The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

The Dev­il, the Beast, Beelze­bub, Lucifer, Satan: whichev­er name we hap­pen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evo­ca­tions of that embod­i­ment of (or per­haps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temp­ta­tion that many of us have encoun­tered in pop­u­lar cul­ture have lit­tle, if any­thing, to do with Bib­li­cal scrip­ture. Here to explain Satan’s real tex­tu­al ori­gins is Reli­gion for Break­fast cre­ator Andrew Mark Hen­ry, who in the video above goes all the way back to the ancient Israelites and the Hebrew Bible — in which “the notion of a sin­gu­lar, supreme evil enti­ty and oppo­nent to God is com­plete­ly absent.”

Hen­ry men­tions that the Hebrew term śāṭān, which means “adver­sary or accuser,” does appear ear­ly in the Bible, but it “sim­ply refers to human adver­saries.” Only in lat­er texts, like the Book of Job, does the word take on the mean­ing of a “divine job title, kind of like a pros­e­cu­tor” or “legal adver­sary in a divine court.”

We’re still far from the cur­rent Chris­t­ian con­cept of Satan, which may even­tu­al­ly have arisen, accord­ing to some schol­ars, out of cen­turies of cul­tur­al exchange between Chris­tian­i­ty and Zoroas­tri­an­ism. The ancient Mid­dle East­ern reli­gion pro­pos­es a per­fect­ly good divine being Ahu­ra Maz­da “locked in bat­tle with a whol­ly evil being named Angra Mainyu.” This encounter between civ­i­liza­tions would explain some­thing about the emer­gence of the now wide­ly acknowl­edged idea of “a cos­mic strug­gle between good and evil.”

As one ancient text is lay­ered atop anoth­er, “an evil leader of fall­en angels or evil spir­it in gen­er­al becomes a recur­ring char­ac­ter,” and in the New Tes­ta­ment, “the chief adver­sary of God” is called by the name Satan — or by the Greek word diábo­los, which gave us Dev­il and all its relat­ed words. In ref­er­ence to the ori­gins of Satan, the Book of Isa­iah offers the line “How you are fall­en from heav­en, O Day Star, Son of Dawn!” The term “Day Star,” which refers to the plan­et Venus, was ren­dered in the Latin Vul­gate trans­la­tion as Lucifer, which has become anoth­er com­mon name for this ever-more-charged fig­ure. Whether we fear him, con­demn him, deny his exis­tence, or even — depend­ing on our musi­cal gen­res of choice — imag­ine that we wor­ship him, our cul­ture does, in some sense or anoth­er, seem to need him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Par­adise Lost Explained: How John Mil­ton Wrote His Epic Reli­gious Poem from Satan’s Per­spec­tive

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

The Leg­end of How Blues­man Robert John­son Sold His Soul to the Dev­il at the Cross­roads

A Brief His­to­ry of Mak­ing Deals with the Dev­il: Nic­colò Pagani­ni, Robert John­son, Jim­my Page & More

John Cleese Plays the Dev­il, Makes a Spe­cial Appeal for Hell, 1966

Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn & Twain Him­self Meet Satan in the Zany 1985 Clay­ma­tion The Adven­tures of Mark Twain

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.