A Genealogy of Satan, Part 2: The Leviathan and the Morning Star

 In the Hebrew Bible, God is the author of of human suffering. He promises to bless his people if they obey him, but, if they disobey, he will send "fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses" (Deuteronomy 28:59). Evil in the sense of human suffering, even if disproportionate and personally undeserved, is not the Devil's work, but the Lord's. God takes full credit. Suffering is punishment for disobedience either by the sufferers or by their ancestors--tribal suffering for tribal guilt, even down to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 34:7). 

In a modern law court, this would be shamefully unjust. It may describe the way economic advantages transmit through families, but it is no excuse for deliberately hurting the innocent. Human justice is violated when God kills the first son of David and Bathsheba to punish their adultery and then blesses their second son, Solomon, and allows the three to prosper. How is it just to punish the perfectly innocent? And just look around. It's impossible to rationalize all the sufferings in the world into a comprehensible pattern of justice.

The Leviathan in Job

The Book of Job questions the concept of suffering as divine punishment argued by his three "comforters." Because Job is suffering greatly, they reason that he must have sinned greatly and should beg forgiveness. Job precedes by many centuries the doctrine of Original Sin, so his great sin would entail great or habitual violations of the laws of Moses, deliberate acts that Job would surely remember. Job is blameless, and he knows it. He refuses either to lie in the interests of theological correctness or to curse God. He simply can't make sense of the situation and questions why is is happening. To this question, Yahweh finally answers from a whirlwind,

"Would you impugn My justice?

     Would you condemn Me that you may be right?

Have you an arm like God’s?

     Can you thunder with a voice like His?" (Job 40: 8-9, Tanakh).

Yahweh says, in effect, "It's none of your business. I'm the boss, not you." Good and evil are the Lord's confidential affair. "Accept your moral ignorance and carry on." Job does and prospers.

For a full chapter, Yahweh boasts about dominating the Leviathan, a water monster combining traits of a whale, an oversized crocodile, and a fire-breathing dragon. The point of Job 41 is that nobody else can touch the Leviathan, but Yahweh can hook it like a fish and leash it as a pet. Sea monsters, figures of primal chaos killed by hero-gods, are staples of mythology. Yahweh's easy mastery of the Leviathan alludes to battles between neighbor pagan gods and their own sea monsters. The Canaanite Baal defeats of Yamm, and the Babylonian Marduk kills Tiamat. Killing water monsters defines both gods as supreme in difficult struggles between order and chaos, but for Yahweh the Leviathan is easy.

The Leviathan Becomes Satan       

Marduk fights a monster.

Throughout the Jewish Bible, Yahweh remains all-powerful, but the Jews may have absorbed the idea of a semi-divine force of evil in Babylon during their fifty-year captivity. In any case, there are so many similarities between Genesis and the Babylonian Enuma Elish that George Smith called his 1876 translation The Chaldean Account of Genesis. Marduk, chief Babylonian god establishes his supremacy by defeating Tiamat, the oceanic mother of the gods, who tries to destroy her offspring. Only Marduk is god enough to meet her (two others flee in terror). Riding a whirlwind like Yahweh in Job, Marduk is a storm god. When Tiamat tries the motherly trick of swallowing Marduk, reabsorbing him into her womb, he blows her up like a balloon and shoots an arrow through her mouth. Tiamat's corpse, opened up like clamshell, becomes the earth and sky--the waters above and below in Genesis 1:7 (Sandars, pp. 90-91).
          Baal, the Chaldean god who opposes Yahweh in much of the Old Testament, is also a storm god and achieves supremacy by killing the god of the sea, this time a male. Baal, like Marduk (and Zeus), is a later-generation god, the grandson of El, the Chaldean sky god whose name is translated "God" in English Bibles and is Allah in Arabic. The chaotic sea-god Yamm demands that the gods surrender Baal, and they agree. But Baal fights instead. As god of storms, the patron of prosperity, Baal flies against the Sea in a scene that might climax a Marvel blockbuster, knocking out Yamm with a flying war-club.

Hail, Baal the Conquerer!

Hail, the Rider of the Clouds.

Prince Sea is our captive. (Coogan and Smith, p. 115).

A sea monster is such an apt symbol for an enemy of the good life that commentators patching together the later image of the Devil identified Leviathan with Satan, but nothing in the text supports this. The Leviathan is a gigantic animal. 

The Morning Star Becomes Satan

        Another name attributed to Satan, Lucifer, comes from Isaiah's use of another Chaldean story to satirize the Babylonian king. In Isaiah 14, the prophet promises an end to the Babylonian captivity with scornful verses to be sung over the Babylonian king when he falls. Starting with verse twelve, Isaiah's poem alludes to a Canaanite myth that is preserved on cuneiform tablets in the epic of Baal (Coogan and Smith, pp. 97-153). 

In the Canaanite myth, Baal is a dying-and-resurrected god who has been captured by death but not yet resurrected. Athar, a minor god who personifies the planet Venus attempts to occupy Baal's throne on Mount Zaphon but is not man enough:

He sat on Baal the Conqueror's throne.

His feet did not reach the footstool.

His head did not reach the headrest.

And Athar the Awesome spoke:

"I can't be king on the heights of Zaphon.

Athar the Awesome descended

Descended from the throne of Baal the Conqueror,

And he became king of the earth" (Coogan and Smith, p.146).

Mount Zaphon

This is an astronomical allegory. Venus is the last and brightest "star" in the east before being overcome by the rising sun. Isaiah mocks the Babylonian king as "O Shining One, Son of Dawn" who is "felled to the earth." Like Athar, the Babylonian king aspired to sit "on the summit of Zaphon" and to "mount the back of a cloud," imitating the storm god Baal (Isaiah 14:12-15, Tanakh). Isaiah mocks Nabonidus with a hyperbolic allusion to pagan myth, as the reference to Venus and to Mount Zaphon make clear.

By reading this political satire as cosmic allegory, later commentators imagined a rebellious angel's fall from Heaven. By Jesus' time, the fall of the Satan-Venus figure had become associated with the story of the lustful "sons of god" who sired a race of evil giants on human women in Genesis 6:1-4, explicitly in non-canonical scriptures such as the Book of Jubilees (c. 150 BCE). This story is alluded to repeatedly in the New Testament. So Satan became known as Lucifer (Latin 'Light-bearer') from the name for Venus in the Vulgate Bible, the story of Athar as Baal's would-be usurper echoing down the centuries, folded into the figure of Satan.

A Composite Anti-God

Originally separate figures coalesced around the idea of God's not-quite-coequal adversary: the prosecutor in Job, the Leviathan, the snake in Eden, and the Morning Star. Around the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews came to imagine an apotheosis of evil--a Devil assisted by legions of fallen angels who impersonated gods. With this transformation, Baal became, not just a lump of stone worshipped by false priests, but the demon Beelzebub.

References

Coogan, Michael D., and Mark S. Smith. Stories from Ancient Canaan. 2nd ed. Westminster John Knox, 2012.

Sandars, N. K. Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. Penguin, 1971.

Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: A New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Jewish Publication Society, 1985.