Satan

And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.

-- I Chronicles 21: 1 (KJV)

The Satan of the Hebrew Bible -- who appears briefly in Job, Zechariah, and Chronicles -- is not the "fallen angel" or "prince of Hell" we find in Christian tradition. Rather, he is in literal Hebrew an "adversary" in the Lord's service whose job is to provoke proud mortals to overplay their hands.

If the serpent who tempts Eve is really Satan, it never says so in Genesis. In fact, there is no "devil" at all in the Hebrew Bible, though we do meet a few threatening spirits and curious demi-gods, Azazel for example [see A Scapegoat].

What's more, it's possible that in this passage from Chronicles the Hebrew satan refers not to an entity but to David's own initiative, which turns out to have evil consequences. In an earlier rendition (II Samuel 24: 1), God himself "moved David" to take a census of Israel, which God, for some unstated reason, in fact resented. (The basic idea is that David was beginning to think too independently.) This paradox proved too much for the author of Chronicles, who thus ascribed the motivation to "Satan."

This substitution still didn't solve the problem, however; Satan, whether impulse or persona, was still the Lord's servant. Not until the second century B.C., at the earliest, did some Jews develop a dualistic conception of the universe, in which God is a source only of good, evil being an independent force. By the time of Jesus, the name "Satan" had come to designate the brains behind evil in the world; this Satan, who ruled over a kingdom of demons, was then also identified with the serpent of Genesis (see Revelation 12: 9).

Though Satan appears only three times in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah we meet another character called Lucifer, depicted as a "son of the morning" who has "fallen from heaven" (14: 12). Despite the fancies of such writers as John Milton, who in Paradise Lost (1667) identified Lucifer with Satan, in Isaiah "Lucifer" is merely a metaphor. The name comes from a Latin rendition of the Hebrew for "morning star" (Venus), which Isaiah compares to a Babylonian king who had been brought down by the Medes. Jesus does report in the Gospels that he "saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10: 18), but he, unlike later interpreters, never equated Satan with Isaiah's heavenly object.

 
Index  |  Next:  The Lord Gave, and the Lord Hath Taken Away

Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!