Where did Satan come from?

The short version: Satan grew out of a job description. The Hebrew word śāṭān means “adversary” or “accuser”. For most of the Hebrew Bible it names a role, not a being, and when a heavenly satan appears he works for God. The rebel who leads the forces of darkness, tempts humanity and rules a kingdom opposed to God is a creation of Jewish writing in the last centuries BCE, and from there he passed into Christianity and, in a different form, into Islam.^[1] Majority

The word before the figure

In the older biblical books śāṭān is an ordinary noun. When Yahweh punishes Solomon, he raises up “a satan” against him: Hadad the Edomite, a human enemy.^[2] When the prophet Balaam sets out to curse Israel, it is the angel of Yahweh himself who “stood in the road as a satan against him”, an obstacle sent by God.^[3] Nothing in these passages suggests a standing enemy of God.^[4] Consensus

Apart from Balaam’s angel, the Torah has no satan at all. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is “more crafty than any beast of the field” that God had made, and is punished as a snake; Genesis does not say it is anyone else.^[5] The identification of the serpent with the devil comes centuries later, in Jewish and Christian writing of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, most explicitly in the Book of Revelation, where the dragon is “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9).^[6]​^[7] Consensus

The accuser in the heavenly court

The first being called the satan is a member of God’s council, the divine assembly that §2 traces back to the gods around El. In a vision dated to about 520 BCE, the prophet Zechariah sees the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of Yahweh, “and the satan standing at his right hand to accuse him”. Yahweh rebukes the accuser and acquits Joshua.^[8] In the prologue of Job, usually dated to the Persian period, “the satan” comes with the sons of God to present himself before Yahweh, suggests that Job is righteous only because he prospers, and is given permission to test him.^[9] Majority

In both texts the word has the definite article: haśśāṭān, “the accuser”, a title like “the prosecutor”. He is subordinate, he needs permission, and he can be overruled. Whatever he is, he is not God’s rival.^[4] Consensus

Moving evil away from God

The decisive step is a single verse. In 2 Samuel 24:1, Yahweh is angry with Israel and incites David to take a census, then punishes the nation for it. When the Chronicler retold the story, probably in the fourth century BCE, the verse became: “A satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to number Israel.”^[10] An action the older writer attributed to God has been handed to another being, and this time without the article. Whether Chronicles means “an adversary” or already a proper name, “Satan”, is debated; that the responsibility has moved away from God is not (§5).^[4] Majority

The move matters because the exilic prophet of Isaiah 40–55 had gone the other way. “I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil,” Yahweh says in Isaiah 45:7: one God, responsible for everything, with no rival (§4).^[11] The later figure of Satan is partly an answer to the problem that sentence creates. Majority

A kingdom of evil

In the third to first centuries BCE the accuser grew into the head of an army. The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), among the oldest Jewish texts outside the Bible, explains evil by a revolt in heaven: two hundred angels descend to Mount Hermon, father giants and corrupt humanity.^[12]​^[13] The book of Jubilees, of the second century BCE, names a chief of evil spirits Mastema.^[14] The Dead Sea Scrolls divide the world between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness” under the “dominion of Belial”.^[15]​^[1] Majority

The Greek translators of the Bible rendered śāṭān as diabolos, “slanderer”, the source of the English word “devil”.^[4] The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek around the first century BCE, says that “through the devil’s envy death entered the world”.^[7] By the first century CE the Gospels and Paul take for granted a Satan who tempts Jesus, possesses people and rules a kingdom opposed to God’s.^[1] Elaine Pagels has argued that the figure’s growth tracks sectarian conflict: the groups that cast their Jewish opponents as allies of Satan were the ones that built him up.^[1] Majority on the sequence; Contested on Pagels’s explanation.

Was Satan borrowed from Persia?

Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian kings who ruled Judea from 539 to 332 BCE, sets a hostile spirit, Angra Mainyu, against the good creator Ahura Mazda, and the Jewish adversary grows into a leader of evil in the same centuries. Mary Boyce and others saw direct influence.^[16] James Barr pointed out that most Zoroastrian texts were written down many centuries later, so the direction of borrowing cannot be shown.^[17] The Jewish satan develops step by step from figures already in Israel’s own texts, and never becomes an equal of God, as the Zoroastrian evil spirit is of the good one.^[4] See whether Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism. Contested

What the rabbis did with him

Rabbinic Judaism kept Satan but shrank him. The Babylonian Talmud records the third-century teacher Reish Lakish:

hûʾ śāṭān, hûʾ yēṣer hāraʿ, hûʾ malʾak hammāwet

“He is Satan, he is the evil inclination, he is the angel of death.”^[18]

What it proves. The rabbis tied the adversary to the yēṣer hāraʿ, the inclination to evil within each person, and to death, both of which God created and controls. Satan in rabbinic and later Jewish thought is mostly an accuser and a tempter acting within God’s order, closer to Job than to Revelation. The Jewish tradition did not make belief in Satan a principle of faith, and modern Jewish theology often treats him as a figure of speech.^[19] Majority

Each side at its strongest

The developmental view. The sequence above is visible in the texts themselves: a common noun, then a heavenly official, then a rival, then a ruler of demons. No single step requires a foreign source.^[4]​^[1] Majority

The traditional readings. Jewish tradition reads the satan of Job and Zechariah as God’s servant, an angel whose task is to test and accuse, and sees no contradiction in his later roles: an accuser is also a tempter. Christian tradition reads the serpent of Eden and the fall of “the morning star” in Isaiah 14:12 as early glimpses of the devil, revealed more fully in the New Testament. Most historians read Isaiah 14 as a taunt against the king of Babylon, but the traditional reading is ancient and still held.^[20]​^[21] Contested

Common misconceptions

• “Satan is in the Garden of Eden.” Genesis has a serpent, not Satan; the identification is later.^[5]​^[6]
• “Lucifer is Satan’s original name.” “Lucifer” is the Latin translation of “morning star” in Isaiah 14:12, addressed to a king of Babylon. Applying it to Satan is a Christian interpretation.^[20]
• “Judaism has a devil like Christianity’s.” Rabbinic Judaism has an accuser and an evil inclination, both under God, but no independent kingdom of evil.^[18]
• “The satan of Job is evil.” He is cynical, not rebellious: he asks permission and works within God’s court.^[9]

Why it matters

Satan is one of the clearest cases of a religious idea with a datable history. He is absent from the Torah, a court official in the Persian period, and a cosmic enemy by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Christianity inherited the last of these forms, and Islam’s Iblis, the angel or jinn who refuses to bow to Adam, belongs to the same family of ideas.^[22] Judaism itself moved back toward the earlier one.

For the full story of the new ideas of the Second Temple period, see Chapter 6: Hellenism, the Maccabees and the Second Temple Sects. For the Persian-period first steps, see Chapter 5: Persian Yehud and the Making of the Torah.