Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Belial" in Simple English language version.
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In late biblical times beliya'al came to designate a mythic personification of evil, and Belial thus became the name of a satanic figure... Two considerations militate against this sort of reading, one historical and the other grammatical. First, the mythic personification of Belial appears to have been a rather late development, and there is no good reason to suppose that beliya'al had assumed this meaning by the time Nahum was composed. There is no evidence of a satanic figure named Belial in biblical or extrabiblical literature from earlier than the third century BC (T. J. Lewis, "Belial," ABD 1 :655–56), and most scholars would date the final edition of ..
