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Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. And as always, I'm JJ. So how are you doing out there? It is going on three plus months now of being isolated. Uh which for me, as I've said, isn't too much of a transition because I'm a homebody by nature, but even for me, this is becoming a bit much. But for those of you who are out there working, I pray that you remain safe. For everyone else that does not have to get out, I hope that you are staying in as much as possible. But I'm gonna open this up with a simple question. Have you ever been paralyzed by an idea?
Where you want to do something, the idea of it sounds interesting, but for one reason or other you just can't. And it may be that the task is too great. It may be Herculean in nature, and that dissuades you from actually acting upon it or for some other reason. That's actually something that I faced with this podcast. Once this pandemic stuff hit, I had an idea pop into my brain of why not do an episode about plague and how the ancients dealt with that.
And on one hand the idea kind of appealed to me, but on the other God, with just the rash of bad news that was constantly pouring out, I I just couldn't bear to inflict that not just on me. I mean, that's not really a big deal. I live in my own brain anyway, it's already in there, but on others. And I kept trying to think of a way to to broach the subject because the idea just wouldn't leave. But I became paralyzed. That's actually probably one of the main reasons why I have not been producing a ton of videos. Um well not videos, podcasts, I'm sorry.
I I wanted to, but you know, I I wanted to do this particular episode, and I I I was paralyzed by it. I just simply could not bring myself to do it. Until I I I started thinking and I finally found a way to broach the topic that eased my own consciousness and I think will hopefully put things into light. And that is to examine probably one of the most beautiful and powerful protection psalms out there, and to look at all the things that it's covering, because that is as relevant as it was in the day that it was written to the present day.
So with no further ado, I actually am going to do something I really haven't done before, and I'm going to read an entire psalm. Um forgive my voice, I know it's not the greatest thing in the world, but I, you know, I hope that you're able to to draw some strength from it. Um this is Psalm 91. He who dwells in the shelter of the most high, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say unto the Lord, My refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stops in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.
You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked, because you have made the Lord your refuge, the most high your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent, for he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up lest you dash your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and on the adder, the young lion and the serpent or dragon, you will trample underfoot. Because he cleaves to me in love, I will deliver him, I will protect him because he knows my name.
When he calls to me I will answer him, I will be with him in trouble, I will rescue him and honor him with long life, I will satisfy him and show him my salvation. That was Psalm ninety-one. It I am reading from the uh revised Standard Version. Uh I do have a nicer translation of it, but uh uh it's not my own work, and I don't want to uh share it without uh getting proper permission, and I actually wanted to produce this as soon as I could. So Psalm 91 uh is a very late entry into the Psalms. Some of them stretch back extremely early on.
This psalm is written solidly within the Second Temple Judaism uh period and it speaks according to the title to the assurance of God's protection. And there are several ways that you can read the psalm. In fact, if you've ever read the psalms and thought that they sounded kind of the same, or there wasn't anything truly interesting about them just because you're reading through them quickly, I can assure you that is not the case. The psalms are high poetry, they are some of the most difficult things to read in all of Hebrew.
In fact, uh students under the classical methods of studying would not be allowed to even look at either Psalms or Proverbs without at least a decade of experience, and that is because they are so hard to understand. Uh, in fact, in grad school I took a class called Rapid Reading Hebrew. I may have mentioned this before, but it was an entire year where we studied uh first um uh James uh not James, I'm sorry, uh Kings, and then the second semester we switched over into Proverbs, and it was the most difficult class I have ever had in my life.
It it was really, really interesting to say the least. Um But this so but all of the psalms have these innate complexities to them, there is so much wordplay involved, uh so many different puns, so many different images. Um it it's it's truly amazing.
Like uh I I know I've mentioned this, but I've been taking a class with a former professor who has been going through the psalms, and even though you know I I know the Hebrew and I've glanced through them, not you know, at a very deep level, but um I've always focused more on Proverbs than I have on Psalms, so it's been really interesting to hear someone who has a phenomenal more experience going through it, but the sheer amount of just beauty and how the words are being played against one another, how the ambiguities that um you know the verb tenses can bring out and it can completely transform how a simple passage can be read and give it layers and layers of meaning is just absolutely phenomenal.
And I mean not only that, but just the pure ordering of how the psalms appear. Uh there is a rhyme and reason to that, and to be able to go through and piece that together is is somehow extremely magical. But anyway, I'm not trying to get too lost in the complexities here, but as I said, you know, you can read the psalm in several different ways, and the first is very mundane, you know, you can take it extremely literally. The psalm is referring to all of these different kinds of dangers that can befall a person, right?
Um, the snare of the fowler, deadly pestilence, uh, you know, you will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flieth by day, nor the pestilence that stalks it in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. You can read that as just purely physical uh things, and that works on that level. It's perfectly fine. Uh in fact if you pair that with Psalm ninety, then you know that literal sense makes you know it it it does make a great deal of sense to a person. But then I think this is where uh the time period in which the Psalm appears makes is much more evident.
This is a second temple Judaism psalm. Second temple was much more focused upon dualism and evil than all the other periods combined. And so every single one of these things becomes a reference not just to physical danger, but to spiritual danger. They become references to the things that not only can you know allow you to stub your toe, but also can steal your soul. And that's where the psalm becomes, in in my opinion at least, truly powerful. And so for the rest of the series, uh I'm an episode, I want to go through and examine what each one of these things are.
What are these veiled illusions? And hopefully then cast that back and offer some hope into what's actually happened today. Uh, gonna take just a real quick musical interlude and then we will get right back into the swing of things. Hope you stick around. Thank you. So, you'll remember that several wild animals are mentioned. For example, you will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon you will trample underfoot. Besides the dragon, the other ones sound pretty mundane, right? Well, let's jump over to Isaiah 34, where it's talking about Edom.
Thorns shall grow over its stronghold uh strongholds, nestles and thistles and its fortresses, it shall be the haunt of jackals and abode for ostriches and wild beasts shall meet with hyenas, the satire cry to his fellow, yea, there shall be the night hag, Lilith, alight, and find for herself a resting place, there shall be the owl nest and lay and hatch and gather her young in her shadow, yea, there shall the kites be gathered, each one with her mate. So there's often a tradition within Hebrew thinking that wild animals can associate with demonic entities.
Um you find this not only within Isaiah 34, and that was reading from verse 13 down to uh 15, but you even find that carried over into much later works like you find at the Dead Sea Scrolls. Um 4Q 5, 10, and 11 is a scroll that mentions um uh howlers and desert dwellers and those who suddenly strike in suddenness. That is a very key phrase because one of the other things.
Hi, this is Monica Rheinagel of Nutrition Diva. Today's show is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. Grocery shopping can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're reading labels. And in my opinion, chicken shouldn't be complicated. Which is why I appreciate Nature Raised Farms. It's chicken that's just chicken. And their lightly breaded chicken nuggets are free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Look for nature-raised farms on your next grocery trip and feel more confident about your choices.
I'm gonna quote here from the dictionary of deities and demons of the Bible. The trap, which also occurs here in Psalm 913, which is the snare of the fowler, is only a metaphor for the element of suddenness, another characteristic of these demons. Uh see the observations about Pachad Pitom below. They are said to lie in wait for their victim and to fall upon uh the person suddenly and unexpectedly. The terms used to denote this characteristic Napal to pounce upon, Pitah Piton, suddenly, are used also in the context of wars and in descriptions of attacks by enemies as well as wild beasts.
So all of this very much ties together uh into a theme that we'll find out through the rest of this. So now that we have the minor characters kind of out of the way, let's go to the much more pronounced ones. And that is that litany that I have read a few times now. The terror of the night, the arrow that flies by day, the pestilence that stalks in darkness, and the destruction that waits at noonday. You'll notice that we have night and day, darkness and light intermixed with each other to show that these entities can strike at any time.
Doesn't matter if it's in the middle of the night, if it's bright noon, there is zero protection from these entities. The second entity referred to here, the arrow that flies by day, uh, you can catch up more on in the previous episode about Lilith. This is an entity that has been commonly associated um with the suddenness of an arrow that flies by day. So that is a pretty clear reference not only to that, but also. To any other wind demon that is also characterized by suddenness. It's the other ones that we have not touched about before. So let's cover pestilence and destruction.
In Hebrew, pestilence is Dever and Destruction is Keteb. And this is where the fact that this psalm is written in Second Temple Judaism is going to make more sense. So Deber kind of harkens back to a lot of more ancient concepts found within the region. So for example, you know, here Deber or Pestilence is actually portrayed as a personification that stalks its prey in darkness. And that's just not a figure of speech. Here it truly is a personification of evil. And we have found that a lot of times uh within Mesopotamia, for example, will um where illnesses are often portrayed as demons.
And also that you would have highly destructive entities that would be present in the entourage of the great god Marduk. But here it isn't the exact same, it's kind of flipping that idea on its head. In early Judaism, where dualism never really came into play, and I've discussed this a few times now, it was always the fact that even if there were these horrible things out there in the world, they were always underneath the direct bidding of God. He was the one that would direct them in certain applications to further his own holiness.
But now that we're over in Second Temple Judaism, that's not quite the case. These are things that are act should be actively guarded against, and only God can protect one from them. The other entity here, Kateb, that wastes at noonday, is kind of an interesting one. So the word kateb only appears four times in the Hebrew Bible, one of which is in Psalm 91. And at base it does mean destruction. And here it is being personified along with the other ones. Now, if you actually look in the Septuagint, they mistranslate this as the midday demon.
And you actually find in some mid rash sources that Keteb is described as a demon covered in scales and horns with one eye in its head and one eye in its heart. It gets kind of elaborate, but here it really is more about the complete mythological sense of the power that this thing encompasses, that it can lay waste to anything at any point in time. In fact, there's one other passage that I want to go back to to kind of round out this analysis. You see, Psalm 91 harkens back to Deuteronomy 32, but it does so in the exact opposite manner in which this protection is actually happening.
If we look from Deuteronomy 32, verse 23, and I will heap evils upon them, I will spend my arrows upon them, they shall be wasted with hunger and devoured with burning heat and poisonous pestilence, and I will send the teeth of beasts against them with venom of crawling things of the dust, and the open the sword shall bereave, and in the chambers shall be terror, destroying both young man and virgin, the suckling child and the man of grey hairs. So in this we actually see you know the absolute destructive power that God can wield against enemies.
Psalm ninety one is taking all of those same images and inverting them to these this is how God will protect you against these same things. And once again, we find arrows mentioned, which is Reshef. And Reshef is in this case we don't really know what it's referring to. Um, you know, does the arrow that flies by day, yes, it could be mentioning Lilith, as I said before, but Reshef is also a god of pestilence, and it's often paired with uh Deber. And here I I think that Psalm 91 is making a clear reference not just to the demons of Deber and Kateb, but also Reshef with arrows.
So you have all of the tools of death being laid out, and I think it's really with some within Psalm 91 that you find the predecessors to what will become the four horsemen within Revelation. That's getting way far ahead of ourselves. Uh already have a request to do a full breakdown of that. Um, and I will, but Revelation is an extremely tricky book, because it's one of the most complex. But we're gonna drop that topic for now and we will pick it up. Uh, not in the next few episodes, because I will have to do a great bit of research, but uh a little bit later.
That I promise you, it is coming around. So we've covered the arrow, we've covered the pestilence and the destruction, but the one that we still need to go over is the terror of the night. While we're not really given many other contextual clues here besides the name Pakadle, we can see that it also harkens back to other texts. Um you have Job 18, um and or uh there's uh uh Job 4, but all of these things are hearkening to what night does for it. It covers its tracks and it's able to capture its enemies again just like a pit and a trap.
So Psalm 91 is rich in history and allusions to other things, but it also serves as a song of protection. Uh you actually find um in um you know within um Jewish liturgies that this is a um song of protection of encounters that was often recited right before sleep. So but we also have it even within the um scenic community, uh, the ones that were behind the writings at umran, the dead sea scrolls. Uh I mentioned 4 Q 5, 10, and 11 already, but there you know the the Mishkil is attempting to protect the community by reciting this short liturgy, and that's what Psalm 91 is doing as well.
If you notice, all it says is that if you trust in the Lord, then you will be protected from all of these horrible things that are stalking at all times of day and night. You don't have to resort to magic, you don't have to resort to wards or curses or anything else. All it needs, all you need is to believe and to put yourself within the shadow of the Almighty, and that's sufficient. And for a time period that was rife with magical charms and protections, that's really saying a phenomenal amount.
So I hope this provided not only some information and you know revealed some of the complexities of how this song was written and also its beauty, but in these troubling times, I really hope it brought a little bit of hope. And just to repeat that word twice. And I know that this was a very you know, Judeo Christian centered episode. I I know that many of you are not, you know, that you don't actively follow that tradition.
And I certainly am not meaning to make anyone uncomfortable, but I uh for me personally I I needed to do this because in combination with the prayer to Saint Michael, the Archangel, this is the other thing in which you know, if I'm feeling insecure, if I'm feeling troubled that I go back to and read. And it doesn't matter if you read it out loud, it doesn't matter if you read it to yourself, but this is a thing that brings me just a little bit of comfort.
And in these uncertain times, even if this does not do it for you, I hope that you have those things that genuinely touch your heart and bring about a sense not only of safety but of wonder. Because that is what's going to get you through these periods. Anyway, thank you for listening to me rambling again. I really appreciate each and every single one of you. And if I can do anything to help, if you have a question, if you want to talk about something, please feel free to contact me. Um we are on Facebook, of course, at facebook.com slash Southern Demonology.
You um uh uh we have a website, southerndemonology.com, uh, where we have uh have a contact button right there at the very top. Uh we even have a Discord channel uh in which we have some pretty lively debates. It's a very small community, and you know it's not the most active thing in the world yet, but I'm really hoping that it gets there because uh, you know, we've actually we had our first live voice chat the other week uh with a few members, and that was wonderful. Uh getting to actually get to know you know people on a more personal basis.
Um so yeah, I I welcome you to contact me or not, you know, if you just want to listen, no no problem whatsoever. But uh if you want to reach out, it'd be great to hear from you. So thank you again. I hope you're doing well, and we will catch you next week.
Hi, this is Monica Rheinagel of Nutrition Deepa. Today's show is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. Grocery shopping can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're reading labels. And in my opinion, chicken shouldn't be complicated. Which is why I appreciate nature-raised farms. It's chicken that's just chicken. And their lightly breaded chicken nuggets are free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Look for nature-raised farms on your next grocery trip and feel more confident about your choices.
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