Satan is one of the most important figures in Christianity. He is believed to be real and personal, the embodiment of all the world’s evil and malice. And yet he hardly appears in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at all. In this blog post, I will trace Satan’s origins and show how and why he became central to the Christian religion.
The original meaning of the Hebrew word satan (שָּׂטָן) is adversary or obstacle, and it is with this meaning that the word first appears in the Bible, completely unconnected to any form of devil. [i]
ONE STORY, TWO VERSIONS
Satan is only used once in the Hebrew Bible as a proper noun, in 1 Chronicles 21, where Satan tempts King David to act in a way that arouses the wrath of God, causing him to send down a plague that kills 70,000 Israelites.
This is a retelling of a story that first appears in 2 Samuel 24. But in that earlier version, it is God, not Satan, who incites David to set out on the road to catastrophe.
Why the difference? Why is it God that incites David in 2 Samuel and Satan in 1 Chronicles? To answer that, we need to look at religious changes that occurred between the writing of the two texts.
HENOTHEISM AND MONOTHEISM
There is a general consensus among scholars that, before they became monotheistic, the ancient Israelites were henotheistic: they believed that there were many gods, but because they had a covenant with Yahweh, they should worship only him.[ii] Many passages in the Hebrew Bible were written during this henotheistic phase and some betray a belief in the existence of multiple gods.[iii]
Recent scholarship suggests that the development of true monotheism came much later than once thought. It only became a major force during and after the Babylonian Exile (c. 597-538 BCE).[iv]
THE IMPLICATIONS OF MONOTHEISM
A monotheistic God is very different from polytheistic gods. He came to be seen as a perfect being: all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good. Polytheistic gods, on the other hand, aren’t all-knowing or all-powerful, and they aren’t particularly good.[v] They can wander round a garden unable to find people who are hiding. And they can lose their temper, massacre those who anger them, regret their mistakes and even need a mortal to remind them not to make a fool of themselves. We see Yahweh do all these things in the Hebrew Bible.[vi]
Many scholars believe the oldest fully monotheistic text in the Bible is Isaiah Chapters 40-55, which was probably written during the Babylonian exile. In it, God says he is the source of everything: both good and evil come from him.[vii]
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Such pure monotheism is inherently unstable.[viii] If God is perfectly good, how can he permit (let alone be the source of) evil and suffering? Theologians call this the problem of evil.[ix]
One answer is to say that it is our fault. God uses evil and suffering to punish us for our sins.[x] This is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis 3 to the early prophets and the history of the Israelites that goes from Exodus to 2 Kings. Much of this (but by no means all) is the work of henotheists rather than monotheists.[xi]
But as their monotheism became more sophisticated, Jewish theologians realised that divine justice was not such a simple matter. Job and Ecclesiastes are two books that wrestle with the fact that righteous people often suffer terrible calamities while the wicked can live long, happy and prosperous lives. The Book of Job’s answer is that we cannot possibly hope to understand why God does what he does, while Ecclesiastes tells us we just have to keep faith and live with the apparent meaninglessness of life.
A less sophisticated argument, which may have entered Judaism via the influence of Greek culture,[xii] is that divine justice is very real, but it is meted out to us in the next life rather than in this.
Another option, which the Jews may have picked up from the Persians who ruled them for 200 years after liberating them from Babylon, is to give God an antagonist. In Persian Zoroastrianism, the cosmos is the scene of everlasting warfare between two gods representing good and evil: Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Light, and Ahriman, the Dark Lord.[xiii]
THE SATAN AND SATAN
The earliest books of the Bible in which “the satan” appears are Job and Zechariah, thought to have been written in the decades following the return from Babylon. In both books, “the satan” has not yet taken on the role of God’s antagonist. Instead, he is God’s rather unpleasant lackey, a prosecutor whose role it is to test the faith of Job and, in Zecharia, to present the case against accepting a newly-appointed high priest.[xiv]
The two books of Chronicles probably date from 70-120 years after Job and Zechariah, by which time monotheism was firmly established. In the story where Satan (with a capital S) leads David to disaster, we see a monotheistic retelling of a henotheistic story from 2 Samuel.
The author of Chronicles tells us nothing about Satan’s motives. Is he still doing God’s dirty work for him? Is he simply inserted into the story to put some distance between God and the decision to lead David astray? Or does he have his own agenda?[xv]
We just don’t know.
Most scholars believe it was in the 200-300 years before the birth of Jesus that Satan evolved into God’s antagonist as we know him today. He became a kind of cosmic scapegoat: everything good comes from God and everything evil from Satan.[xvi] One Christian theologian has summed up precisely why Satan is such a good answer to the problem of evil: “…if there were no Satan, it would be hard to resist the conclusion that God is a fiend both because of what he does, in nature, and because of what he allows, in human wickedness.”[xvii]
THREE ORIGIN STORIES
Jewish texts from this period have a variety of origin stories for Satan. Jubilees and 1 Enoch go back to a myth in Genesis 6 about the Watchers, angels who lusted after human women. One of the eventual consequences of their union was Satan and his army of demons.[xviii]
A second origin story is connected with the planet Venus. This is the brightest star but, (we now know) because it is between us and the sun, it never rises high in the night sky and sets soon after the sun. This has led to myths in various cultures about fallen gods or gods such as Phosphoros in Greek mythology, who tries and fails to rise above the other gods.[xix]
Isaiah 14:12-15 draws on just such a myth when it taunts the King of Babylon after his fall. The apocryphal book 2 Enoch (in some versions) writes of Satanael, leader of a group of angels who were cast down after turning their backs on the worship of God.[xx]
In the third century CE, Origen of Alexandria helped tie these myths together with references to fallen angels in Luke and Revelation, bringing us the story of an angel who leads a rebellion against God. Origen gave this angel the name Lucifer: the Latin name of the planet Venus.[xxi] (For Origen, this story was a spiritual analogy, not a literal depiction of something that had actually happened.)
A third origin story connected Satan with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. According to a Pharisee book called The Life of Adam and Eve, when God created Adam, he ordered the angels to bow to him because he had been created in the image of God. Satan refused to do so, and God banished him from heaven.
Satan got his revenge, however, by taking the form of a snake and tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. This is the first document we know of that linked Satan and the serpent. By the 2nd century CE, this connection had become standard Christian doctrine.[xxii]
CHRISTIANITY AND SATAN
Jesus grew up in a religious environment where Satan was very much seen as God’s adversary. In the gospels, he and his army of demons are Jesus’ main antagonists.[xxiii] For the author of Luke, Satan is the real ruler of the world, and Jesus is here to overthrow him. In both Luke and John, Jesus is engaged in a cosmic struggle against Satan, and those who obstruct him are doing Satan’s work.[xxiv]
You can see the same attitude in the Pauline epistles. For Paul, Satan is working through pagans, non-Christian Jews and his opponents within the church to thwart him.[xxv] Here we can see the roots of Christian intolerance. If you and your opponent have an honest disagreement, you can search for common ground or agree to differ. But if you are working for God and they are working for Satan, all compromise becomes impossible.[xxvi]
It is in the Book of Revelation that Satan really comes into his own. This supreme example of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic writing draws on 1 Enoch, Jubilees and Daniel to create a seminal horror story in which Satan appears as a beast, a seven-headed monster and a serpent, a malignant manifestation of all that is evil in the world.[xxvii]
OUR IDEA OF SATAN
Much of our image of Satan and Hell comes from Revelation, with a dash of Greek myth, including the horns of Pan. Dante’s Inferno drew on Aristotle and did much to shape Medieval ideas of Hell. For Dante, Hell has nine circles, each worse than the last, until the ninth layer, where we find Satan, emasculated and forlorn, eternally feeding off Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius.[xxviii]
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is a complex and in many ways heroic figure, a winged demon who learns to accept his banishment from Heaven and builds a kingdom for himself in Hell.[xxix] Goethe’s Faustus borrows from the legend of Satan’s temptation of Jesus to give us the story of a man who sells his soul to the Devil in return for material success here on earth.
More recent fiction has found inspiration in Satan for antagonists who represent the crystallisation of evil: Dracula in the 19th century and Sauron and his orcs in the 20th. Recent decades have given us Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Sauron and Lord Voldemort come from books consciously written to include Christian allegories.
Conspiracy theories also give us analogies of Satan: hidden hands behind all the evil in the world, from the Illuminati, Freemasons and Elders of Zion to the Bilderberg Group, shape-shifting lizards, woke cultural Marxists and elite paedophiles in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. No compromise is possible with these people because they are the embodiment of evil.
Perhaps the time has come for us to leave Satan behind.
_____________
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[i] Numbers 22:22, 32, 1 Samuel 29:4, 2 Samuel 19:22, 1 Kings 5:4, 1 Kings 11:14, 23, 25.
[ii] Both the Bible and archaeological evidence suggest that henotheists had little success in persuading the wider Israelite population to abandon the worship of other gods.
[iii] For example: Exodus 20:3, 12:12, 15:11; Numbers 33:4; Deuteronomy 4:19, 5:7, 6:14, 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint version); Joshua 24:15; Psalms 82:1, 82:6–7, 86:8, 95:3, 96:4 and 97:7.
[iv] This is the theme of Römer, Thomas: The Invention of God, Harvard University Press, 2015.
[v] For a discussion the monotheistic revolution and its implications, see Hayes, Christine, Introduction to the Bible (Kindle Edition), Yale University Press 2012, pp. 21-27.
[vi] See Genesis 3:8–9, Numbers 11:1, 1 Samuel 15:2–3, Genesis 6:6 and Exodus 32:7–14 respectively. There are many other examples!
[vii] Isaiah 45:7.
[viii] Wray, TJ & Mobley, Gregory: The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots (Kindle Edition), Palgrave MacMillan 2005, p. 166.
[ix] Hayes, Introduction to the Bible, pp. 400-402
[x] Hayes, op cit, pp. 158-159.
[xi] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, pp. 37-38.
[xii] Goodman, Martin: Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations, Allen Lane, 2007, pp. 254-257.
[xiii] Thomas Römer cautions that we don’t in fact know much about Persian Zoroastrian religion during this period and so can’t be certain that it influenced Judaism: Römer, The Invention of God, pp. 227-230.
[xiv] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, pp. 39, 59-65. Thomas Römer argues that the satan is in fact a later insert into the story of Job, put there to distance God from the tortures inflicted on him: Römer: The Invention of God, p. 290 n. 50.
[xv] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, pp. 65-67.
[xvi] Wray & Mobley: op cit, p. 176.
[xvii] Peter Green quoted in Gumbel, Nicky: Questions of Life: A Practical Introduction to the Christian Faith, Cook Ministry Resources, Colorado 1996, pp. 165-6.
[xviii] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, pp. 99-104.
[xix] See https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/gods/phosphorus/ (accessed 03/08/2025).
[xx] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, p. 109.
[xxi] See https://www.aletheiacollege.net/devil/1-2-3.htm (accessed 03/08/2025).
[xxii] Barton, John: A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, Penguin Random House, London 2020, pp. 227, 507 n. 19.
[xxiii] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, p. 113.
[xxiv] Wray & Mobley: op cit, pp. 116, 125-128.
[xxv] Wray & Mobley: op cit, p. 130.
[xxvi] Armstrong, Karen: A History of God, Vintage, London 1993, pp. 326-7; MacCulloch, Diarmaid: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Kindle Edition). Penguin Books 2010, pp. 160, 664.
[xxvii] Wray & Mobley: The Birth of Satan, pp. 136-148.
[xxviii] Wray & Mobley: op cit, pp. 154-157.
[xxix] Wray & Mobley: op cit, pp. 157-160.
Paul Clark 