FEAR AND THE EVOLUTION OF SATAN: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

FEAR AND THE EVOLUTION OF SATAN

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

Many ancient religions have stories detailing the struggle between good and evil. Starting within the ancient Persian world with the kind of demonic, divine force that was responsible for evil that arose out of the notion that a good God could not be responsible for bad things.

Evil inclinations are however seen within Jewish Scripture as a gift of God’s creation leading through challenges and struggle to overcoming this tendency toward evil and the development the full ownership of ‘Good’ within us. There is no traditional Jewish idea of an evil entity as an adversary of God tempting God’s creation away from the right path. Within Judaism's mystical teachings, a light side and a dark side of human nature is noted, but the dark side is never given equal power to the light.

The serpent in the Garden of Eden is Introduced as ‘the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that God had made’ . Satan does not make an appearance in Genesis because the concept of the devil had not yet developed. The books of Numbers and Job were written long before the book of Genesis. While the word satan appears elsewhere in the Jewish Scriptures, it is never a proper name since there is no devil in ancient Israel’s world-view. The noun satan, Hebrew for ‘adversary’ or ‘accuser’ , occurs nine times in the Hebrew Bible: five times to describe a human military, political or legal opponent, and four times with reference to a divine being. In Numbers 22, the prophet Balaam, hired to curse the Israelites, is stopped by a messenger from Israel’s God , described as ‘the satan’ acting on God’s behalf. In Job, ‘the satan’ is a member of God’s heavenly council and one of the divine beings, whose role in Job’s story is to be an ‘accuser’ , a status acquired by people in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia for the purposes of particular legal proceedings.

If God is good, then someone or something must be bad. If men are intrinsically good and made in the image of God, then someone or something must cause the decay in humanity. Essentially, the increasing development of an evil persona

fulfilled two growing needs of humanity which were that of needing someone to blame, and the other was in needing to support the evolving belief in a God who is purely and entirely good. This mirrors human struggles of the time. According to T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley’s book The Birth of Satan, Satan can often been seen in parallel to the fall of man (e.g. in the Genesis story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, both Adam and Satan are punished) “It is as if Satan is an allegorical representative of the human race” Studying Satan and all that he represents we learn more about our own culture, our world, our history, and humanity as a whole, because we blame him for the parts of humanity that we don’t want to acknowledge exist. Through a historical analysis of Abrahamic texts, it is apparent that Satan became a necessary element/entity which explains the aspects of humanity that we cannot accept come from God. (Huneidi, Hanan, "A Historical Account of the Conceptual Evolution of Satan in the Abrahamic Belief Traditions" (2014). Senior Theses. 52)

In the book of Job, the progression moving towards the more familiar form of Satan in an identifiable being form. In this story Satan was not necessarily depicted as an evil adversary to God, but rather a challenging associate, and even an “aspect of God” (Malone MSC, Peter. "The Devil. " Compass 43.1 (2009): 14-25)

Jesus converses with Satan in the desert confirming Satan as a singular character in the Bible. During this conversation Satan offers Jesus power and glory if Jesus agrees to worshipping Satan. In this story Satan is a very useful character in solidifying the divine nature of Jesus as a supreme leader for his Jewish followers. Even a separate individual in this story, Satan is still acting as an arm of God in testing Jesus’ devotion to God and God alone. And yet, this is a marked shift for Satan from the traditional Jewish belief system, in which Satan has (or at least claims to have) powers independent of God (Malone 18) … he (the Advocate) will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. Sin is a pathology, a sickness, an illusion that we authorise to define us as victims, rather than projecting our God image. The only antidote is Love, not condemnation or damnation.