Satan

The word satan appears first in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as a common noun for someone or something that obstructs one's way. In the Book of Job, it is given as a name for the fierce angel who persuades God to test Job. The figure of Satan as a powerful force of evil bent on destruction derives from the combination of two ideas: the banim (“sons of the Lord”), who were the wicked “watcher angels” of Genesis 6, and malakim (“powers”) who were agents of the Lord—or manifestations of the Lord—in his relationship with humans. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek about 200 BCE, satan was translated as diabolos (from which the term Devil is derived), meaning “adversary.” The concept of a Devil, vague and marginal in the Old Testament, became much more vivid and terrifying in the period from 100 BCE to 150 CE, when many writings that were accepted neither by Jewish nor by Christian authorities nonetheless circulated widely. These works, known as pseudepigrapha (materials falsely claimed to have been written by ancient biblical figures such as Enoch) made the Devil a single spirit of evil whose function is to oppose the will of the good God by perverting humans. In these writings, the Devil appears under many different names, such as Mastema, Beelzeboul, Azazel, Satan, and others. The social condition for the rise of the concept of a single, huge power of evil was the fearsome oppression of the Jews under Syrian and Roman rule in that period. There may also have been mutual influence between Jewish and Zoroastrian thought, which posited the existence of two separate gods, one of good and the other of evil.

This period is when Christianity arose, and the power attributed to Satan in the New Testament made him the source of all opposition and threat to Christ, to the Christian community, and to Christian individuals. He is tempter, accuser, tormentor, and jailer of the damned in hell. In addition to the canonical Christian writings, a number of allegedly Christian but actually Gnostic texts, mainly from about 150 to 300 CE, presented the cosmos as a battleground between the God of spirit on the one hand and the Devil, lord of matter, on the other. Thus, the Gnostics created a matter/spirit dichotomy, which they melded with the Zoroastrian good spirit/evil spirit dichotomy. Such a dichotomy was explicitly and firmly denied by orthodox Christianity, in which the Devil's power, though great and fearful, was always weaker than that of Christ. Anyone calling on Christ against the Devil would be saved, and at the end of the world, Christ would cast Satan and his fellow demons forever into hell. Belief in the existence of a Devil as the personification of evil has never been a necessary Christian dogma, but tradition, based on the New Testament, assumed his reality.

The Muslim Qur'an, believed to have been dictated word by word by an angel of God to Muhammad, affirmed the existence of Satan (Iblis or Shaytan). However, Islam differs from Judaism and Christianity in that the will of Allah prevails in every place throughout all time. This means that opposition to Allah either by humans or by spirits was limited entirely to what God wills to allow. As opposed to monotheism and Zoroastrian dualism, most religions recognize no single spirit of evil.

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