The ‘Daemonium meridianum’ and Greek and Latin Patristic Exegesis

Abstract

The three decades preceding the publication of the new Latin translation of the Psalter by the Biblical Institute in Rome in 1945 have seen a number of studies and articles which throw revealing light on the interpretation of Psalm 90.6. Discussing the laws of purification and diet in the Old Testament, J. Döller thought it possible to discover in the Bible a few faint vestiges of a popular belief in demons among the Israelites and saw a plague demon especially in ‘the destruction that lays waste at noonday’ (Ps. 90.6b). Referring to Döller's study, S. Landersdorfer pointed to a parallel Assyrian belief which regarded midnight and noonday as periods especially dangerous and haunted by demonic agencies, and was inclined to assume even for the Masoretic text the idea of a demon of night (6a) and a demon of noonday (6b). Both demons were thought to exercise their power especially at the hours of the chilling midnight cold and the scorching noonday heat, and to be responsible for certain bodily disorders, such as sunstroke and malaria fever, and for other diseases caused by the rapid changes of temperature in the southern deserts. In this case the psalmist would already have alluded to a popular belief, though such an allusion would not necessarily imply that he himself shared the view, Landersdorfer's article had been written ten years prior to its publication, that is, in a period when, owing to the disturbances during and shortly after the First World War, access to foreign publications was difficult and often impossible. Thus he was apparently unaware that, only about a year before the completion of his article, W. H. Worrell had pointed out some similar parallels from oriental countries.