Belial

The Hebrew word occurs some twenty-seven times in the Old Testament, always as a common noun and usually in a construct phrase — “sons of Belial,” “men of Belial,” “a witness of Belial,” “a thing of Belial.” The Greek Septuagint generally translates rather than transliterates it, which is itself evidence that the translators heard a word and not a name.

Between the Testaments that changes decisively. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, Belial is a personal figure: the War Scroll arrays the sons of light against the army of Belial, the Community Rule describes the two spirits and the dominion of Belial over the sons of injustice, and the community’s liturgy curses him by name. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Ascension of Isaiah use the form Beliar in the same personal way, and Jubilees speaks of the spirits of Belial.

So the Apostle’s single use falls at a precise point in the history of a word — after it had become a name in the Jewish literature of his time, and in a letter written to Corinthians who would have understood it as one. That is why the record is catalogued as Scriptural: 2 Corinthians 6:15 genuinely uses it of a person. It is also why nothing further can be built on it.

St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the passage, takes Belial simply as a name for the adversary and spends his effort where Paul does — on the impossibility of the mixture. The point of the verse is not information about a demon but the exclusion of any partnership between Christ and what opposes Him, and every clause in the chain says the same thing in a different pair of terms.

The Orthodox tradition has accordingly never developed a figure of Belial. He has no place in the hymnography, no role in any patristic account of the fall, and no distinct character in Orthodox thought. The demonology of the Church is spare: the demons are fallen angels, created good and fallen by the free misuse of will, held under judgment, and defeated at the Cross. It does not need, and has not produced, a roster of princes.

This restraint is worth naming as a positive commitment rather than a gap. The elaborate hierarchies of named demons belong to Second Temple sectarian literature on one side and to later Western demonology on the other; the Eastern Church stayed out of both, on the conviction that close attention to the enemy is spiritually harmful and that the names God has not revealed are not ours to catalogue as though they were.

None. Belial has no commemoration and appears in no Orthodox service. The Qumran community had a liturgy that cursed him by name; the Church does not, and the difference is instructive — the Orthodox services renounce the devil in the general terms Scripture uses, and name no individual spirit.

The passage in which he appears is read in church as part of the epistle to the Corinthians, where its subject is the incompatibility of the Christian life with idolatry, not the identity of a demon.

There is no iconography of Belial, and there could not be. He is a name in a single verse with no narrative attached, and the fallen are in any case never written as icons.

The word’s afterlife has been almost entirely in the direction Scripture does not go. Medieval and early modern Western demonology gave Belial a rank, a court and a legal career — the fifteenth-century Buch Belial staged him as an advocate pleading against Christ before the throne of God — and Milton set him among the fallen in Pandaemonium as the eloquent counsellor of ignoble ease. From there he passed into the general stock of the literary devil.

The Orthodox East produced none of this. What the Church retained from the passage is the sentence itself, which has become one of the standing scriptural expressions of the impossibility of divided loyalty.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, rediscovered in the twentieth century, made the Second Temple usage visible again and clarified exactly what Paul was drawing on. That is the record’s chief scholarly value: it shows a word caught in the act of becoming a name, and it lets the reader see precisely how much of the popular devil comes from Scripture and how much from the literature around it.

This is the reason the record exists, and it is worth stating flatly. When the older English Bibles print “sons of Belial,” they are transliterating a Hebrew common noun that means worthlessness. The phrase is Hebrew idiom for “worthless men,” exactly as “son of peace” means a peaceable man. Most modern translations render it accordingly, and the demon disappears from the verse — because he was never in it.

The same pattern is documented elsewhere in this section. Abaddon in the Old Testament is an impersonal word for the realm of destruction and the grave; only Revelation 9:11 makes it the title of a personal spirit. In both cases an ordinary Hebrew word was personified later, and in both cases reading the later sense back into the earlier verses would put a demon into passages that have none. The two records are the clearest paired illustration in this database of why the source registers are kept apart.

The verse sits inside a run of five parallel questions: righteousness with lawlessness, light with darkness, Christ with Belial, the believer with the unbeliever, the temple of God with idols. Each pair names two things that cannot be mixed, and the accumulation is the argument.

Chrysostom reads it as an appeal about company and worship rather than a disclosure about the spirit world, and this record follows him. The name is doing rhetorical work — it supplies the sharpest available antonym to Christ in the vocabulary Paul’s readers had — and the Apostle says nothing further about the being it names, then or anywhere else.

Qumran cursed Belial by name in its liturgy. Later Western demonology gave him a rank and a courtroom. The Orthodox Church did neither, and the omission is deliberate rather than accidental.

The Eastern tradition names very few individual spirits, addresses none, and consistently warns that studying the enemy closely is a way of attending to him. Its demonology is correspondingly spare: the demons are fallen angels, they act only as God permits, they cannot compel, and they have been defeated. Everything else it has been content not to know.

• 2 Corinthians 6:14–16 — The single place in the received Scriptures where Belial names a person, in a chain of contrasts with Christ, light, righteousness and the temple of God.
• Deuteronomy 13:13 — “Certain men, the children of Belial” — the impersonal noun; men who entice a city to idolatry.
• Judges 19:22 — The men of Gibeah; modern translations render the word “worthless fellows.”
• 1 Samuel 2:12 — The sons of Eli, “sons of Belial,” who knew not the Lord.
• 1 Samuel 25:17, 25 — Nabal, called a son of Belial and a man of Belial — a judgment on his character, not his allegiance.
• Nahum 1:15 — “The wicked shall no more pass through thee” — beliyya‘al again as a noun, of a human enemy.
• 1QM, the War Scroll (extra-biblical) — The sons of light against the army of Belial. The clearest evidence of the word’s personification before the New Testament.
• 1QS, the Community Rule III–IV (extra-biblical) — The two spirits, and the dominion of Belial over the sons of injustice.
• Ascension of Isaiah 1–5; Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (extra-biblical) — The form Beliar, used personally. Second Temple and early Christian pseudepigrapha; no authority.

Orthodox teaching is not one undifferentiated body of claims. What Scripture states, what the Church prays, what the Fathers taught, and what later writers explain are distinct registers — this page keeps them apart so you can see what each statement rests on.