Devil in Christianity
In Christianity, the Devil, also known as Satan, is a malevolent entity that deceives and tempts humans. Frequently viewed as the personification of evil, he is traditionally held to have rebelled against God in an attempt to become equal to God himself. He is said to be a fallen angel, who was expelled from Heaven at the beginning of time, before God created the material world, and is in constant opposition to God. The Devil is identified with several other figures in the Bible including Lucifer, Satan, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the tempter of the Gospels, Leviathan, Beelzebub, and the dragon in the Book of Revelation.
Early scholars discussed the role of the Devil. Scholars influenced by neoplatonic cosmology, like Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius, portrayed the Devil as representing deficiency and emptiness, the entity most remote from the divine. According to Augustine of Hippo, the realm of the Devil is not nothingness, but an inferior realm standing in opposition to God. The standard medieval depiction of the Devil goes back to Gregory the Great. He integrated the Devil, as the first creation of God, into the Christian angelic hierarchy as the highest of the angels who fell far, into the depths of hell, and became the leader of demons.
Since the early Reformation period, the Devil has been imagined as an increasingly powerful entity, with not only a lack of goodness but also a conscious will against God, his word, and his creation. Simultaneously, some reformists have interpreted the Devil as a mere metaphor for humans' inclination to sin, thereby downgrading his importance. While the Devil has played no significant role for most scholars in the modern era, he has become important again in contemporary Christianity.
At various times in history, certain Gnostic sects such as the Cathars and the Bogomils, as well as theologians like Marcion and Valentinus, have believed that the Devil was involved in creation. Today these views are not part of mainstream Christianity.
Old Testament
Satan in the Old Testament
The Hebrew term was originally a common noun meaning "accuser" or "adversary" that was applicable to both human and heavenly adversaries. The term is derived from a verb meaning primarily "to obstruct, oppose". Throughout the Hebrew Bible, it refers most frequently to ordinary human adversaries. Such verses include 1 Samuel 29:4; 2 Samuel 19:22; 1 Kings 5:4; 1 Kings 11:14, 23, 25; and Psalms 109:6. However, Numbers 22:22 and 32 use the same term to refer to the angel of the Lord. This concept of a heavenly being as an adversary to humans evolved into the personified evil of "a being with agency" called the Satan 18 times in Job 1–2 and Zechariah 3.Both Hebrew and Greek have definite articles that are used to differentiate between common and proper nouns, but they are used in opposite ways: in Hebrew, the article designates a common noun, whereas in Greek, the article signals an individual's name. For example, in the Hebrew book of Job, one of the angels is referred to as a satan, "an adversary", but in the Greek Septuagint, which was used by the early Christians, whenever "the Satan" appears with a definite article, it specifically refers to the individual known as the heavenly accuser whose personal name is Satan. In some cases it is unclear which is intended.
Henry A. Kelly says that "almost all modern translators and interpreters" of 1 Chronicles 21:1 agree the verse contains "the proper name of a specific being appointed to the office of adversary". Thomas Farrar writes that "In all three cases, satan was translated in the Septuagint as diabolos, and in the case of Job and Zechariah, with ho diabolos. In all three of these passages there is general agreement among Old Testament scholars that the referent of the word satan is an angelic being".
In the early rabbinic literature, Satan is never referred to as "the Evil one, the Enemy, belial, Mastema or Beelzebul". No Talmudic source depicts Satan as a rebel against God or as a fallen angel or predicts his end. Ancient Jewish text depicts Satan as an agent of God, a spy, a stool-pigeon, a prosecutor of mankind and even a hangman. He descends to earth to test men's virtue and lead them astray, then rises to Heaven to accuse them.
In the Book of Job, Job is a righteous man favored by God. Job 1:6–8 describes the "sons of God" presenting themselves before God:
"Sons of God" is a description of 'angels' as supernatural heavenly beings, "ministers of Yahweh, able under His direction to intervene in the affairs of men, enjoying a closer union with Yahweh than is the lot of men. They appear in the earliest books of the Old Testament as well as in the later... They appear in prophetical and sapiential literature as well as in the historical books; they appear in the primitive history and in the most recent history... they usually appear in the Old Testament in the capacity of God's agents to men; otherwise they appear as the heavenly court of Yahweh. They are sent to men to communicate God's message, to destroy, to save, to help, to punish....The angels are in complete submission to the will of God... Whenever they appear among men, it is to execute the will of Yahweh."
God asks one of them where he has been. Satan replies that he has been roaming around the earth. God asks, "Have you considered My servant Job?" Satan thinks Job only loves God because he has been blessed, so he requests that God test the sincerity of Job's love for God through suffering, expecting Job to abandon his faith. God consents; Satan destroys Job's family, health, servants and flocks, yet Job refuses to condemn God. At the end, God returned to Job twice what he had lost. This is one of the two Old Testament passages, along with Zechariah 3, where the Hebrew becomes the Greek in the Greek Septuagint used by the early Christian church.
A satan is involved in King David's census and Christian teachings about this satan varies, just as the pre-exilic account of 2 Samuel and the later account of 1 Chronicles present differing perspectives:
According to some teachings, this term refers to a human being, who bears the title satan while others argue that it indeed refers to a heavenly supernatural agent, an angel. Since the satan is sent by the will of God, his function resembles less the devilish enemy of God. Even if it is accepted that this satan refers to a supernatural agent, it is not necessarily implied this is the Satan. However, since the role of the figure is identical to that of the Devil, viz. leading David into sin, most commentators and translators agree that David's satan is to be identified with Satan and the Devil.
Zechariah's vision of recently deceased Joshua the High Priest depicts a dispute in the heavenly throne room between Satan and the Angel of the Lord. The scene describes Joshua the High Priest dressed in filthy rags, representing the nation of Judah and its sins, on trial with God as the judge and Satan standing as the prosecutor. Yahweh rebukes Satan and orders that Joshua be given clean clothes, representing God's forgiveness of Judah's sins. Goulder views the vision as related to opposition from Sanballat the Horonite. Again, Satan acts in accordance with God's will. The text implies he functions both as God's accuser and as his executioner.
Identified with the Devil
Some parts of the Bible, which do not originally refer to Satan, have been retroactively interpreted as references to the Devil.The serpent
mentions the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which tempts Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus causing their expulsion from the Garden. God rebukes the serpent, stating: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel". Although the Book of Genesis never mentions Satan, Christians have traditionally interpreted the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the Devil due to Revelation 12:9, which describes the Devil as "that ancient serpent called the Devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world; was thrown down to the earth with all his angels." This chapter is used not only to explain the fall of mankind but also to remind the reader of the enmity between Satan and humanity. It is further interpreted as a prophecy regarding Jesus' victory over the Devil, with reference to the child of a woman, striking the head of the serpent.Lucifer
The idea of fallen angels was familiar in pre-Christian Hebrew thought from the Book of the Watchers, according to which angels who impregnated human women were cast out of heaven. The Babylonian/Hebrew myth of a rising star, as the embodiment of a heavenly being who is thrown down for his attempt to ascend into the higher planes of the gods, is also found in the Bible, was accepted by early Christians and interpreted as a fallen angel.Aquila of Sinope derives the word, the Hebrew name for the morning star, from the verb 'to lament'. This derivation was adopted as a proper name for an angel who laments the loss of his former beauty. The Christian church fathers—for example Saint Jerome, in his Vulgate—translated this as Lucifer. The equation of Lucifer with the fallen angel probably occurred in 1st-century Palestinian Judaism. The church fathers brought the fallen lightbringer Lucifer into connection with the Devil on the basis of a saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke : "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning."
In his work De principiis Proemium and in a homily on Book XII, the Christian scholar Origen compared the morning star Eosphorus-Lucifer with the Devil. According to Origen, Helal-Eosphorus-Lucifer fell into the abyss as a heavenly spirit after he tried to equate himself with God. Cyprian, Jerome, and a few other church fathers essentially subscribed to this view. They viewed this earthly overthrow of a pagan king of Babylon as a clear indication of the heavenly overthrow of Satan. In contrast, the church fathers Hieronymus, Cyrillus of Alexandria, and Eusebius saw in Isaiah's prophecy only the mystifying end of a Babylonian king.