A Genealogy of Satan, Part 1: Contemporary Belief and the Hebrew Bible

 

Gustave Dore's illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost

The most recent Gallop Poll on the subject (2016) finds that 61% of American adults believe in the devil, with 12% "not sure." It's unnerving to suppose that some three out of four people on the street live under the threat of a malevolent angel. 

           Some of them may have answered yes with something less concrete in mind. I recall years ago when an Eastern Orthodox layman explained universal salvation, Satan's soul being the last to go to Heaven. I asked him if he believed in Satan. His answer was that, when a coven of Satan worshippers invoke him in a cemetery, evil is certainly present. I took this as a no in yes's clothing. Maybe some respondents to the Gallop Poll answered yes in this same equivocal sense.

My own fascination with the devil goes back to when I read Faust stories as a teenager--Goethe's and Marlowe's plays--and listened to Gounod's opera, but I always understood them as allegories about pride and losing one's moral compass, not about literal demons. I played a demon in video comic series I wrote a few years back, a comic mashup of the Faust legend and A Christmas Carol (https://youtu.be/I4N1_JxrYtE). Selling one's soul seems a good analogy for consumerism, the delusion that material goods bring happiness. Then there's my bluegrass song, "Mention My Soul to the Devil," discussed elsewhere (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/06/death-wish-in-dixie-afterlife-in-shape_15.html). Here is a sample stanza:

I sure do hope to see you up in heaven.

My soul means a whole lot to me.

But I’d give a lot for a Jagermeister shot

And a big HD TV.

I should have been prepared for the Gallop Poll results after an old country fellow I sang this to was horrified and asked sternly if I went to church. He'd apparently never heard of the Faust or, if he had, took it for a real-life possibility, dangerous to joke about. Because he was an uneducated Southerner in his seventies, I understood him to be an exception. Apparently not.

Unlike other signs of religiosity (or superstition, if you prefer), belief in the devil among Americans isn't correlated with age (and only mildly with education) and it has increased, not diminished, in recent decades. Gallup shows the percentage of people who don't believe in the Devil dropped from 37% in 1990 to 21% in 2007, with 78% at least open to his existence, a rate that only had slightly declined by 2017. During these decades, church attendance and belief in God declined, so this isn't about religiosity, but must be something else in popular culture. 

I used to associate Satan-belief with primitive minds, as if it should have diminished over time, that doesn't seem to be case. Satan is absent from the Book of Genesis and not yet the Devil in the older parts of the Bible. The talking snake is just a snake, and the Satans later in the Hebrew Bible are either common nouns or (as in The Book of Job) designate loyal servants of God. Milton's Satan, the rebellious angel, ruler of Hell, and prince of darkness is a Zoroastrian figure cobbled together over centuries and only emerging clearly about the time of Jesus.

The snake in the Garden of Eden is just that, a snake (nahas), the same term used for the bronze serpent that Moses raises on a pole in the wilderness (Numbers 21:9), the one that Hezekiah had removed from the temple sanctuary (2 Kings 18:4). The Eden story is a bundle of etiological motifs, tales to explain, among other things, why animals no longer talk and snakes have no legs but slither on their bellies even though they are clever at avoiding unwanted attention, "more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord had made" (Genesis 3:1).

           The talking reptile is far removed from any human form. It isn't an angel, of which there are many in Genesis. It is an obvious symbol of power and cleverness but tells Eve no more than her own imagination might. Milton's Paradise Lost is a great story, one I've read repeatedly, but no supernatural visitant from Hell is needed to attract people to forbidden fruit. An ordinary talking snake will serve, and Jewish tradition holds that all of the animals could talk in Eden (Jubilees 3:28). Gustave Dore's illustration of Lucifer, the anti-heroic fallen angel in Paradise Lost contemplating a snake, presumably preparatory to slipping inside its skin (a ridiculously snug fit) illustrates what a reach it was for later commentators to identify the snake with Satan.

Satan is a common noun in Hebrew referring to any "accuser" or "adversary" and functions in the Old Testament as God's district attorney. The word appears in The Book of Job and Zachariah with a definite article (ha-satan 'the Accuser')--still not a name but name-like, like the President as opposed to president. The Lord in both of these stories is not yet the omniscient or omnipresent. At this point in theological history, he is a creator, but he gathers information from spies and must test his creatures to know if they are loyal, unsure how they will perform. He lives within time, not in timeless eternity, sending angels out to enforce verbal orders.

If the God of these stories is all-powerful, he is so only in the sense that governments are totalitarian. The all-power is potential, not actual. A totalitarian dictator may be able to send out spies and arrest anyone at will, but, if he tried, for instance, to allow only strawberry ice cream on even-numbered days, chocolate on odd-numbered--or, more ridiculously, to personally pre-approve every dessert in the nation--he would reach a limit to his powers. And dessert-eating is a minuscule fraction of the "total" national activities . So totalitarian does not mean total control. Similarly, the all-powerful God of Old Testament stories is clearly not Calvin's predestinater who foreordains every detail from the beginning of time, but is more like the dictator of a totalitarian nation, a force not to be thwarted when he puts his mind to some detail. The God of Abraham does not simultaneously or eternally know everything, but has telescopic vision or efficient spies (Genesis 18) and tests his subjects with cruelty that would be pointless if he were omniscient.

The God of the Old Testament is, however, all-powerful with respect to his angels. There is no such thing as a competing evil angel, a Prince of Darkness. Ha-satan is one of God's loyal servants, gathering with his "sons." The term for the group Satan gathers with is often translated "angels," but is literally "sons of God" (Job 1:6). In the conversation that leads to Job's suffering, God speaks first, and the Accuser (ha-satan) is always a loyal functionary, an officer of the all-powerful. Though Job is ultimately acquitted, Satan resembles a prosecuting attorney in a court, not an enemy of the judge but an agent of justice, even if the accused may resent him.

Similarly, Zechariah 3:1-5, the other occurrence of Satan as a proper noun, presents a judicial proceeding. Joshua is standing in the temple in dirty clothes, having been implicitly rebuked by the Accuser. An angel (malakh or 'messenger') of Yahweh, speaking in his name, rebukes the Accuser and orders that Joshua be given clean clothes. Christian commentators overlay this with the New Testament conception of Satan as an evil spirit, but the text itself chimes with ha-satan in Job, a dutiful prosecutor at the conclusion of a trial. There's no suggestion that he resists Yahweh's orders. He is not evil in the sense of opposing God.

Then there's the strange story of Balaam's Ass. An angel of the Lord blocks a path to prevent the prophet from going where he has been forbidden to go, but the angel visible only to the Balaam's donkey, which turns repeatedly off the path. When the prophet reproaches the donkey, it suddenly defends itself in complete Hebrew sentences. The angel, a blameless messenger of Yahweh, is called a satan in Hebrew, presumably because he is opposing Balaam, but English translations bury the term by calling the angel is an adversary.

The other satans in the Hebrew Bible are similar. In 2 Samuel 24, an angel of the Lord incites David to take an ill-fated census, but, when the same story is repeated in 1 Chronicles 21:1, the narrator blames satan. Thus God himself is Satan when he misleads human beings, which he does regularly. Recall how he repeatedly "hardens" the heart of the Pharaoh in the story of the plagues of Egypt, with disastrous consequences. Not the term satan, but the function, appears in 1 King's 22:19-25 when God calls for a volunteer among the angels, a "deceiving spirit" to mislead King Ahab. An unnamed angel finally volunteers, and God gives a personal guarantee that the deception will work. There is no rebellion here, but execution of God's orders,

Consistently in the Hebrew bible, a satan is a faithful agent of the Lord, a force for good if God is good. The term appears when God's will opposes to human interests or results in unpleasantness. Satan may be feared or disliked by human beings, but he isn't the source of error or suffering. God himself is. Yahweh is all-powerful and everything is in accordance with his will:

I form the light and create darkness,

     I bring prosperity and create disaster. (Isaiah 41:7)

Jewish thought underwent a transformation after the Babylonian Captivity. After 597 BCE, the most influential Jews, about a quarter of the population of Judea, were exiled to Babylon, and Jerusalem was destroyed. Traditional religious thought was challenged, both by foreign influence and by the realization that Yahweh, as an all-powerful friend of his chosen people, had failed. He was re-conceptualized within a larger context. In the Captivity, the Jews were exposed to the city's patron god Marduk and the creation myth we can still read in the Enuma Elish, where Marduk kills a destructive primal mother, a monstrous figure of chaos.

Cyrus the Great, whose Persian conquest of Babylon ended Jewish captivity and earned him the title of Messiah (Isaiah 45:1), introduced Zoroastrianism, a religion that saw life as a battle between the light and darkness, two competing gods. The god of goodness and light needed human beings to fight on his side against Ahriman, the author of evil, the bringer of darkness and disaster. John R. Hinnels' description of Ahriman in his Persian Mythology (1997) reads as if it could have been written about the Devil by Cotton Mather in Puritan New England:

"He is the demons of demons and dwells in an abyss of endless darkness in the north, the traditional home of the demons. Ignorance, harmfulness, and disorder are the characteristics of Ahriman. He can change his outward form and appear as a lizard, a snake, or a youth. His aim is always to destroy the creation of Ahura Mazda, and to this end he follows behind the creator's work, seeking to spoil it. As Ahura Mazda creates life, Ahriman creates death; for health, he creates disease; for beauty, ugliness. All man's ills are due entirely to Ahriman" (p. 52).