The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

by Elaine Pagels

Walter Wink and the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and some of his followers have studied Satan’s theological and psychological implications.3

In this book, then, I invite you to consider Satan as a reflection of how we perceive ourselves and those we call “others.”

A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people’s life, and making it symbolize

their difference.7

So when God promises to make Abraham the father of a new, great, and blessed nation, he simultaneously defines and constitutes its enemies as inferior and potentially accursed.

From the beginning, then, Israelite tradition defines “us” in ethnic, political, and religious terms as “the people of Israel,” or “the people of God,” as against “them”—the (other) nations (in Hebrew, ha goyim), the alien enemies of Israel, often characterized as inferior, morally depraved, even potentially accursed.

Yet at certain points in Israel’s history, especially in times of crisis, war, and danger, a vociferous minority spoke out, not against the alien tribes and foreign armies ranged against Israel, but to blame Israel’s misfortunes upon members of its own people. Such critics, sometimes accusing Israel as a whole, and sometimes accusing certain rulers, claimed that Israel’s disobedience to God had brought down divine punishment. The party that called for Israel’s allegiance to “the Lord alone,” including such prophets as Amos (c. 750 B.C.E.), Isaiah (c. 730 B.C.E.), and Jeremiah (c. 600 B.C.E.), indicted especially those Israelites who adopted foreign ways, particularly the worship of foreign gods.4 Such prophets, along with their supporters, thought of Israel as a truly separate people, “holy to the Lord.”

Mentioned in Psalms.

Certain writers of the sixth century B.C.E. took a bold step further. They used mythological imagery to characterize their struggle against some of their fellow Israelites. But when Israelite writers excoriated their fellow Jews in mythological terms, the images they chose were usually not the animalistic or monstrous ones they regularly applied to their foreign enemies. Instead of Rahab, Leviathan, or “the dragon,” most often they identified their Jewish enemies with an exalted, if treacherous, member of the divine court whom they called the satan.

The satan is not an animal or monster but one of God’s angels, a being of superior intelligence and status; apparently the Israelites saw their intimate enemies not as beasts and monsters but as superhuman beings whose superior qualities and insider status could make them more dangerous than the alien enemy.

In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an “evil empire,” an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike.7 As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the ...

translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal’āk) into Greek (angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called “sons of God” (benē ’elōhīm), and were envisioned as the hierarchical ran...

In biblical sources the Hebrew term the satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character.8 Although Hebrew storytellers as early as the sixth century B.C.E. occasionally introduced a supernatural character whom they called the satan, what they meant was any one of the angel...

Hebrew storytellers often attribute misfortunes to human sin. Some, however, also invoke this supernatural character, the satan, who, by God’s own order or permission, blocks or opposes human plans and desires. But this messenger is not necessarily malevolent. God sends him, like the angel of death, to perform a specific task, although one that human beings may not appreciate; as the literary scholar 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-śā n-lō]—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:

As Satan became an increasingly important and personified figure, stories about his origin proliferated. One group tells how one of the angels, himself high in the heavenly hierarchy, proved insubordinate to his commander in chief and so was thrown out of heaven, demoted, and disgraced, an echo of Isaiah’s account of the fall of a great prince: How are you fallen from heaven, day star, son of the dawn! How are you fallen to earth, conqueror of the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God; I will set my throne on high … I will ascend upon the high clouds.…” But you are brought down to darkness [or: the underworld, sheol], to the depths of the pit (Isa. 14:12–15). Nearly two and a half thousand years after Isaiah wrote, this luminous falling star, his name translated into Latin as Lucifer (“light-bearer”) was transformed by Milton into the protagonist of Paradise Lost.

Whichever version of his origin one chooses, then, and there are many, all depict Satan as an intimate enemy—the attribute that qualifies him so well to express conflict among Jewish groups.

Those who asked, “How could God’s own angel become his enemy?” were thus asking, in effect, “How could one of us become one of them?” Stories of Satan and other fallen angels proliferated in these troubled times, especially within those radical groups that had turned against the rest of the Jewish community and, consequently, concluded that others had turned against them—or (as they put it) against God.

As John Collins points out, the author of the Book of the Watchers, by choosing to tell the story of the watchers instead of that of the actual Greek rulers or corrupt priests, offers “a paradigm which is not restricted to one historical situation, but which can be applied whenever an analogous situation arises.”25 The same is true of all apocalyptic literature,

and accounts for much of its power.

Even today, readers puzzle over books that claim the authority of angelic revelation, from the biblical book of Daniel to the New Testament book of Revelation, finding in their own circumstances n...

The primary apocalyptic question is this: Who a...

26 To most readers of the Book of the Watchers, the answer would have been obvious—Israel. But the author of Watchers, without discarding ethnic identity, insists on moral identity. It is not enough to be a Jew. One must also be a Jew who acts morally. Here we see evidence of a historical shift—one that Christians wil...

What, then, does God’s election of his people mean? The author of Jubilees, echoing the warnings of Isaiah and other prophets, suggests that belonging to the people of Israel does not guarantee deliverance from evil. It conveys a legacy of moral struggle, but ensures divine help in that struggle.

Throughout the visions of Daniel, such monstrous animals represent foreign rulers and nations who threaten Israel. When Daniel, trembling with awe and terror, prays for his people, he is rewarded with divine assurance that all Israelites who remain true to God will survive (12:1–3). Thus the book of Daniel powerfully reaffirms the integrity of Israel’s moral and ethnic identity. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Daniel, unlike such other apocalyptic books as the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees, is included in the canonical collection that we call the Hebrew Bible and not relegated to the apocrypha.

Irenaeus wanted to consolidate Christian groups threatened by persecution throughout the world. The gospels he endorsed helped institutionalize the Christian movement. Those he denounced as heresy did not serve the purposes of institutionalization.

Martyn suggests, too, that the crisis in John’s community occurred when a group of Jewish scholars, led by the rabbi Gamalial II (80–115 C.E.), introduced into synagogue worship the so-called birkat ha-minim (literally, “benediction of the heretics”), a prayer that invoked a curse upon “heretics,” including Christians, here specifically identified as “Nazarenes.” This might have enabled

synagogue leaders to ask anyone suspected of being a secret “Nazarene” to “stand before the ark” and lead the congregation in the benediction, so that anyone guilty of being a Christian would be calling a curse upon himself and his fellow believers. The historian Reuven Kimelman disagrees, and argues that this ritual curse entered synagogue services considerably later and so could not have precipitated a first-century crisis. The author of John speaks, however, as if synagogue leaders had taken measures more drastic than the birkat ha-minim, suggesting that they actually excluded Jesus’ followers to prevent them from worshiping alongside other Jews.

Ever since the first century, John’s version of the gospel has consoled and inspired groups of believers who have found themselves an oppressed minority—but a minority that they believe embodies divine light in the world.

“Christians severed the traditional bonds between religion and a nation or people,” and, as the historian Robert Wilken points out, “Ancient people took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city, nation or people.”3

Tatian perceives his essential being as spirit, ultimately indestructible:

Even if fire should annihilate my flesh, and the universe disperse its matter, and, although dispersed in rivers and seas, or torn apart by wild animals, I am laid up in the storehouse of a wealthy master … and God the king, when he pleases, will restore the matter that is visible to him alone to its primordial order.68

Tatian refuses to acknowledge any subjection to nature and refuses to submit to the demands of the culture and society into which physical birth delivered him: I do not want to be a ruler; I am not anxious to be rich; I decline military command; I detest sexual promiscuity; I am not impelled by any insatiable love of money to go to sea; I do not contend for reputation; I am free from an insane thirst for fame; I despise death; I am superior to every form of disease; grief does not consume my soul. If I am a slave, I endure slavery; if I am free, I do not boast of my fortunate birth.… Why are you “destined” so often to grasp for things, and often to die? Die to the world, repudiating the insanity that pervades it. Live to God, and by apprehending God, apprehend

Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). I am grateful to John Collins for referring me to this work.