The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

No. I am not lawyering for the devil. I’m not even sure there is such a thing as the devil, as you already know if you read “If there is a God…” on this  site. Neither were the Jews. So where did Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, the Evil One, the Prince of Darkness, etc., come from?

Sit down, grasshopper. This may be a tough lesson.

According to biblical scholars such as Lucas Sweeney, there really wasn’t any “devil” in Jewish tradition, and therefore in the old testament, until the Persian period, from 300-500 years before the birth of Christ. Woops. What? Then where did all that evil come from? And what about the snake in Paradise? Truth is, God was believed to be in charge of everything up until that time, the cause of all good and all evil.

Consider Isaiah 45:7, in which God says: “I form light, and create darkness, I make weal and create woe: I the Lord do all these things.” Or according to Youngs: “Forming light, and preparing darkness, Making peace, and preparing evil, I [am] Jehovah, doing all these things.” That makes it pretty clear, except to an ambitious public defender, who would argue “No, God doesn’t do evil; he just prepares it.” But it still presented a problem. Why would a god who created the world and all of its creatures, who gave Adam and Eve Paradise, who was responsible for countless good acts, also be responsible for all the evil in the world? Remember, God described Himself as a loving and forgiving God, slow to anger and quick to show mercy. But how could God be good and loving and evil and hateful all at once? Was a puzzlement.

Enter Zoroaster, a Persian religious philosopher who lived about 600 years before the birth of Christ, and the concept of Dualism, which is belief in the existence of two supreme opposed powers (gods), or sets of divine or demonic beings, that caused the world to exist. One good, one bad, don’t you see. This concept put the uncomfortable Jewish minds at ease – God does all the good stuff; that other Being does all the bad stuff. Yay! And over time, the name that came to be most associated with “that other Being” was “Satan.”

True, the word “satan” was used with some frequency in the old testament, but it had a much different meaning – that of “adversary,” “obstacle,” or “opponent.” David himself is called by that term at least twice in the book of Samuel, but the word never has the meaning of “an immortal evil being.”

In many translations, however, “Satan” is blamed for everything from tricking Adam and Eve to tempting Christ, thousands (or maybe billions) of years later. In Job 1:6, for example: “One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them” (New International Version). But Young’s translation reads: “And the day is, that sons of God come in to station themselves by Jehovah, and there doth come also the Adversary in their midst to station himself by Jehovah.”

Is this a distinction without a difference? Not really. If you accept that the bible is the word of God, then you must believe that God is the cause of both good and evil, happiness and suffering, life and death, as He said He was. And Satan, by whatever name you want to call him/her, is nothing more than an “adversary,” or, as in the story of Balaam and the Angel in Numbers 22:22, a being of some kind who only acts as a messenger or servant of God. This latter definition might shed some light on the story of Job, in which “Satan,” or the “adversary” is sent by God to wreak havoc on Job and his family. As a test, of course. This all-knowing being seems to be always testing his creatures to make sure they love him and only him. Which a modern psychiatrist might suggest stems from an insecurity complex. Or narcissism. But that’s stuff for another article.