The Origin of Satan (10 page)

Neil Forsyth says of the
satan
, “If the path is bad, an obstruction

is good.”9 Thus the
satan
may simply have been sent by the Lord

to protect a person from worse harm. The story of Balaam in the

biblical book of Numbers, for example, tells of a man who

decided to go where God had ordered him not to go. Balaam

saddled his ass and set off, “but God's anger was kindled because

he went; and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as

his
satan
” [
le-satan-lo
]—that is, as his adversary, or his

obstructor. This supernatural messenger remained invisible to

Balaam, but the ass saw him and stopped in her tracks:

And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road,

with a drawn sword in his hand; and the ass turned aside out of

the road, and went into the field; and Balaam struck the ass, to

turn her onto the road. Then the angel of the Lord stood in a

narrow path between the vineyards, with a wall on each side.

And when the ass saw the angel of the Lord, she pushed

against the wall, so he struck her again (22:23-25).

The third time the ass saw the obstructing angel, she stopped

and lay down under Balaam, “and Balaam’s anger was kindled,

and he struck the ass with his staff.” Then, the story continues,

the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said to Balaam,

“What have I done to you, that you have struck me three

times?” And Balaam said to the ass, “Because you have made a

fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would

kill you.” And the ass said to Balaam, “Am I not your ass, that

you have ridden all your life to this very day? Did I ever do

such things to you?” And he said, “No” (22:28-30).

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 41

Then “the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the

angel of the Lord standing in the way, with his drawn sword in

his hand, and he bowed his head, and fell on his face.” Then the

satan
rebukes Balaam, and speaks for his master, the Lord:

“Why have vou struck vour ass three times? Behold, I came

here to oppose you, because your way is evil in my eyes; and

the ass saw me. . . . If she had not turned away from me, I

would surely have killed you right then, and let her live”

(22:31-33).

Chastened by this terrifying vision, Balaam agrees to do what

God, speaking through his
satan
, commands.

The book of Job, too, describes the
satan
as a supernatural

messenger, a member of God's royal court.10 But while Balaam's

satan
protects him from harm, Job's
satan
takes a more

adversarial role. Here the Lord himself admits that the
satan

incited him to act
against
Job (2:3). The story begins when the

satan appears as an angel, a “son of God” (
ben ‘elohim
), a term

that, in Hebrew idiom, often means “one of the divine beings.”

Here this angel, the
satan
, comes with the rest of the heavenly

host on the day appointed for them to “present themselves

before the Lord.” When the Lord asks whence he comes, the

satan
answers, “From roaming on the earth, and walking up and

down on it." Here the storyteller plays on the similarity between

the sound of the Hebrew satan and shut, the Hebrew word "to

roam," suggesting that the satan s special role in the heavenly

court is that of a kind of roving intelligence agent, like those

whom many Jews of the time would have known—and

detested—from the king of Persia’s elaborate system of secret

police and intelligence officers. Known as “the king’s eye” or

“the king’s ear,” these agents roamed the empire looking for signs

of disloyalty among the people.11

God boasts to the
satan
about one of his most loyal subjects:

“Have you considered my servant Job, that there is no one like

him on earth, a blessed and upright man, who fears God and

turns away from evil?” The
satan
then challenges the Lord to put

Job to the test:

42 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

“Does Job fear God for nothing? . . . You have blessed the work

of his hands, and his possessions have increased. But put forth

your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you

to your face” (1:9-l 1).

The Lord agrees to test Job, authorizing the
satan
to afflict Job

with devastating loss, but defining precisely how far he may go:

“Behold, all that belongs to him is in your power; only do not

touch the man himself.” Job withstands the first deadly

onslaught, the sudden loss of his sons and daughters in a single

accident, the slaughter of his cattle, sheep, and camels, and the

loss of all his wealth and property. When the
satan
appears again

among the sons of God on the appointed day, the Lord points out

that “Job still holds fast to his integrity, although you incited me

against him, to harm him without cause.” Then the
satan
asks

that he increase the pressure:

“Skin for skin. All that a man has he will give for his life. But

put forth your hand now, and touch his flesh and his bone, and

he will curse you to your face.” And the Lord said to the
satan
,

“Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life” (2:4-6).

According to the folktale, Job withstands the test, the
satan

retreats, and “the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and he

gave him twice as much as he had before” (42:10). Here the
satan

terrifies and harms a person but, like the angel of death, remains

an angel, a member of the heavenly court, God’s obedient

servant.

Around the time Job was written (c. 550 B.C.E.), however,

other biblical writers invoked the
satan
to account for division

within Israel.12 One court historian slips the
satan
into an

account concerning the origin of census taking, which King

David introduced into Israel c. 1000 B.C.E. for the purpose of

instituting taxation. David’s introduction of taxation aroused

vehement and immediate opposition—opposition that began

among the very army commanders ordered to carry it out. Joab,

David’s chief officer, objected, and warned the king that what he

was propos-

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 43

ing to do was evil. The other army commanders at first refused to

obey, nearly precipitating a revolt; but finding the king adamant,

the officers finally obeyed and “numbered the people.”

Why had David committed what one chronicler who recalls

the story regards as an evil, aggressive act “against Israel”?

Unable to deny that the offending order came from the king

himself, but intent on condemning David's action without

condemning the king directly, the author of 1 Chronicles

suggests that a supernatural adversary within the divine court

had managed to infiltrate the royal house and lead the king

himself into sin: “The
satan
stood up against Israel, and incited

David to number the people” (1 Chron. 21:1). But although an

angelic power incited David to commit this otherwise

inexplicable act, the chronicler insists that the king was

nevertheless personally responsible—and guilty. “God was

displeased with this thing, and he smote Israel.” Even after

David abased himself and confessed his sin, the angry Lord

punished him by sending an avenging angel to destroy seventy

thousand Israelites with a plague; and the Lord was barely

restrained from destroying the city of Jerusalem itself.

Here the
satan
is invoked to account for the division and

destruction that King David's order aroused within Israel.13 Not

long before the chronicler wrote, the prophet Zechariah had

depicted the
satan
inciting factions among the people.

Zechariah's account reflects conflicts that arose within Israel

after thousands of Jews—many of them influential and

educated—whom the Babylonians had captured in war (c. 687

B.C.E.) and exiled to Babylon, returned to Palestine from exile.

Cyrus, king of Persia, having recently conquered Babylon, not

only allowed these Jewish exiles to go home but intended to

make them his allies. Thus he offered them funds to reconstruct

Jerusalem’s defensive city walls, and to rebuild the great Temple,

which the Babylonians had destroyed. Those returning were

eager to reestablish the worship of “the Lord alone” in their land,

and they naturally expected to reestablish themselves as rulers

of their people.

They were not warmly welcomed by those whom they had

left behind. Many of those who had remained saw the former

44 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

exiles not only as agents of the Persian king but as determined to

retrieve the power and land they had been forced to relinquish

when they were deported. Many resented the returnees’ plan to

take charge of the priestly offices and to “purify” the Lord's

worship.

As the biblical scholar Paul Hanson notes, the line that had

once divided the Israelites from their enemies had separated

them from foreigners. Now the line separated two groups
within

Israel
:

Now, according to the people who remained, their beloved

land was controlled by the enemy, and although that enemy in

fact comprised fellow Israelites, yet they regarded these

brethren as essentially no different from Canaanites.14

The prophet Zechariah sides with the returning exiles in this

heated conflict and recounts a vision in which the
satan
speaks

for the rural inhabitants who accuse the returning high priest of

being a worthless candidate:

The Lord showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before

the angel of the Lord, and the
satan
standing at his right hand

to accuse him. The Lord said to the
satan
, “The Lord rebuke

you, O
satan
! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you”

(Zech. 3:1-2).

Here the
satan
speaks for a disaffected—and unsuccessful—

party against another party of fellow Israelites. In Zechariah’s

account of factions within Israel, the
satan
takes on a sinister

quality, as he had done in the story of David’s census, and his

role begins to change from that of God's agent to that of his

opponent. Although these biblical stories reflect divisions

within Israel, they are not yet sectarian, for their authors still

identify with Israel as a whole.

Some four centuries later in 168 B.C.E., when Jews regained

their independence from their Seleucid rulers, descendents of

Alexander the Great, internal conflicts became even more

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 45

acute.15 For centuries, Jews had been pressured to assimilate to

the ways of the foreign nations that successively had ruled their

land—the Babylonians, then the Persians, and, after 323 B.C.E.,

the Hellenistic dynasty established by Alexander. As the first

book of Maccabees tells the story, these pressures reached a

breaking point in 168 B.C.E., when the Seleucid ruler, the Syrian

king Antiochus Epiphanes, suspecting resistance to his rule,

decided to eradicate every trace of the Jews’ peculiar and

“barbaric” culture. First he outlawed circumcision, along with

study and observance of Torah. Then he stormed the Jerusalem

Temple and desecrated it by rededicating it to the Greek god

Olympian Zeus. To enforce submission to his new regime, the

king built and garrisoned a massive new fortress overlooking the

Jerusalem Temple itself.

Jewish resistance to these harsh decrees soon flared into a

widespread revolt, which began, according to tradition, when a

company of the king’s troops descended upon the village of

Modein to force the inhabitants to bow down to foreign gods.

The old village priest Mattathias rose up and killed a Jew who

was about to obey the Syrian king’s command. Then he killed the

king’s commissioner and fled with his sons to the hills—an act of

defiance that precipitated the revolt led by Mattathias’s son Judas

Maccabeus.16

As told in 1 Maccabees, this famous story shows how those

Israelites determined to resist the foreign king’s orders and retain

their ancestral traditions battled on two fronts at once—not only

against the foreign occupiers, but against those Jews who

inclined toward accommodation with the foreigners, and toward

assimilation. Recently the historian Victor Tcherikover and

others have told a more complex version of that history.

According to Tcherikover, many Jews, especially among the

upper classes, actually favored Antiochus’s “reform” and wanted

to participate fully in the privileges of Hellenistic society

available only to Greek citizens.17 By giving up their tribal ways

and gaining for Jerusalem the prerogatives of a Greek city, they

would win the right to govern the city themselves, to strike their