Are there any exorcisms in the Old Testament?
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Are there any exorcisms in the Old Testament?
There seem to be at least two allusions to exorcisms in the Old Testament.
The first allusion to exorcism appears in the Bible, in the youth narratives of David (1 Samuel). But while the biblical David seemed to be able to effect a temporary expulsion of Saul’s evil spirit using music, the book of Tobit contains the first explicit description of an (informal) exorcism. Josephus recounts incidents of possession and exorcism in his Antiquities of the Jews (2, 5, 8, 45-48). In his description, exorcism involved burning herbs and immersing the possessed person in water. The New Testament also reports Jesus to have performed numerous exorcisms of demonic spirits in first-century Palestine (Matthew 12; Mark 5, 6, 13; Luke 8).
The Dead Sea Scrolls include several exorcism incantations and formulae, mostly directed against disease-causing demons. The DSS Psalms collection in particular (11Q5) has “four songs for the charming of demons with music.” People who fell under the influence of false prophets and mediums were thought to also require the exorcism of possessing evil spirits (the false prophets and mediums themselves were subject to death, a sure cure for most possessions; see Zechariah 13). - Jewish Exorcism
Although the Book of Tobit is not in the Protestant Bible, it is recognized as canonical in both the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.
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The word "exorcism" is not used in the OT, but something close to it is described in David's driving away the evil spirit that God had sent to King Saul.
Whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him. (1 Sam. 16:23)
Also, in the Book of Tobit (OT Apocrypha) the angel Raphael instructs Tobit's son Tobias in a special technique to perform an exorcism to liberate Tobias' bride Sarah from a powerful demon, Ashmodai, who had killed her previous seven husbands:
Tobias remembered the words of Raphael, and he took the fish’s liver and heart out of the bag where he had them and put them on the embers of the incense. The odor of the fish so repelled the demon that he fled to the remotest parts of Egypt. (Tobit 8:2-3)
These are the only two known cases in the OT and its Apocrypha in which an exorcism is described.
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