Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia by Sara Ronis (review)

Reviewed by: Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia by Sara Ronis Martha Rampton Sara Ronis. Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 316 pp. In his Making of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown notes that "saints positively needed sorcerers" (22). Sara Ronis makes a similar claim when she argues that "rabbinic thinking about demons was a major locus of identity formation" (223). However, as Ronis makes clear, Christian saints' association with demons differed significantly from the relationship between demons and late antique Babylonian rabbis. Demons in the Details is a compelling discussion of demons' place in the Babylonian Talmud and the ways in which demons were criterial to rabbinic authority. The book is composed of six chapters, in which Ronis traces two "interconnected discourses around demons" (196). One paints demons as capricious and harmful; the other portrays them as temperamentally and morally neutral—often affable—figures. Demons were at the heart of the Sasanian Jewish community and were brought to the service of the "rabbinic project" (196). Ronis explores the demonologies of ancient and late antique Mesopotamian and Roman Palestinian religious traditions and concludes that the world view of Babylonian rabbis was distinctively Babylonian. Chapter 1 ("Origin Stories") traces the existence of demons (shedim) in a variety of texts beginning with the Hebrew Bible, where demons do not loom large. In the Second Temple period, the most fruitful places to look for the origins of malignant, destructive demons are in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Treatise on the Two Spirits), the book of Jubilees, Josephus's The Jewish War, and the Enochic Book of Watchers, where demons are the offspring of the sexual union between angelic beings and human women. As in all monotheistic religions, there was tension around the notion that an omnipotent God created evil creatures who worked at cross purposes to his plan. That conflict was resolved in the Mishnah, in which demons are part of God's cosmic scheme and not unalterably malevolent; rather they are spirits that "uphold God's righteousness" (44). The Babylonian Talmud contains several contradictory origin stories that draw on Second Temple traditions. (Prominent among them is that demons were the product of Adam's semen.) The rabbis of Sasanian Babylonia were successful in creatively harmonizing these diverse traditions. Chapter 2 ("Classification Matters") places Babylonian talmudic exegetes in dialog with the Greek and Christian "scholarly elite." In her treatment of rabbinic End Page 214 taxonomies, Ronis presses into service philosophers and theologians reaching back to Plato. For Platonic philosophers, the demon was something akin to a guardian angel. This invisible creature was a beneficent essence ontologically positioned between gods and humans. For some thinkers, demons were synthetic entities who participated in both the divine and the profane; for others, they were either good or bad. Within the thought world of Christian intellectuals, demons were wicked fallen angels, unequivocally vile, who posed as deities of the classical pantheon. Demons were corporally superior to humans but morally inferior, and Satan was the worst among them. Inherent in Greek philosophy, Christian theology, and Babylonian Rabbinism there was (to a greater or lesser degree) a principle of hierarchical ranking of demons with other species which made demons cognitively graspable. In chapter 3 ("How to Avoid Demonic Dangers"), Ronis takes a deep dive into one sugya in tractate Pesaḥim which lays out a dizzying assortment of perils that involve drinking, eating, copulating, and wiping in even numbers. Also hazardous are eating or drinking particular stuffs; urinating on demons; passing over spilled water; menstruant women; nighttime; and drinking water on Tuesday or Friday nights when demons are loose. Ronis seeks to establish (rather artlessly) that demons delimited time and the rabbinic body. The author is more effective in her treatment of demons' role in fixing space and marking the edges of human habitation. Demons dwell in fields, abandoned buildings, Roman Palestine, shadows cast by trees, and outdoor privies. At times they infiltrate domestic places as well. Demons (by rights) demand their own space and become aggressive (often causing illness) only when they are provoked by infringement of their habitats. Chapter...