beliyya'al

This word is almost never used on its own. It normally sits as the second half of a set phrase that turns it into a label for a person: a son of it, a daughter of it, a man of it. Calling someone that is not a mild insult. It writes a person off entirely, as no use to anyone and dangerous besides.

The people so labeled are a mixed crowd, and what binds them together is not one particular vice but the damage they do to whatever holds a community together:

• townsmen who talk a whole city into abandoning its God
• the mob at Gibeah that demands to rape a guest
• priests who treat the offerings and the worshippers with contempt
• men who refuse to accept the newly chosen king
• two hired witnesses whose lies get an innocent man killed

Worship, sex, kingship, and the courts: each story shows a different part of the shared order being torn, and in most of them the people so named do not survive the story.

The same word can attach to a thought rather than a person. A ruinous idea entertained in the heart, or a ruinous thing set before the eyes, is described with it too, which shows that the word names a quality and not a class of people.

Two neighboring words help fix the shade. The ordinary word for a wicked person (רָשָׁע) says that someone is guilty, in the wrong before God or a court. The word for a fool (נָבָל) says that someone is morally senseless. This word says something different again: that a person is beyond use and beyond trust, the kind whose presence wrecks whatever it touches.

In a few poetic lines the word does something it never does in the stories. It stops describing people and starts describing what kills them. In one song of rescue it sits in a stack of parallel phrases alongside the cords of death, the cords of the grave, and the snares of death, and the picture is of a drowning man: the torrents of this word sweep over him and he cries out for help.

That is why so much scholarship argues the word began life in the vocabulary of death rather than of morals. On that reading it once named the underworld, the place from which nobody comes back, or the mouth that swallows the living, and only later hardened into an insult. Others answer that the grave in the Hebrew Bible is not reserved for the wicked, so these poems may simply be stretching the ordinary word for ruinous wickedness to name a deadly flood. The argument is unresolved.

Whichever way it began, this poetic use is the bridge to what came next. In Jewish writings from the last centuries before the New Testament, and once in Paul, the word is no longer a quality at all but a name, spelled Beliar in Greek (Βελιάρ), for the chief of the powers of darkness.