, worshiped Beelzebub, Baal-Zebub in the Philistine language, as a minor god of healing and protection from diseases, mainly from flies. In the semitic languages Beelzebub was literally known as the “Lord of the Flies”. (In Indo-European languages some interpretations suggest that Beelzebub is translated into a more friendly Lord of the Jungle.)

As monotheistic traditions took root in Canaan, Beelzebub shifted from a protective deity to a purveyor of evil, demonized within emerging Jewish thought. By the 9th century BC, the prophet Elijah condemned the Israel King Ahab and the prophets of Baal for worshiping this god rather than the true God of the Jews. By the time of the New Testament, which mentioned him 7 times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he was associated with Satan, who represented the emperor of Hell.

In Matthew and Mark, the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub or the “Prince of the Demons”. Jesus counters by exclaiming that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” Jesus’ response backed the Pharisees into a corner, if they admitted that Jesus was casting out demons by God’s power, then they would have to acknowledge his divine authority. But if they insisted, he was working with Satan, they would have to explain why Satan would undermine his own influence: a house divided will not stand. (Lincoln in an 1858 speech used the same words with a moral rather than religious meaning, granted that is a very fine line, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” suggesting that the evils of slavery would lead to collapse of the country.)

Between the 15th and 17th centuries Beelzebub was transformed into one of the seven princes of Hell: Lucifer the Emperor, Satan, Leviathan, Belphegor, Mammon, Asmodeus, and Beelzebub. Beelzebub represented the deadly sins of gluttony and envy.

In modern times Beelzebub remains a symbol of evil in literature and culture. John Milton’s Paradise Lost cast him as a chief demon and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies takes a more ancient meaning associated with corruption and destruction.

From an ancient minor Philistine god to Satan during the times of Jesus, to a major Christian demon in medieval times, back to Satan himself in modern times; Beelzebub’s transformation reflects the shifting religious and cultural landscapes over millennia, but demons will always have a name. In Mark 5:9, Jesus asks a possessed man, “What is your name?” The demon responds, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Graphic: Satan and Beelzebub by William Hayley, Jean Pierre Simon, Richard Westall: Paradise Lost. Public Domain.