Mastema
is the name of an arch-demon who first appears in the literature of Israel's Second Temple Period, as a personification of the Hebrew word "mastemah" (?????), meaning "hatred", "hostility", "enmity" or "persecution".
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MASTEMA TICKETS
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Hosea
From
Hosea 9.7-8:
7 The days of punishment are coming,
the days of reckoning are at hand.
Let Israel know this.
Because your sins are so many
and your hostility
so great,
the prophet is considered a fool,
the inspired man a maniac.
8 The prophet, along with my God,
is the watchman over Ephraim,
yet snares await him on all his paths,
and hostility
in the house of his God.
Book of Jubilees
According to the book of
Jubilees, Mastema "Hostility" is the chief of the
demons engendered by the
fallen Watchers/
Angels with women, perhaps one of those same demons.
His actions and name indicate he is
Satan, the 'Adversary', but much more the Satan who appears in the
book of Job with a function to fulfill under
God than the
Satan of later tradition who is the uttermost enemy of
God.
Beliar, mentioned twice in Jubilees, is likely to be identical with Mastema in this work.
When
God is ready to destroy all these demons after the
flood and
Noah prays that his descendants be released from their attacks, Mastema intervenes, beseeching
God to allow him to retain and control one tenth of these
demons in order to exercise his authority because they are "intended to corrupt and lead astray before my judgement because the evil of the sons of men is great". So Mastema is the tester of humans with
God's permission.
Mastema sends a plague of birds onto the land in the days of
Terah.
Later, Mastema counsels
God to test
Abraham (Jubilees 17:15-16) just as
Satan in the book of Job wants permission to test
Job. As Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son
Isaac, Mastema stands in
God's presence. On his deathbed Isaac promises that the spirits of Mastema will have no power to turn
Jacob or his descendants away from
Yahweh.
The strange account in
Exodus 4.24 where
Yahweh meets
Moses by the way and tries to kill him is retold in a way that attributes the attack to Mastema instead (Jubilees 48:1-3). It is claimed that Mastema aided the
Egyptian priests that opposed Moses. Mastema is also said to have been chained while the
Israelites left Egypt but then let go to encourage the Egyptians to chase after the Israelites and so come to their doom in the
Red Sea.
On the other hand, the deaths of the firstborn of the Egyptians are attributed to "all the powers of Mastema".
it:Mastema
ja:?????
pl:Mastema