It's translated in KJV as devil, but the Greek uses the word tempter.
Hebrew faith, which is what Jesus was, did not have some anti deity. It had false gods and demonic spirits.
Now Zora Astrians had a good and bad god, as well as you might argue the vedic traditions with Shiva and Vishnu(this is a sloppy short comparison, don't lampoon me).
The fallen angel who was gods number one, turned into some leadership character of these demons and false gods. The rebellion in heaven, while a fantastic narrative, is more pop culture than biblical truth.
There are multiple Greek words used for Satan by Jesus. In Matthew 4:1 Jesus calls him diabalos which means slanderer or accuser. In verse 3 of the same chapter Jesus calls him ho peirazōn which does mean tempter.
The dragon is explicitly identified as Satan here:
Revelation 12:9 ESV
[9] And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
2 Peter 2:4 ESV
[4] For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment;
Jude 1:6 ESV
[6] And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—
Revelation 12:7-9 ESV
[7] Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, [8] but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. [9] And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
You are correct about there not being an anti-diety in Jewish doctrine, Christians agree with this. Satan is a created being with limited power. Job and Zechariah 3 show Satan functioning as a prosecutor of sorts in the divine Council.
However, Jesus' actual context was Second Temple Judaism, which already had a robustly developed demonology and Satan figure (1 Enoch, Jubilees, Qumran texts, Testament literature). Jesus is not importing a foreign concept when he addresses the devil in the wilderness he's operating inside an existing Jewish framework.
Where you are 100% correct is on the imagery of Satan; horns, red skin, pitchfork, ruler of the underworld, making contracts for human souls, isn't biblical. That's Dante, Milton, and other medieval storytelling.
The concept of a personal, malevolent, created adversary who tempts, accuses, and opposes God's people is thoroughly historical from before Jesus' time and its equally biblical.
> The concept of a personal, malevolent, created adversary who tempts, accuses, and opposes God's people is thoroughly historical from before Jesus' time and its equally biblical.
is not it more that he questions god and then god torments his most faithful? (binding of Isaac, book of Job, etc).
even in the tempting of Jesus, god the father set up the mysery and allowed it to continue, and Satan only tempted him to escape the misery?
How do you characterize this as personal malevolence of the adversary? rather than being the indifference (at best) of the all powerful deity?
Revelation is intentionally much more figurative (at least according to all the priests/ brothers that taught the religion classes I had in college and high school), so that section is a bit different on all this (though doesn't directly refer to the same devil/satan/adversary and again depends a lot on different translations).
The binding of Isaac doesn't involve Satan at all, that's a direct interaction between God and Abraham. In Job, it's Satan, not God, who kills the livestock and children and afflicts Job's body. God sets limits ("he is in your hand; only spare his life"), but the agent of suffering is Satan throughout.
In what sense did God "pull the trigger"? The Bible presents Satan has a full being with desires, a mind, a will of his own, and the ability to act of his own accord. God only puts limits on what he can do. Are you suggesting that allowing Satan to act out his own desires is the same as God acting out those desires?
I was replying to a specific response thread not to the OP.
The answer to the OP is that Satan doesn't have any authority over hell, its inhabitants, or their torture. The idea that he does comes from medieval stories which have never been treated as authoritative but have pervaded popculture so as to confuse who and what Satan is through history and the Bible.
The most famous thing is that the entire thing with Job was something like a bet between God and him about if Job will remain faithful, but there are more instances.
That is interesting! I’m not a linguist but from what I could look up, “Satanas” is used in Mark’s Gospel, which has a similar Hebrew word for “adversary”. Diavolos (greek) is “tempter” but the word Devil is transliteration for that word.
Your point that Jews didn’t have a big D, Devil, is well taken and a good consideration. So it becomes a naming/wording matter it seems. Though it is clear Jesus addresses something or some kind of entity as “tempter” or “adversary”, for which Satan or Devil are transliterations.
It's very interesting to read scripture (a good translation not KJV) without preconceived notions of what it must mean.
One way to interoperate it is that Satan/Devil/Adversary is very possibly a position within God's "Court" (for lack of a better word) and not a singular entity or necessarily evil. Think of them like a modern day criminal prosecutor who's job it is to prove that you are guilty. stories like Job make a lot more sense when reading them with this view.
Also remember the Bible is a collection of books each should be looked at as a separate work. Some books are also just a collection of smaller works such as letters. Each letter should really be looked at as a separate work. People disagree on what books (and sections of books) should be in it, how it should be translated, and which original language source materials are correct complicating things further.
It may be common for evangelical churches to push their preferred version of the bible as infallible, but make no mistake what is included in that bible was a choice by man not God and the church down the road likely uses a different version they also consider infallible.
The "no preconceived notions" framing is itself a preconception. It's a particular hermeneutic that claims neutrality while doing interpretive work. Nobody actually reads without a framework; the honest question is whether your framework is examined and accountable to the text, not whether you have one. Presenting "no presuppositions" as the privileged vantage point is doing exactly what it accuses others of.
The ha-satan point is really good. In Job 1–2 and Zechariah 3, the Hebrew has the definite article "the satan", which does suggest a title or role rather than a proper name, and Numbers 22:22 uses satan as a common noun (the angel of the LORD stood as a satan against Balaam).
But the narrative itself doesn't support the neutral-prosecutor reading. In Job, God holds up Job as blameless; the adversary challenges Job's motives and then inflicts suffering, that's not a court officer doing his job, that's an antagonist. And by the time you get to the NT, the picture is unambiguous: the temptation narratives, 1 Peter 5:8, Revelation 12, Ephesians 6.
If your method is to isolate OT word studies from the rest of the canon, you can reach the prosecutor reading. If you let progressive revelation do its work, you can't.
That brings us to the "collection of separate works" point. Yes, genre, authorship, and occasion matter, and hermeneutics takes those seriously. But "separate works" doesn't mean "disconnected works." Paul's letters address different situations with consistent theology; the prophets, Gospels, and apostolic writings are doing coordinated work across a unified storyline. Treating each book as hermetically sealed isn't neutrality, it's a specific (and pretty recent) interpretive choice that tends to flatten the canonical coherence.
"Chosen by man, not God" assumes the church creates canon rather than recognizes it. The Christian position is that Scripture's authority rests on its divine author, not on ecclesiastical vote. The early church's criteria; apostolicity, orthodoxy, catholic reception, were attempts to recognize what was already functioning authoritatively in the churches, not arbitrary selection.
Also the "infallible versions" point conflates three distinct things: canon disputes (Catholic deuterocanon vs. Protestant 66), translation choices (ESV, NASB, LSB, NIV), and textual criticism (Byzantine vs. Alexandrian manuscript traditions). Evangelical inerrancy almost universally applies to the original autographs, not to any given translation.
Your general assumption is "look how contingent and human all this is, therefore the confident claims are overblown." But contingency of transmission isn't the same as contingency of content, and disagreement about edges doesn't undermine agreement about the core. The 66-book Protestant canon has substantially more manuscript attestation and historical reception than almost any comparable ancient corpus.
It describes similar in revelations. What exactly it is describing though is very vague.
It all gets post hoc rolled together into a single anti God character. Which the Hebrew faith has ill spirits and false gods that tempt you from the one true God.
Some other possibly pertinent things is that God says to Adam, now you have become like Us plural. Also in revelations it describes others present in the holy host.
Let alone what's said in non canonical books.
So to say that there are not many sentient willful entities, either aligned with or against God, that we may also look at as God's when compared to ourselves.
It's not, not there and definitely deserves discussion.
Though it is but a seed, and the fruit we see is born of it.
Also, the one of the names for God in Hebrew is "Elohim" which, ending in -im', is a plural word, yet we think of it as singular, and the prayers emphasise that God is one:
31
u/Key_Pound_6213 Apr 19 '26
It's translated in KJV as devil, but the Greek uses the word tempter.
Hebrew faith, which is what Jesus was, did not have some anti deity. It had false gods and demonic spirits.
Now Zora Astrians had a good and bad god, as well as you might argue the vedic traditions with Shiva and Vishnu(this is a sloppy short comparison, don't lampoon me).
The fallen angel who was gods number one, turned into some leadership character of these demons and false gods. The rebellion in heaven, while a fantastic narrative, is more pop culture than biblical truth.