A Genealogy of Satan, Part 3: From Moses to Monotheistic Dualism

 As I've discussed in previous sections, The God of the Old Testament was beyond good and evil. He included the Devil. Satan was his servant or one of his sons. Yahweh dictated moral law for people, but he was not bound by it. Richard Nixon is supposed to have said, "If the President does it, it's not against the law." This applies in spades to Yahweh.

         There can be no more unambiguous evil than the deliberate murder of  a child. I don't refer to abortion. A fetus doesn't engage guilt as unambiguously as a screaming three-year-old. It takes a special kind of monster to slaughter children, and yet that is what Yahweh commanded Joshua and his soldiers to do as they invaded Canaan, to massacre everyone in conquered towns solely because of their ethnicity. Maybe this should be no surprise. The Flood drowned every child but Noah's, and an angel slaughtered the firstborn of Egypt after God hardened the Pharaoh's heart to make this inevitable. This puts the God of Moses, in an elite club with Adolph Hitler. Jesus may love the little children, but Yahweh commands mass infanticide. When Job questions this kind of justice, God answers from a Whirlwind, a storm of wholesale destruction, "Don't ask." The Lord does what the Lord does. His name, as he announces from the burning bush, is "I Am" (Exodus 3:14). He is What Is. Men do evil, but moral categories don't apply to God's activities even when they seem downright satanic.

God's immunity to all human judgement, his satanic nature (in human terms), seems to be the point of the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19). It's hard to imagine a more categorically evil act than stabbing your own son to death so you can to burn his body, and this is what Abraham conspires to do. Because of his preparations--gathering wood, going to Mount Moriah, and binding Isaac on the altar--he is as guilty as if he had committed the crime. His intention is clear. But, of course, he was acting on God's command. It wasn't his idea. Setting aside the fact that God's command is a voice that only Abraham hears, a possible hallucination, and accepting it as the edict of the Most High, what kind of God do we have here? In human terms, an evil one. 

Commentators praise Abraham's obedience, but what if he had been obeying a human king? It would be evil enough for a human king to threaten to stab Abraham's son and burn the body in front of him for no reason but his royal pleasure, but to pressure the father perform the horror himself and to be apparently pleased by his submission, how evil is that? Of course, the murder is interrupted, but fake executions are a recognized form of torture, undeniably cruel, especially fake executions of innocent loved ones. The action of Yahweh in the Binding of Isaac is humanly indefensible, an act of divine bravado to prove that Yahweh (like Nixon in his dreams) is above his own moral law. As a consequence, Abraham's God requires no semi-independent Satan. If there is nastiness to be done, if the good must suffer, Yahweh can inflict the suffering himself or order it done by his heavenly hosts. His is the only power for good or ill.

A term for this is monism, the idea that one thing is behind all that exists. The roots of Hebrew religion are obscure. Perhaps there are traces in the scriptures of a time when Yahweh was a tribal war or storm god like Baal and Marduk, even when he had a wife, but by the time the Pentateuch was collected, he had become the all-powerful creator. He stood alone. He wasn't just a jealous god, the only kosher deity in Judea. He was the God, the only real one. All the competition were fakes, idols of clay, wood, or stone. Monotheism, belief in a single creator, implies monism, a unified cosmos expressing his will. If everything isn't exactly as he willed it, that implies another power in the world--a lesser power maybe but still godlike--an Other strong enough to resist him. The term for this is dualism, whether the God-limiting power is an anti-God, delegated free will, or merely stubborn matter.

Monotheism is a balancing act between monism and dualism. Some Christian thinkers, such as George Berkeley (1685-1753), slipped into pantheism by seeing even our sense of a physical world as God's pure stream-of-consciousness, God's thoughts overflowing into time (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/04/pantheism.html). God and nature are one. Others ascribe so much power to the Devil that the cosmos is the Devil's kingdom--at least until some end time--ruled by demonic "principalities and powers." Paul even calls Satan "the god of this world" (or "of this age," 2 Corinthians 4:4), and he has a point in our own age. Certainly, if Berkeley is right and everything we see in the world is the thought of God, he has a dirty mind. 

Between the Babylonian Captivity and the first century BCE, Jewish writers became uncomfortable with the monist Yahweh as the source of evil in the world and offloaded the more obnoxious events--temptations, dirty tricks, disasters, and tests attributed to God in early scripture--onto fallen angels, semi-independent bad guys who frustrated God's good intentions. This styled God as a benign superman, an all-Good one, but weaker than the early morally mixed deity. He was Superman in a world that, even though he created it, inexplicably contained Kryptonite. His omnipotence is compromised in a primal war between good and evil.

It's unclear what caused the Jews to become discontented with the self-justified God--a deity who, asked what his name was (to account for himself), answered (like Popeye), "I am what I am" (Exodus 3:14). In Babylon during the captivity, the Jews surely heard about Tiamat, a chaotic water goddess killed by Marduk, the king of heaven, who created the world by splitting her body in half--a story paralleling Genesis 1 where Elohim divides waters above and below. Marduk's world is less a creation than a spoil of victory. Jews were exposed to the idea of cosmic moral struggle, to triumphant gods who fought cataclysmic battles with evil, unlike the Hebrew God, who treated monsters like the Leviathan as pets to be led around on a leash (Job 41:5). 

When the Persians conquered Babylon and freed the Jews, they certainly heard of Zoroastrianism, a dualistic theism that understood the world as a battleground between light and darkness. Zoroaster's God (with his aides) is ultimately dominant and the final judge of souls, but he is successfully resisted for thousands of years by an evil god leading demon armies, an idea completely absent from early Judaism. Cyrus the Great, the Zoroastrian conqueror of Babylon, allowed his vassal states, including Judea, religious freedom and was so admired by them that the second Isaiah called him a messiah (Isaiah 45:1). Many details of later Judaism and Christianity, including the Last Judgement, are carbon copies of Zoroastrian teachings.

Finally, there was Platonic philosophy that saw God as absolute good--the ultimately orthodox idea that evil is simply distance from the Good  or ignorance of it (the metaphor varies). God is pure light, below which the world is a dark illusion that human beings are called to liberate themselves from. This laid the groundwork the theory of evil in classical Christian theology--that Evil is merely the absence of God's pure Good, not something that exists, but the absence of existence. Evil is no more a real thing than a shadow is. This explains a dark side of experience without compromising God as absolute light and guarantees that, despite temporary appearances, Good will inevitably triumph. 

        These three ideologies--heroic creation myths, Zoroastrianism, and Neoplatonism--may have transformed the morally ambiguous Yahweh of Moses into the post-Captivity God and stimulated belief in a semi-independent Prince of Darkness, a belief prominent in later Jewish texts and the New Testament..