Mastema

Mastema is an important figure for understanding how ancient Judaism handled the problem of evil, because he occupies a middle position between an independent devil and an agent of God. He is the chief of the hostile spirits in the Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE retelling of Genesis and Exodus; his name means "hostility" or "enmity." What is theologically striking is that Mastema does his work only by God's permission.

When, in Jubilees, God moves to destroy all the demons after the Flood, Mastema petitions that a tenth be left to him to carry out the testing and punishment of humankind, and God grants it. It is Mastema, not God, who prompts the testing of Abraham (taking over the role Genesis assigns to God), and Mastema who assists the Egyptian magicians against Moses. He thus functions as an "adversary" (the literal meaning of satan) who is nevertheless within the divine order, permitted to tempt and afflict as an instrument of God's purposes. The figure marks a stage in the development from the ambiguous "satan" of the Book of Job, a member of the heavenly court, toward the fully independent Devil of later tradition.

Mastema is prominent in only one surviving text, the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish work usually dated to the second century BCE, where he leads spirits who test and afflict humanity, proposes Abraham's trial, and works against Moses in Egypt, always with God's permission rather than in open rebellion. What makes Mastema interesting to historians of religion is less the character himself than the company he keeps: Second Temple Jewish literature of this period names several distinct adversarial figures, Mastema, Belial, and Satan among them, without settling whether these are the same being under different names, overlapping roles occupied by different beings, or titles rather than proper individuals at all.

Some scholars read Mastema as essentially a functional title, meaning something like "the one who opposes" or "hostility" personified, used by the author of Jubilees in a role that other contemporary texts assign to Belial. This multiplicity is itself the historical evidence: rather than a single settled figure of ultimate evil inherited whole from earlier tradition, the very idea of one consolidated adversary, the later Christian and rabbinic Satan or Devil, appears to have crystallized gradually out of exactly this scatter of overlapping Second Temple figures, of which Mastema is one of the more clearly attested examples.