Translator’s Introduction
In 1641, in the Lutheran university town of Altdorf near Nuremberg, a Hebrew professor named Theodor Hackspan set a student to defend a set of theses in public. The student, Johann Frischmuth of Wertheim, stood and answered for them. The subject was the names of angels and demons: where those names came from, what they reveal, and whether the beings behind them have bodies, ranks, or a birth. The theses were printed the same year by the Scherff press under a double title, Hebrew and Latin: מלאכים ושדים, Mal’akhim we-Shedim, “Angels and Demons,” and De Angelorum Daemonumque Nominibus, “On the Names of Angels and Demons.”
The copy
The text translated here is the copy held at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, digitized by its Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum under the call number bsb11852740 (old shelfmark 4 Diss. 3241,15). It is a thin quarto disputation of the kind German universities produced by the thousand in the seventeenth century: a professor (the praeses) drew up numbered theses, a candidate (the respondens) defended them in a public exercise, and the whole was printed as a small pamphlet. It still repays reading three and a half centuries later because of the professor. Hackspan was a Christian Hebraist and orientalist, and he reads the Jewish sources in the original. The title page even carries the opening words of the Quran in Arabic, the Basmala, a quiet boast about the range of tongues the author commanded.
What the book is
This is not a grimoire. No circles are drawn, no spirits are summoned. It is a work of learned comparison, and its method is the thing. Hackspan takes the angelology and demonology of the rabbis, the Talmud, Maimonides, the Yalkut, the Zohar, the Kabbalists read through Reuchlin and Cornelius Agrippa, and sets it beside the Church Fathers and the theologians of his own day, Catholic and Lutheran alike. He is interested in the seams: where the two traditions part, and where the Jewish material preserves something the Christian schools had lost or never had.
The argument opens by setting the frame. The names of the angels, the Talmud says, “came up from Babylon” with the Jews of the exile, the same as the names of the months. Maimonides lists ten ranks of angels, from the chayot (the “living creatures of holiness”) down to the ishim. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation become the four Evangelists, or do not, depending on whether you follow Bellarmine or Chemnitz. Then the questions sharpen: do angels and demons have bodies? Where do demons come from? Here Hackspan reaches the strangest material, the rabbinic tradition that demons, the shedim, lilin, and ruchin, were born from Adam’s seed during the hundred and thirty years he lived apart from Eve, a tradition that stands directly behind the figure of Lilith.
About this translation
This is, as far as we can find, the first English translation of the work. It follows the Munich copy paragraph by paragraph. The text moves constantly between Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with a little Greek and Arabic; Hackspan quotes his rabbinic sources in Hebrew and then gives his own Latin rendering, and we have translated both into English, naming the source each time. Where a Hebrew technical term carries weight, chayot, shedim, qliphoth, we keep it and gloss it rather than flatten it. The dense apparatus of citations, to chapters of the Talmud, to Maimonides, to Reuchlin and Agrippa and the Fathers, is kept in place, because the web of references is half the point. Translator’s notes, set off in brackets, clarify a name or a reference where the seventeenth-century shorthand would otherwise be opaque. The author’s own paragraph numbering is preserved.
We present it as a historical document. It is a window into how a learned Christian of the early seventeenth century read the Jewish demonology, what he found credible and what he found “slippery,” and where he thought the rabbis had kept a thread the Church had dropped. What any of it describes, and whether there is anything behind the names at all, the disputation does not finally decide. Neither do we.
The Disputation
Thesis I
1. About to speak of the names of the angels, and of how far those names show us either their nature or their office, pointing them out as if with a finger, I give warning at the outset that they are not all of one kind. Some are common to all; some belong to a particular order of the good angels. That I might set it all out more methodically, our purpose does not allow, which is to examine what Maimonides and the other Talmudists report of these things and to weigh it against what has been piously handed down among Christians. Yet let us know this much in general about the proper names. The Jerusalem Talmud says of the months too, in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, not far from its beginning: Rabbi Hiyya said, the names of the months came up from Babylonia. Resh Lakish added that the names of the angels too first came from the same place. (See the Talmudic epitome entitled Ein Yisrael, p. 187, col. 2.)
2. As for what the Talmudists keep asserting here about the proper names of the months, it is not to be taken as though no name of this kind had been given to a month by the Jews or by the people of Palestine before the Babylonian captivity. For there occur Ziv (1 Kings 6:1) and Bul (ibid. v. 38), Ethanim (ch. 8:2), and Aviv (Exodus 13:4), though Pererius, on ch. 12 of Exodus, holds these to be epithets of the months rather than proper names. But this is what they mean. Since formerly the months were generally named in order, no less than the days, so that they once said “in the first month, the second, the third, the seventh, the ninth,” the Jews afterward, returning from captivity, brought other names back with them and used these, the earlier ones being mostly dropped and set aside. Thus afterward they said Nisan for Aviv, Iyar for Ziv, Marcheshvan for Bul, and Tishri for Ethanim, the older names being made obsolete.
3. As for the proper names of the angels, the matter is plain if we look into the sacred book, in which there is no mention even of the good angels before the account of Abraham, except for the Cherubim at the end of Genesis 3, a thing noted likewise by Theodoret (Question 2 on Genesis). The reason for this, as also for the diversity of the angelic qualities themselves, is argued one way by some and another way by others. Of the evil angels there was no mention; yet their malice betrayed itself at once, to our grief, in the deceiving of the first-formed pair, just as afterward the diligence of the good angels showed itself in the guarding of Paradise and in leading back the one who had strayed. Moses said nothing explicitly about the nature of the angels, just as he did not depict the particular character of the other creatures one by one. The sacred historian willed such things to be left to the investigators of nature, since it served his purpose little to set out a written physics, or a written science of spirits. Some things, too, that needed a distinct exposition were to be learned from later writers, as the very idea of the divine image cries out, an idea distinctly described afterward in Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10.
4. But to come nearer to the names of the angels themselves, one may know that they are listed by Maimonides in this way, in Book 1 of the Mishneh Torah, the Treatise on the Foundations of the Law, ch. 2, §7: The variation of the angelic names is according to the variety of their ranks. And therefore they are called the living creatures of holiness (chayot ha-qodesh), to whom the highest rank belongs; then the wheels (ophanim); after these the Erelim and the Chashmallim; likewise the Seraphim and the Malakhim; the Elohim and the Bene Elohim; and finally the Cherubim and the Ishim. All those ten names by which the angels are called are found among them on account of their ten ranks. It appears from this that the Jews, no less than the Scholastics, reckon distinct orders of angels, but on a foundation either slippery or altogether absent, as will become clear from the exposition of each in particular. For I do not deny the orders absolutely.
5. Concerning these orders they bring forward various things, which may be seen in Reuchlin (Book 3 of On the Kabbalistic Art, p. 752) and in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (Book 3 of the Occult Philosophy, ch. 17). The first explains how a higher rank stands toward a lower, and what influence it exerts upon it; the second sets out for what chief reason God uses the ministry and the work of the angels, and compares this with the doctrines of Dionysius. The first order takes in the chayot (the living creatures). For in Ezekiel 1:5 four living creatures are mentioned, which at v. 10 are said to have shown the form of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. The pious Fathers hold that the Evangelists are signified by them, and so that their number is fulfilled in the figure four, against what the heretics supposed. Hence Bellarmine too (On the Word of God, Book 1, ch. 6) says: What are those four living creatures shown to Ezekiel and to John, the man, the lion, the calf, the eagle, to be believed to mean, if not the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? For this the people attest everywhere not only in writing and by word of mouth, but the very walls cry it out with signs and images. The same is the view among our own of Dr. Hunnius, in the Colloquy of Regensburg, session 10. Yet it seemed otherwise to Dr. Chemnitz, to Joachim Camerarius, and to Dr. Paul Tarnow, who teach plainly enough that this old opinion accords more with piety than with truth. Indeed, the very thing these press as most certain, Pererius (Volume 3 of his Selected Disputations) calls into doubt.
6. And this not only because John, while still a wayfarer in this life, saw those four living creatures praising God, so that they are distinct from John the Evangelist, but most of all because in Revelation the fourth living creature is plainly distinguished from John. There is the further point that in Ezekiel (if indeed, as Maldonado supposes, the same thing is meant by the “living creatures” in both places) at ch. 10:15 they are marked with the name Cherubim; that in Revelation 4:8 those living creatures redouble the angelic Trisagion, the “Holy, holy, holy” described in Isaiah 6; and that in ch. 5:7 and following they are now set over against the angels, now distinguished from the elders, that is, from the Prophets and Apostles. But the number of four living creatures will not hold if you fold two of the Evangelists in among the twenty-four elders; nor will you fitly understand angels by the living creatures, both because they are mentioned as distinct from angels and because they were redeemed by the blood of Christ. Let the theologians weigh this: the vision of Ezekiel does seem to stand otherwise than that of John. But whatever in the end comes under the name “living creatures,” it is clear from ch. 10:15 that the living creatures are called Cherubim, and so that they are wrongly distinguished from these as one order from another on the ground of eminence. Nor is it proven that the Chashmallim and the Ophanim are separate kinds of angels, much less distinct orders of them.
7. So too about the Erelim they are surely mistaken, for weeping is ascribed to these in Isaiah 33:7, though such spirits have no traffic with weeping. In the Yalkut on ch. 22 of Genesis (p. 28, col. 4) that weeping is said to have happened at the time when Abraham was about to slay his son at the divine command. For the words run thus: In the hour when Abraham our father stretched out his hand to take up the knife and slay his son, the ministering angels wept, for it is said (Isaiah 33), Behold, the Erelim cried out without. This they relate of the good angels, though inconsistently enough, as will appear later; but least of all does Maimonides agree with them in it.
8. That altogether greatest man Erasmus notes, in his Scholia on Volume 2 of the Letters of Jerome (p. 157), that Augustine held the view that demons have aerial bodies, and those by no means assumed for the occasion but their own and natural, unless one should perhaps wish to interpret it thus, that “body” is taken by him for “substance,” in the way the ancients sometimes used that word, as when they dispute whether a voice is a body or an accident. Vorstius, in his Notes on the third disputation, uses a similar escape, for he judges that body is by no means to be denied even of God, the simplest of spirits, without prejudice to His being a spirit, on the ground that most theologians, especially the ancient ones, hold the angels to be corporeal (to which Bodin would add human souls as well), though they do not deny them to be spirits. So too, he says, there are animal and vital spirits, and wind is called pneuma in John 3, since they share in matter.
9. But it is strange that Vorstius should use so great a misuse of words (akyrologia) as to assert that even God himself can be called a body, on the ground that He is a solid substance, that is, as he explains in the same place, not a phantasm or a shadowy accident. For it is clear enough that, when the simplicity of God is in question, this is meant with reference to corporeal substance, not as having for its opposite a phantasm or a shadowy accident, but a spirit or a spiritual essence. This, then, would not be to dispute but to play with an ambiguity, which those who mean to dispute avoid as far as they can. Nor does that doctrine of the Fathers about the angels help him, the doctrine that they are spirits in such a way as not to be wholly foreign to body. For if he would give place here to the opinion of those Fathers who followed the Platonists, he will have made them corporeal in the proper sense, and will not have observed the opposition between body, taken precisely as substance only, and phantasm, since those Fathers called them corporeal in the proper sense. This clarification, then, drawn from the example of the angels, is beside the point. Add here Erasmus, in the place cited, and Juan Luis Vives on Book 15, ch. 23, of Augustine’s City of God.
10. Likewise Menasseh ben Israel, the Jew, in Book 2 of On the Resurrection, ch. 2, asserts that God made out of the purest matter the ten Sephirot, or divine lights, and out of a more impure matter the other ten spirits, the outer powers, called qliphoth, that is, shells or husks; and these things he reports from the Zohar, a most ancient book. About the Sephirot, consult, if you please, Reuchlin (Book 3 of On the Kabbalistic Art, p. 734), where various opinions are brought forward. It would not, then, be strange that the angels should consist of body, or at least be made of matter, as being framed out of matter, though of the purest. And if I may add in passing the manner of the production of the spirits, we shall see that the Jews assign to them bodies even grosser than those that are formed out of matter of this purest kind.
11. They differ, of course, in various ways about the production of the good spirits, as also about the demon, now as emanating from one source, now from another. In the Yalkut on Genesis (p. 39, col. 3) they say: On every day God, blessed be He, creates a troop of angels, who sing a new song. In the book Sefer Chasidim, on the last page, they speak of the production of the demon thus: The souls of the wicked, when they die, pass over or are changed into demons, just as all the souls of the whole progeny of Cain were changed into the same demons. To these was given the power to do harm to those who profane the Sabbaths. In the Talmud, tractate Eruvin, ch. 2, I read thus: During all those years in which the first man was under the ban, he begot spirits, demons, and spectres, as it is said (Genesis 5:3), And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years and begot a son in his own likeness, after his own image, from which it is wholly plain that until that time he did not beget in his own image. It is to be noted that the demons are said to be begotten from human seed, for the gloss in Ein Yisrael on that passage says that those three harmful kinds (minei mazikin), which here are called Shedin, Lilin, and Ruchin, were born from seed poured out at night-time, the man being quite unaware, as the Mosaic phrase has it.
12. They even persuade themselves that the angels differ in sex, as the Yalkut teaches from Bereshit Rabbah. The words occur in the Yalkut on ch. 7, v. 14 of the Second Book of Samuel, in these very terms: During all those hundred and thirty years in which Eve lived separated from Adam, she had relations with male spirits, by whom she also bore offspring; and the spirits that are female had relations with Adam, and bore from him. And lest you suppose that this view belongs only to Rabbi Simeon, to whom it is ascribed in the place cited, unroll the Talmud itself: in tractate Chagiga (p. 17, ch. 2), after relating that the good angels have this in common with the evil ones, that both have wings, it adds that the demons have three things in common with human beings: they eat and drink; they grow and multiply; and they even die outright, just as human beings do.
13. In this way above all the Jews express to us the nature of the angels. Yet I would not have it taken without distinction of them all, for now these authors contradict one another, and now they contradict themselves. Maimonides at least, who is usually held in the highest regard (ch. 2 of the Mishneh, Book 1, §3), says that they are a form altogether without matter, and goes on, they have no body, nor are they anything corporeal, but are forms, not separated by any matter, but distinct from one another in themselves. And our own faith holds exactly this, which calls both the good and the evil angels ruchot or pneumata (spirits), as may be seen in 1 Kings 22:21, Matthew 8:16, Hebrews 1:14. Nor does it matter that they appear in fire or winged, for Maimonides rightly continues: All these things are said by way of a prophetic vision and in a riddling manner, as if by this very thing he wished to hint that the angel is neither a body nor heavy as heavy bodies are, just as it is also said (Deuteronomy 4:24), “The Lord your God is a consuming fire,” though in truth He is not fire, but this is said of Him by way of a parable; and in a like manner it is said of the angels (Psalm 104:4), He makes his angels spirits (ruchot), that is, like winds, by way of a figure, as the paraphrast explains in the same place.
14. We see here that the words of the Psalmist are not taken by Maimonides in the proper sense, of a spiritual nature, which is also the opinion of the Chaldean interpreter [the Targum]. And although there are some among the Christians who think the discourse there is about the creation of the angels, yet others prefer the exposition that refers the text to providence, with the kaph of similitude understood. Kimchi, in the Mikhlol (p. 17), warns that this prefix is often missing, and adduces particular places: 1 Samuel 15:23, the sin of divination is rebellion, that is, “is as the sin of divination”; Proverbs 11:22, a beautiful woman who turns aside from reason is a golden ring at a swine’s snout, that is, “is as a golden ring,” as the Greeks too rendered it. So then, although they know from the Scriptures that those ministers of God are truly spirits, yet they do not judge that this is what is hinted at in this place. Thus in our own tongue Luther interprets the ruchot of winds, and the same is the opinion of Genebrardus and Jacobus Cappellus, and it seems to fit the phrase better, both because those who are here said to be made ruchot are already declared to exist (since, unless they were supposed to exist, they would likewise not be made esh lohet, “a flaming fire”), and because, on this exposition, they would consist no less of spirit than of flaming fire, which displeases those others. Yet we let each abound in his own sense here, for our faith is not at stake in it.
15. This is the view of the Jews about the origin of the angels and demons, and likewise about their bodies. The Quran does not disagree with these, as Widmanstadius, a man most skilled in law and in languages, noted in his Notes on the Theology of Muhammad, observing that it took up many things long approved among the Jews. Menasseh ben Israel asserts, from the Zohar, that the demons were made not out of the purest matter but out of some more impure matter. The Quran, in chapter 15, repeatedly says that they were made from a scorching fire (min nari al-samum). This, no doubt, is that less pure matter, yet more fit and worthy for the bodies of demons. The Talmud asserts that the angels are corporeal, and indeed, along with Satan, endowed with bodies that are not assumed but their own. The Quran likewise brings in God addressing Job, who was anxiously entreating Him about removing the Devil, in these words: Strike with your foot (urkud bi-rijlika), repel him from you with your foot. But if Job could, and had to, repel Satan with his foot, how was Satan free of corporeal mass? See chapter 38 of the Quran.
16. But in truth, as anyone easily notices, there is nothing sound here, and some of it is rejected even by the sounder Jews. What sort of thing is this, after all, that the souls of the wicked are changed into devils? Perhaps the Jews forget what they are otherwise accustomed to say, the soul has the same character in death as in life, and that it is not changed in its state, as the body is wont to be changed. Would the soul, changed into a demon, then again, with the body brought back to life and so destined to pay the penalty, constitute the same individual? And would the very same body in number, once subjected to the rule of the soul, pay the penalty, even though the soul, being changed, experiences nothing of this? There are demons enough otherwise, no necessity commands their multiplication, and it accords with divine justice that the soul which sinned should undergo the punishment. Further, how ridiculously do they make the mother of the human race the begetter of demons (for what other word should I use, since they suppose that the evil spirits were her seducers?), and how ineptly do they confirm it from chapter 5 of Genesis? If the practice of Aben Ezra [Ibn Ezra] ever holds good, let it hold here too: this exposition lacks sense. This exposition is left without reason.
17. Not to press now the point that they suppose the demon, as such, to have been made by God, namely out of impure matter. And although our own faith too seems to hint at something similar, when it relates that the demons are tortured by the fire of hell, and ascribes bread to the good angels (Psalm 78) and tongues or speech to them (1 Corinthians 13), yet we must know that it is not for us to investigate, concerning the infernal fire, in what manner it torments the demons, but rather by what chief means we may escape it. There are indeed some who think it happens in this way, that although fire, namely material fire, in no way acts upon them, yet the wandering spirits bear it most grievously that they are bound to a prison-house of this kind. Others hold another opinion; and whatever it may finally be, the matter is so difficult to explain that no one has yet been found who could give a reason for it in which others would rest, as Bellarmine says (Book 3, On the Eucharist, ch. 6). Nor, if the manner be disputed, is the thing at once to be denied, since it is certain that the human soul is incorporeal and yet is afflicted by an infernal punishment unknown to us. As for the angelic bread and tongues, Genebrardus, on the cited passage of the Psalmist, thinks such things are ascribed to the angels as singular and wonderful, just as the Jews are otherwise wont to say: This is the custom of the language: when it would magnify some thing, it attaches it to God, whence “the mountains of God” and “the cedars of God.” Whether this opinion can win the suffrage of the learned, the discussion will show, for others persuade themselves that such things are said by hyperbole. Thomas Aquinas (Part 1, Question 51, Article 3, reply to 4) contends that the angels do not speak properly even in assumed bodies, but that the sound is something like speech, insofar as they form sounds in the air similar to human voices.
18. But enough has been said so far about the body or matter of the spirits; let us now look at the remaining orders. About the Chashmallim and the Ophanim many things are said, in the Jewish manner, by Maimonides (Part 3 of the Guide of the Perplexed, ch. 2 and following), which we leave to those authors. The Seraphim they would have named from this, that whoever looks upon them is set on fire, as they would have the Cherubim carry the meaning of kingship and dominion, about which Cornelius a Lapide too remarks something, on ch. 9, v. 5, of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the author says that above the ark were cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy-seat, and so uses the neuter gender, although the Hebrew is masculine. I have shown elsewhere, from Thomas (on the Sentences, Book 2, dist. 9, art. 4, reply to 7), that these are trifles of the Scholastics, in that they make Cherubin and Seraphin of the neuter gender, just as Cherubim and Seraphim are of the masculine. But something must be pardoned them, since by the fault of the age they were wholly ignorant either that those words were Hebrew, or, if this did not escape them, then at least it lay hidden from them that Hebrew has no neuter gender at all.
19. But why the Greeks throughout the Old Testament said ta cheroubim (the cherubim, in the neuter) is disputed even among the philologists. Agostino Steuco of Gubbio, Bishop of Kisamos, on ch. 3 of Genesis, says: I wonder at the Septuagint, why they rendered ta cheroubim in the neuter gender, since that gender does not exist among the Hebrews, who know no other nouns but masculine and feminine. Perhaps we too do not rightly say “Blessed Seraphin.” Drusius (Book 10 of his Observations, ch. 19) judges that the word pneuma (spirit) is to be understood, as if one read ta pneumata cheroubim (the spirits, the cherubim). Genebrardus, on Psalm 17, criticizes this, indeed laughs at it outright as far as the Latins are concerned; but he himself is persuaded that the Greeks used the neuter because in the angels there is no sex, and likewise because, by the property of the Greek tongue, the Greek calls proper nouns, especially of a termination unfamiliar to him, by various genders, and chiefly by the neuter. The former reason is less probable, though Cornelius a Lapide too presses it, however acute it may seem. The Latins, for their part, followed the Greeks without controversy.
20. Next come the Malakhim (messengers), a name so far from constituting a peculiar order that it is rather altogether general, and it is still before the judge whether it sometimes belongs to the evil spirits too. It is general if we look at the very meaning, for it sounds “messenger.” Hence, on their own testimony, a “messenger” is called malach, and they are so named because they are the envoys of God in the administration or government of the world; and, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (ch. 1, last verse) explains it of pious men in particular: Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out for service for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation? The Jews indeed not rarely make separate mention of the malachei ha-sharet, the ministering angels, who are servants; but that there are others who are not such has not yet been shown from the Scriptures.
21. Whether the name belongs only to the blessed spirits hangs on several places of Scripture. [The original misnumbers this paragraph “12.”] Drusius (Book 10 of his Observations, ch. 9), after saying that in 1 Corinthians 11:10 some understand demons by the word angeloi, added in the revised edition: Wrongly: for evil angels are not called “angels” without qualification, so far as I know. Pineda, in his commentary on Job 4:18, where the Vulgate translated In his angels he found wickedness, notes that apostate and deserter angels are understood by the Greek and Latin interpreters; and the Photinians, with certain others following them, would have demons understood under the name angeloi in Hebrews 2:16, for whose sake Christ by no means suffered. But since, in the words cited from Job, the word is said with the suffix as Malachav (his angels, that is, God’s), I cannot persuade myself, even if nothing else at all stood in the way, to understand demons. For in the sacred writings God and the angels make up the holy assembly, just as the dragon and his angels make up the wicked one (Revelation 12:7); nor is “the Angel of the Lord” anywhere, so far as I know, said of Satan, nor can it fitly be said of him with the distinction preserved. Moreover the Photinians wrongly translate the passage of Hebrews 2, about which elsewhere. Yet let the learned consider whether the word is used without qualification in 2 Peter 2:4, and let them judge. Let the places 1 Samuel 18:10, ch. 19:9, and ch. 16:23 also be compared.
22. Maimonides observes that the same are also called Elohim; but whether the evil ones too are so named, he does not hint. The commentator’s words are: The angels are called Elohim because they too have dominion in the world; but it is a name common to God (blessed be He), to the angels, to the prophets, and to the judges. He would not add, “and to the devils”; the reason I shall give later. For the rest, that the good angels are called Elohim is taught by unanimous opinion, following the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (chs. 1 and 2), by the Chaldean [Targum] and the Syriac in the passages of Psalm 8:6 and 97:7; nor do the Greeks and the better rabbis disagree. Cornelius a Lapide alone, on Psalm 97, supposes a corruption in the sources and supplies the word Malache (angels); but this is bare conjecture. For one who judges that angels are denoted by Elohim can, without damage to the text, since the discourse is about good angels, call them “angels of God.” Nor is word always rendered by word; the sense too must be heeded, and if this is the same in both, there is no corruption underlying, no defect of a word.
23. About the Devil, whether he is anywhere called Elohim, I see it is doubted. Vorstius reports, in his Notes on the second disputation, that Drusius contends about this matter with Zanchius, and adds: It is not yet clear to me, and so I leave this open. For my part, I think that Elohim is taken always, or for the most part, in a good sense, and so is used in the sacred writings of the good angels rather than the evil ones. For the fact that the idols of the nations (which may be called demonia according to the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 10:20) are called Elohim is to be thought to come rather from the supposition, or the opinion, of men than from the mind of the Holy Spirit. But I would readily believe that the apparition called Elohim in 1 Samuel 28:13 was the Devil, although it seems otherwise to the Jews, and although, in Drusius’s judgment, antiquity believed that those things were done by the true Samuel. We do indeed read it said of Samuel by Sirach (ch. 46:20): After he had fallen asleep he prophesied, and showed the king his end, and lifted up his voice from the earth in prophecy.
24. The same is handed down by the Yalkut on Samuel (p. 20, col. 3): Rabbi Jonathan says, all the prophets prophesied while they enjoyed life; but Samuel prophesied both in his life and after his death. For Samuel said to Saul: if you will hear my counsel, and so are willing to perish by the sword, your death will be an expiation upon you, and your lot will be with me in the place where I dwell. So Saul heard his counsel and was slain with his sons, that his portion might be with Samuel the prophet; for it is said, “you shall be with me,” that is, be-mechitzati, in the same chamber with me. But as these things smack of folly, so it is impossible that Saul and Samuel should be in the same spirit after death, and in the same joy, since the one was impious, a transgressor of the divine commands and a man who took his own life, while the other was famed for the most steadfast piety, and, now most surely dead, would rather have called the king back from self-slaughter, the king who stood on the brink of ruin; and his counsel stands far otherwise in 1 Samuel 15:23. Several similar follies are there, which I gladly pass over.
25. Far more rightly Augustine judges that Satan, who transfigures himself into an angel of light, appeared in the assumed form of Samuel. Yet Menasseh ben Israel, the Jew, attacks this opinion under Augustine’s name (Book 2, On the Resurrection, ch. 6): If, he says, an evil spirit had been under the person of Samuel, how would it have said, “Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me”? Were Saul and his sons then to be received into the number of demons? Certainly that rests on no foundation. But let me too be allowed to ask of the Jew: if it was the true Samuel, how could he say, “Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me”? For Saul the self-slayer was heading one way, faithful Jonathan another. By that phrase, then, machar atta immi (“tomorrow you are with me”), death simply is meant, not any particular state following death. Nor does it follow that Saul, as such, was to be received into the number of demons; for the demon was not speaking out of his own mind, but, as he was deceiving Saul under an assumed person, so he fitted all the words baldly to the condition of the dead Samuel.
26. Nor does Menasseh bring anything better than Augustine’s view, but serves up his own follies to us. It must be laid down for certain, he says, that there are certain spirits whose power over the souls of dead men is so great that they hold them subject and clothe them in whatever body seems good to them. But it is necessary that they do this within the space of twelve months after a man’s death; for during that time (as is read in the Gemara of Sabbath) the soul often ascends and descends to the body. And the reason is that for a whole year the soul is not altogether absent from its body, nor does it plainly cast off the love of its dwelling; hence, so long as that year is not complete, it can be made to migrate back and be drawn by the spirits into its body. But who would grant the suppositions this man takes up? He supposes that Samuel and Saul died in the same year. Yet it is plain that this is disputed among the Jews, from the Book Yuchasin, where we read: King Saul died two years after Samuel, to which is added: although our masters, of blessed memory, said that both died in one year — though they there rather approve the latter opinion.
27. He supposes, from the Talmud, that the soul now and again returns to the body, and that it can be driven by a certain spirit to put on the body. The Talmud, in tractate Rosh Hashanah ch. 1, says: The perfectly righteous are at once written and sealed for the life to come; the wholly wicked, on the contrary, for Gehenna. By this very thing it is shown that they have no commerce with these earthly things. So in what way the righteous Samuel could have been made to stand forth, I do not find. Further, whence is the power of that spirit over the souls of the piously dead proved? It rather goes against divine providence. For if that spirit is evil, it has no right over the blessed; but if good, it will not resist divine providence, nor begrudge them their state, but will rather be a help and guard them, that they not be forced to lie under the power of a sorceress. Add that, even if all this could be excused, in truth it still could not have been called Samuel; for the soul of a body stripped of its bodily apparatus would be said only to be present to it, not to inform it as its form, from which alone the name is to be taken.
28. So much for that phantom of Samuel, of which our Luther excellently says (Volume 2 of the Latin Jena edition, p. 459) that he deserves no credence who says that the souls of the righteous, existing in the hand of God or the bosom of Abraham, are under the power of Satan and of impious men, since both the woman and Saul acted plainly against God’s command in seeking the truth from a dead man. Pererius, on ch. 7 of Exodus (disputation 7), asserts that the apparition of the dead was wholly real, yet that it by no means came about by the power of the necromantic art, but by the singular counsel, will, and power of God, and was no less a miracle than the giving of sight to a blind man or other things counted among God’s great miracles. Whether by this assertion he overturns the opinion of his fellows about the apparition being Samuel himself and not some phantom, let them see to it.
29. Nor should anyone be troubled that the sacred Scriptures dissemble in that place, and do not determine whether it was the true or the counterfeit Samuel, indeed that they expressly call him Samuel. For Scripture did this, as Luther notes, because it tempers the words to Saul’s opinion, who believed it was Samuel, while the spirit cleverly imitates and amplifies all of Samuel’s words. But Scripture wished the reader forewarned and forearmed by its preceding command, by which it secretly refers him elsewhere, so that he might know that whatever was done otherwise was not done by a good spirit, nor by the sons of a good spirit. In this same way too, in 2 Samuel 1, it brings in Saul’s armor-bearer relating that Saul was slain by him, so plausibly that David, believing him, ordered him killed because, as he claimed, he had slain the Lord’s anointed. Nor does Scripture here disclose whether he spoke truth or lied, but left his lie to be recognized by the reader from the earlier place, at the end of 1 Samuel, where, according to the history, it had described Saul’s death; and unless you go back to it, you would believe this armor-bearer speaks the truth. So too, in the lying raising of the dead Samuel, it refers back to the truthful account set down in the earlier book. Blessed Luther excellently confirms this from Luke 16:29–31, where such apparitions are read to be rejected.
30. Now let us investigate where the good angels are called Bene Elohim (sons of God). The rabbis, with the Christians agreeing, appeal to Job: at ch. 1:6 he records that Satan mingled himself among the sons of God, and at ch. 38:7, Where were you, says the Lord, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God (kol bene Elohim) shouted for joy? The illustrious Drusius (Century 1 of his Miscellanies, ch. 12; add Letter 37) calls this into doubt. His words are these: More rightly, perhaps, “all the sons of God,” that is, all the stars, so that it says the same thing in other words; for it precedes, “when the morning stars praised me.” For antiquity placed the stars in the number of the gods, which is known even from the second book of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. But since it is plain that this is the phrasing of Job, from ch. 1, I cannot grasp why, with no necessity commanding it, we should depart from the received sense; indeed, this exposition has just as much probability as the opinion of those who believed that in the same verse the angels too were hinted at by kochvei boker (the morning stars), whence perhaps afterward arose the opinion about Lucifer fallen from heaven (Isaiah 14:12).
31. But in what sense the name belongs to the angels, the Photinians dispute. Smalcius, in his Examination of the errors noted by Smiglecki (p. 26), denies that the angels are properly adoptive sons of God. An adoptive son of God, he says, is properly one who, having at some time existed and not been a son of God, was afterward made such; but since there was no time at which the angels existed and were not sons of God, but were made sons of God in their very creation, who does not see that adoption does not properly belong to them? It belongs improperly, insofar as those who once were not were created, and created sons of God. So this man, following Socinus, defines an adoptive son by time, since the adoptive is opposed to the natural, that is, to one begotten of his father’s essence, as they commonly like to speak; and so the adoptive in the proper sense is one who is not begotten of the essence but adopted into a son, prescinding formally from existence.
32. For the rest, as the angels are called Bene Elohim and Elohim, so they relate that the same are also called Elim (Exodus 15:11) and Bene Elim (Psalm 89:7). Hence Genebrardus, on the cited passage of the Psalmist, writes thus: Who shall be like God among the sons of God, that is, among the holy ones and the angels, who are honored with the title “sons of God” (Job 1:6), since they were not only brought forth by God Most High, which they have in common with the demons, but also adopted as heirs of eternal life. He adds there that they are called sons of Elim, of the mighty Gods, that is, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each of whom is a perfect, true, and omnipotent God. But since it is harshly said that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are “mighty Gods” (unless you wish to excuse Genebrardus on the ground that he speaks in accommodation to the Hebrew tongue, in which perhaps Elim no less than Elohim is a personal, not an essential, name), so his view that they are called sons of God because they are adopted as heirs of eternal life would need a fuller explanation, which we rightly leave to the theologians. For we know that Bellarmine (Book 2, On Grace and Free Will, ch. 17) recognizes in the good angels an absolute election, as in the evil ones a negative reprobation.
33. Further, whether the evil spirits are called Bene Elohim is disputed. The passage Genesis 6:2 gave occasion to the question. The Chaldeans [the Targums] even supply the names of these angels, and say they were called Uzziel and Shemhazai; others believe their children were thence named Nephilim; most call them Giants, earth-born, because begotten of angels and humans. If anyone wishes to see the authors and the great crowd of the Fathers, let him unroll Juan de Rada (on the Sentences, Book 2, controversy 5, article 2) and Sixtinus Amama (Antibarbarus, p. 389). Muhammad himself (chapter 2) hints at something similar, concerning the angels called Harut and Marut, though he does not explain it fully; yet his followers relate that these same angels, enticed by a woman’s beauty, solicited her chastity, and on that account paid the penalty. These things, however, are taken by others according to the persons concerned, either in a composite or in a divided sense; or, if you prefer, of angels who before the union were already given over to malice, or who contracted guilt by that very crime. If of good angels, then they were not confirmed in goodness (which is roughly Arminius’s opinion); nor would you rightly say the flood was sent for that cause, since angels of that kind did not perish in the flood. But if of evil ones, certainly they too did not perish in that same devastation; and since they are spirits, you would say they are strangers to sexual union.
34. Finally, about this passage adduced from Genesis, I would like to set down the words of Thomas [Aquinas], which are read in Part 1, Question 51, Article 3, reply to 6: It must be said that, as Augustine says in the 15th book of the City of God, many affirm that they have themselves experienced, or have heard from those who experienced it, that Sylvans and Fauns (whom the common people call incubi) have often been wanton toward women, and have sought and accomplished intercourse with them. Hence to deny this seems a piece of impudence. But the holy angels of God could in no way fall thus before the flood. Therefore by “the sons of God” are understood the sons of Seth, who were good; and Scripture names as “the daughters of men” those who were born of the line of Cain. Nor is it to be wondered that Giants could be born of them. If, however, some are sometimes born from intercourse with demons, this happens not by seed issuing from the demons, nor from assumed bodies, but by the seed of some man taken for this purpose, namely that the same demon who is a succubus to the man becomes an incubus to the woman. The last rank, finally, takes in the Ishim, whom they say appear to the prophets.
35. These, then, were those grades or orders of angels which Maimonides asserts; from which it appears by no slight token that this is rather a game than the mind and meaning of the Holy Spirit. Bare titles of this kind do not precisely constitute one order and another. Thus the same magistrates are called Elohim and Bene Elyon (Psalm 82:6), which coincides with “sons of God.” Would you rightly assert, from this variety of words, that some of the magistracy are Elohim, and indeed superior, and others Bene Elyon, as being inferior? There is added that these credulous folk constantly refute themselves; for Gabriel and Michael are certainly archangels, and not to be placed in the lowest grade, as Maimonides’s commentator here lays down concerning Gabriel. But these things are asserted of the spirits according to each man’s pleasure rather than from the truth of the matter, as we meet many such things also in the writings of the Papists, who, to confirm them, are wont now and then to put the Scriptures forward as a pretext.
36. Thus Bellarmine (Book 1, On the Roman Pontiff) dares to assert as certain and proven that among the angels, besides the supreme King of all, God, there is one who presides over all the rest; and that at the beginning the one now called the Devil was endowed with this dignity, but after the Devil’s fall, he gathers from Revelation 12:7 that holy Michael is the prince of all the angels, and rightly called the overseer of paradise. Let us also hear Henriquez discoursing thus on the office of the archangels (Book 10 of his Moral Theology, ch. 31, §3): An archbishop in Spain is counted among the magnates, and sits before the King with covered head, and has for his guardian, by reason of his office, an archangel, besides the private angel that is granted to him as guardian, as to other private persons. If you ask whence these things became known to him, you will hear no witness. Moreover, how at length they are wont to dispute about assisting angels who are never sent, and others who minister, anyone who wishes may learn from the Scholastics, who would have nearly the four supreme orders, namely the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, and Dominations, be the assisting ones, and the rest ministering. Consult also Cornelius a Lapide on ch. 1 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and Pineda on ch. 1 of Job.
37. So much for the names of the grades; for they have very many others, named either from the planets, or from the celestial signs, or from other things, and known by particular offices. Hence, from the names Tzedek (Jupiter) and Maadim (Mars), come Zidkiel and Maadimiel, and many more, which are adduced at length by Cornelius Agrippa; some you will also read in the Gloss of Tremellius on ch. 12 of Tobit. Nor are other names unknown: Uriel, who is mentioned in 4 Esdras 4:1; Raziel, about whom the Chaldean is to be consulted on ch. 10:20 of Ecclesiastes; Azriel, who is said to be set over the waters, lest, the shore being broken, they flood the land; likewise the angel Suriel, standing in the sight of God, whom the Talmud mentions. In that book you will find still other titles of angels according to the diversity of their charges: for Yorkami is the angel over hail, another over the baths, another over food, and Lailah is set over conception. About each of such angel names they hand down many fabricated things, sometimes abusing the authority of Scripture itself, after the manner received among the Talmudists. But now I shall add a few things about the Devil.
38. He [the Devil] has obtained various names. The prince of the demons, while Christ was active on earth, was called Beelzebub or Beelzebul, as is plain from Luke 11:15, whom most interpreters hold to be the one called in the Quran Iblis. For Muhammad thinks of the fall of the angels, and of the demon so named, very differently from the Christians. For in the second sura he says at once that God commanded the angels to venerate the man newly made from the earth, and that none of them refused except this Iblis, who under that name was banished from the heavenly court. The reason for the refused veneration he everywhere assigns as this: that since Satan was made from fire, God brought forth the man from a baser matter, namely min salsal, from clay. It may seem strange to anyone whence the impostor drew such things, about which there is deep silence in the authentic records.
39. The great man Juan Luis Vives (Book 4, On the Truth of the Faith, ch. 10) thinks that perhaps these things arose for Muhammad from ch. 1 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, wrongly understood; for he took the firstborn, mentioned in verse 6 as brought into the world and to be adored by the angels themselves, to be said of Adam, against what should have been, since the discourse is about Christ. It is a conjecture I do not simply disapprove, for it is plain that the impostor served up to his own people much that he had altered from the Old and New Testaments. Yet somehow I seem to see something else here, which is nearer the truth. For again he followed the Jews, who assert exactly the same thing, as will appear to one who unrolls Galatinus, who (Book 7, On the Secrets of the Catholic Truth, ch. 4) reports the opinion of the Jews from Rabbi Moses ha-Darshan.
40. The reason this is approved by me rather than what seemed right to Vives is the comparison of the whole account. Galatinus records that Satan, with the band so named, refused to adore the man because he was made from a baser matter, namely earth, but that God commanded the same adoration because Adam surpasses any angel in wisdom. Galatinus, indeed, twists all this another way; but to one who compares the Talmudists and the Quran, something else easily appears. The Yalkut on ch. 1 of 1 Chronicles reports a discourse and deliberation held between God and the angels about man. For it says that a certain angel spoke thus: The angels said, what is the use or the excellence of this man you are framing? God answered one of them: his wisdom far surpasses yours. And so, having brought up the beast, the wild animal, and the birds, He asked the angels whether each had a name; and when they denied that they knew, He brought the same to Adam and questioned him about the names. At once Adam answered: this is an ox, that an ass, this a camel. God added: and what is your name? And Adam answered that it was fitting he be called Adam, because he was created from the earth (adamah). Read chapter 2 of the Quran about the angels by nearly the same rule, and weigh it. So as often as he gives the reason for the refused adoration, this is it: that God created man from earth (see chapter 15 alone). It is therefore very likely that Muhammad sought these fictions from the Jews.
41. Although the trifler ought to have observed that the earth from which Adam was produced is not baser than the pestilent fire from which he fancies Satan was made; and if by sajada he understood adoration and worship properly so called, he makes God entice the angels to idolatry, which is most strictly forbidden to men, than which nothing is more contrary to the divine nature; indeed he makes the demon far more prudent than God himself, as one who refused, and rightly so (as is clear from the revealed word), since the Deity was commanding wrongly, seeing that a mere man is not to be adored, unless perhaps he did this with Photinus and his followers, who derive the adoration and invocation of a mere man from the will of God alone. Finally, he makes the angels persist in their inborn holiness and yet be idolaters. But if by that word he understands only outward honor, we still wait to see from what he would make his fiction credible; for it is not likely that God commanded a superior to follow an inferior, and one purely such, against what order demanded, with such honor as the Arabic word implies.
42. For the rest, there is also a particular angel, both among the Jews and to Muhammad, named in Hebrew Malach ha-Mavet, in Aramaic malach mota, and in Arabic malak al-mawt (the Angel of Death), about whom they bring forth wonders. They derive the word from the sacred book; for the fact that in Proverbs 16:14 the king’s wrath is called malachei mavet (messengers of death), Ibn Ezra, Solomon [Rashi], and Rabbi Levi expound by common consent, as noted on thesis 14 above, so that the sense is: the king’s wrath is like the angels of death, to remove a man from the way of life and lead him into the way of death, as Rabbi Levi says. They therefore take the text about the angels of death in the same sense in which we take them here, though perhaps the Holy Spirit does not so intend it.
43. About this angel they hold the following in the Sefer Chasidim (no. 1145 and following): when dogs see the angel of death, they weep. Hence, no doubt, those canine tears, not disapproved by our common women, who try to make them credible from Exodus 11:7, where, when Egypt is said to have abounded in malachei chabbalah (destroying angels), as the Jews suppose, it is denied that a dog moved its tongue in the houses of the children of Israel. The cause of the howling they derive from the description of that angel, which the Talmud gives thus (tractate Avodah Zarah ch. 1, p. 20; and Beth Israel p. 156, col. 3): They said of the angel of death that he is all over eyes; and when someone is set in his death-agony, the angel stands at the sick man’s pillow with a drawn sword, from which a drop of gall hangs. As soon as the sick man sees him, he trembles and opens his mouth, into which the angel sprinkles that drop. By that drop he dies, grows foul-smelling, and turns pale. These things plainly seem parabolic, whence the Chaldean [Targum], for cherev (sword), substitutes in Psalm 91:7 gera (arrow); which agrees in part, as to the phrase, with the Apostle, who in Ephesians 6:16 bids us quench the flaming darts of the evil one.
44. Indeed Girolamo Cardano, the physician of Milan, writes in Book 19 of his On Subtlety what the subject bids me report here: Everyone, before he dies, is frightened by seeing something, and after he has seen it, does not survive. And although it may be natural, it is still a wonder. I saw a most distinguished man who, though he could not move himself, when it came to that point, nearly threw himself from the bed, and the attendants fled; for it happened deep in the night. He adds that similar things happen to others: just as to princes lightnings and comets and the stars in the sky are presages of death, so confused noises take their place among private men, such as he testifies he himself often heard about the dying, and received from others. Whatever it may finally be, if any true things lie hidden here, they must be wrapped up in fables.
45. The Jews supply still other names for that angel, or at least for one like him. The Book of Tobit (ch. 3, vv. 8 and 20) calls him, in the rabbis’ speech, Asmodeus, and hints that he is a wicked demon; others point to Dumah and Samael. To all it is, as it were, agreed that he is the prince set over the dying; but whether he comes under the name of the good or the evil angels is disputed. The Jews are wont to say, Satan is the angel of death; hence they frame prayers of this kind, that God may guard them from Satan the destroyer, by which they hint that the one whom Scripture mentions in Exodus 12:23 is a demon.
46. Genebrardus, on Psalm 89:49, fosters the same opinion. Yet whether a different kind of death (especially plague) is to be charged to the good angels is disputed by Dr. J. Tarnow (Biblical Exercises, p. 735), Pererius (on ch. 11 of Exodus, disputation 1), and Cornelius a Lapide (on ch. 10:10 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians). Two things here seem harder: one, that in Hebrews 2:14 Satan is said to have the power of death; the other, that an angel of this kind is called the angel of the Lord (malach Yahweh) in 2 Samuel 24:16 and 1 Chronicles 21:12. To say more about this controversy neither this place would allow, nor the plan of the work; and so I prefer here, with Agostino Steuco, to hold back my assent rather than to put forth anything imprudently and rashly, though I do not conceal that, on the supposition given above, the one who slew so many thousands of peoples in the time of King David seems a good angel, and that not rarely even good angels are so hostile to evil men, and the evil to the good, that they may be said to hasten death, God directing all things.
47. But since the angel of death has been mentioned, I would not wrap in silence what Maimonides hands down (Part 3 of the Guide, ch. 22): that Simeon ben Lakish said that the angel of death, Satan, and the yetzer ha-ra (the evil inclination) signify the same thing; just as, on the opposite side, he gathers the same about the yetzer tov (the good inclination) and the good angel, as if here too the same thing underlay. And although the Rabbi did not note the place, it stands nonetheless in the Talmud (tractate Bava Batra ch. 1, and in Beth Israel p. 77, col. 3); and Galatinus adduces a similar passage from the Kabbalistic fragments (Book 6, ch. 17). While I weigh this confusion of the demon with the evil inclination, I raise two questions for the learned. One is what is to be thought of the fact that our vernacular renders the ruach ra’ah (the evil spirit; elsewhere in the Yalkut they call it ruach ha-tumah, in the same way as in the New Testament the unclean spirit occurs) in Judges 9:23 as “an evil will,” and Tremellius as “an evil disposition.”
48. The other is this: since the Sadducees elsewhere fell into the heresy of denying the resurrection, on the occasion of a saying of a certain Antigonus, who had forbidden the holding out of hope of reward when one lives rightly, were not the same men deceived on a like occasion, so as to deny that there is an angel or a spirit (see Piscator on Acts 23:8), on the ground that the angel is the same as the human figment, or disposition? Here, as I said, I assert nothing, but leave such things to be weighed by the more learned. We know that errors are quite often begotten from sayings badly understood, especially where words are multiplied beyond necessity. There were words enough otherwise by which the Devil could be expressed; but while the Jews busy themselves digging out new ones here and there, after the manner received among that people, I would not think it absurd that they gave occasion to opinions of this kind.
49. Finally, to the Papists we owe certain names of the demons. For the Vulgate, in Psalm 91:6, makes mention of the noonday demon; the cause, or rather the occasion, of the error the illustrious Amama points out. And in Habakkuk 3:5 it expounds Reshef of the Devil. Likewise they would have him called Behemoth in Job 40, and in ch. 41 the king over all the sons of pride. But most of all they refer here the passage of Isaiah 14:12, where he is called Heilel, that is, Lucifer; which was also the opinion of several of the Fathers. The Papists are not unaware (as Pererius admits, on Genesis, p. 758) that there is there a prophecy, according to the truth of history, about the unhappy fall of the King of Babylon into the depths of misery from the highest degree of prosperity; yet they think that in a mystical sense the fall of the angel Lucifer is signified, from the highest happiness in which he had been created by God into the greatest misery. But since they would have that mystical sense serve as an argument, scarcely will anyone grant it them; and how far at last might we go, if, as Pererius asserts in the cited place, the consensus of the Fathers using the mystical sense in argument should declare that it was principally intended by the Holy Spirit? Let us rather dismiss such things, and embrace what the truth of history opens up, and not wrest dogmas from figures, provided the common consensus of the Fathers be present, as Bellarmine wished (Book 1, On the Mass, ch. 6).
The disputation closes, as it opened, with a line of Arabic: الحمد لله رب العالمين — “Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds” (Quran 1:2), set as a bookend to the Basmala on the title page.
Finis.
Sources
- The original. Theodor Hackspan (presiding) and Johann Frischmuth (respondent), מלאכים ושדים — De Angelorum Daemonumque Nominibus (“On the Names of Angels and Demons”). Altdorf: printed by the Scherff press, 1641. A university disputation in forty-nine numbered paragraphs.
- The copy translated. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich (Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum), digital copy
bsb11852740; shelfmark 4 Diss. 3241,15; VD17 23:264880U. - The works Hackspan cites are kept inline throughout, as his own apparatus: the Talmud tractates Rosh Hashanah, Eruvin, Chagiga, Bava Batra, and Avodah Zarah; Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and Guide of the Perplexed; the Yalkut Shimoni, Ein Yisrael, Sefer Chasidim, and Zohar; Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa, and Menasseh ben Israel; and the Church Fathers and the Catholic and Lutheran theologians of his own day.