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According to the biblical picture, the heavenly realm is teeming with life. Many types of divine beings have long been recognized, such as the (...), the (...), and the (...). Just as these terms refer to divine beings characterized in specific and recognizable ways, there is another category of the divine population with its own identifying features and narrative function. Several meanings of the term (...) are familiar (wind, breath, spirit, inclination, and various overlaps),1 but there is also a category of divine being by this name, repeatedly characterized according to a particular role, once called the "spirit of falsehood." Although the spirit of falsehood ((...)) of Micaiah's throne vision in 1 Kings 22 is well known, the tradition generally remains unacknowledged in other texts and in scholarly pictures of divine society as a whole, from works on the divine council to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons.2
Biblical references to a (...) of falsehood outside of 1 Kings 22 have been read in the same light as the jealous spirit ((...)) of Num 5:14, for example, or the spirit of grace and supplication ((...)) in Zech 12:10. The (...) of 1 Kings 22, however, is the only specific spirit we see in the Hebrew Bible with individual identity and agency, with the clear exception of the spirit of Yhwh (which functions differently). Only in the case of the (...) of falsehood is it clear that we definitely have a tradition of a specific non- Yhwh spirit; the sole question is the extent of that tradition. The phrase (...) occurs in one text, but references to a (...) sent by God in order to bring destructive justice through deceit occur in several more.
A larger study of Near Eastern spirits would be intriguing, but for the present, a few notes on Mesopotamian demons and spirits should establish a general context for the (...). The Mesopotamian material, as we will see for the Israelite data, includes a range of ideas. There should be no contrived attempt to create a unified picture in either case or to draw a one-to-one correspondence between the two. In an overview of some basic points, however, certain similarities are evident.
Spirits in Mesopotamian literature are...