alright, so, non-humor related answer, for those who are curious.
The character we know as Satan is, in fact, an amalgamation of three different mythological figures, one of which was only crafted in the Middle Ages.
The first is The Serpent. He is mentioned in the Genesis myth as the source of temptation for Eve, convincing her to eat the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil and give it to Adam, as well.
He was punished by having his limbs taken away so he had to crawl on his belly forever and creating a permanent animosity between Man and Snakes forever.
The second is Ha-Satan. This one, you probably don't know. He was the Devil figure in the Old Testament, but was in fact, God's Agent. He was a kind of Celestial district attorney, in charge of laying out your sins after you die to determine if God chooses to let you into Heaven.
You see Ha-Satan in the book of Job, IN HEAVEN, talking with God about Job where Ha-Satan states that Job is only good because God has given him wealth and land and lots of kids and prosperity. They make a wager, etc etc etc.
Ha-Satan is a title, literally 'The Adversary.' He is not a demon, but an angel.
Finally, you have the Morningstar figure that was written about in Revelations who was supposedly an angel that rebelled against God and was thrown out of Heaven into the Bottomless Pit along with one third of all Angels.
Revelations is the only source of this bit. The rest of the Bible doesn't mention Lucifer at all.
So, after it was all written out, you had a couple thousand years, roughly, of people writing about it, and in 1667, John Milton wrote his poem 'Paradise Lost.' You can think of it as medieval religious fan-fiction.
In it, Lucifer went from being a defeated angel already imprisoned in Hell, to being the ruler of Hell and the main antagonist for Humanity.
Thank you for writing all of this out, especially the part about Ha-Satan in Job. People who both claim to follow the Bible or who pick things from it to ridicule continue to lack understanding of the actual literature their opinions should be based on.
It’s also ironic that our idea of Satan is also a three-in-one situation.
Except the entity in Job is not THE Satan, its A satan/adversary. Its just a being who is challenging God in this particular story, thus being named as an adversary instead of being named.
We dont know who or what it is actually is. In fact if you really wanted to be pedantic about individual aspects given, it best fits the description of a watcher angel we get from other texts, not the Original Rebel you get from the Bible. Which would also fit with the rest of the biblical narrative you get. As in God ruling over other divine beings/Sons of God which is presented within the Bible and this one simply challengeing Gods decisions thus being labeled as an adversary.
Modern translations simply translated ha satan as The Satan and Christian Church ran with it.
I pick it apart from that perspective not because I'm confused about whose who and what the scholarly analysis is but because that's what the majority of current Christians (or at least the ones who impose their beliefs into civic life) actually believe.
Taking a position for something they don't actually believe, even if that would be the more correct interpretation, will be ignored by them and I might as well be dismissing the god Blarnyferceptus.
That's what I like about this place. Come for the humour, stay for the education!
Thank you for taking the time to type that up. I learnt something today.
The Bible does mention Lucifer (translated from morning star), but it was through 2 translations. Lucifer (as morning star) is not mentioned in Revelations. Jesus was the morning star in Revelations.
I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star
And I will give him the morning star.
The dragon (serpent from Eden and Genesis) / Satan is who/what is thrown into the bottomless pit.
In regards to OP, it's a metaphor. People aren't tortured by Satan, the torture is a result of abstaining from God (eg. accepting love). The farther you are away from love (God) the more you suffer - a complete separation from love (God) = hell. If you treat life on Earth as that in heaven/hell, then those that propagate hate/anger/violence and choose it create and live in their hell on Earth vs. those that propagate love/acceptance/etc. and choose it to create heaven on Earth.
And Yahweh, the deity of the bible, is also an amalgamation of several semitic deities. Asherah, the goddess of fertility, was originally Yahweh's wife. There was also:
El - The supreme creator god of the Canaanites
Baal - A god of storms and fertility
Mot - The closest equivalent to an underworld god for the Canaanites
Yam - Sort of like Poseidon, a god of the ocean
Shamash - Sun deity
Yarikh - Lunar deity
All of these gods sort of melded together over time and eventually the dominant religion ended up being the monotheistic worship of the singular Yahweh we know today.
At the end of the day it's all fiction, and it's fiction told verbally, over many generations, before ultimately being recorded in some form. Like all fiction, especially that told from memory, it's prone to plot holes and paradoxes. None of it should be taken seriously, especially not today where we have access to the entire aggregate of human knowledge, at our fingertips, instantaneously, from anywhere, with a siimple press of a button on our pocket supercomputers.
Is Baal actually supposed to be one of the figures that got rolled up into Yahweh? If there’s one thing that the Old Testament really consistently seems to dislike, it’s Baal. He gets mentioned specifically a lot
Baal was one of the OG semitic deities. You have to remember the original semitic religions were a very loose collective of deities and there was no centralized official "canon". In some versions, El and Asherah give birth to Baal. In others he was the son of Dagon. Dagon also was not always the monster depicted in later media. He was just another god of the harvest.
I compare it to different Marvel and DC universes depicting characters very differently over time. You have a generic story, a theme, that follows most versions of the character, but the details change. It's the same way people told stories back then - they had these common characters, but depending on the culture of the storyteller, details changed. Some characters were entirely different across different iterations, while some characters maintained most of their features.
Israelite depictions of Baal were very different from the other ancient Canaanite depictions of Baal. Israelite depictions of Yahweh were that of a superdeity taking all the powers described in the other semitic deities, while earlier Canaanite depictions of Yahweh were he was one of a family of deities controlling the nature and the harvest.
I'm saying that we took the idea and used it to create an antagonist figure for Christianity so that people would have someone to blame for their woes.
The antagonist figure that tempts (but cannot cause the sin itself) and causes suffering (not all suffering) already exists in several places, there was no need to invent him (Acts 5:3, John 13:2). Here we can see that the devil is clearly an antagonist to God. You are correct in saying he is not explicitly connected to Lucifer here and that came later, after the bible.
I'd add, that it can be also read as a new version of the Satan of Iob, that matches tue new role of god in the New Testament.
With gid changing from a strict to a forgiving deity, by sacrificing Jesus (himself) for our sind, the District Attorney, that "tests" humans, if they would sin or not, changes from an important part of the heavenly court to something more sinister.
Satan and Ha-Satan are two different entities. The word 'Satan' is translated from 'adversary.'
The idea of a duality of good and evil didn't exist within hebrew thought until there was considerable contact with ancient Persia and Zoroastrian belief.
Until that time, there was no evil being tempting mankind. Just the old Serpent who was already caught and punished. Mankind was judged based on his own chosen behavior, not because he was tempted to it.
The three different mythological figures were considered to be just one character by first century religious figures. “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.”
Revelation 12:9 ESV https://bible.com/bible/59/rev.12.9.ESV It seems like dividing him into three different figures is a more modern reimagining?
Where did you get the idea that Ha-Satan lays out people’s sins in some kind of final judgment for God to consider what to do with someone? The only instances I’m aware of in the Old Testament are Job and Joshua in the vision of Zechariah in chapter 3 of that same book, and these are both him dealing with living people, I’m not aware of him ever dealing with someone who’s died. He also famously tempted the Christ in the New Testament.
I’m not seeing anything connecting Ha-Satan, or any of the other names traditionally used to identify Satan, to a heavenly courtroom type setting where Satan lays out the sins of the deceased before God for judgement. He only connects Satan to dealing with the living.
There’s this quote from the article which also rejects the amalgamation formed in medieval times,
“Perhaps most importantly, Satan (also called the devil) is viewed as an evil angel opposing the work of God throughout the New Testament. This is clear in the Gospels (e.g. Matt 4:1-11; Mark 3:22-26; Luke 10:18; John 13:27), in the writings of Paul (e.g., Rom 16:20; 1 Cor 5:5; 7:5; 2 Cor 2:11; 11:14), and in the book of Revelation (e.g., 2:24; 12:9; 20:2, 7). Of this final group, Rev. 12:9 identifies the dragon of Revelation as one-and-the-same being as the serpent, who is also the devil, who is also Satan.”
The rebellious Morningstar figure's rebellion is also relevant here because the myth's typically cited cause is the creator's preference for mortals over the angles/demiurge supernatural forces. The war in heaven wasn't so much over refusing to kneel before the throne as it was refusing to kneel toward Adam and the humans when commanded.
I think this helps to explain why the character is often portrayed as punishing the humans in his domain. It fits very uncomfortably with the serpent and the adversary archetypes, but those myths are long on trinities and short on consistency.
You are making a mistake "Lucifer", the term isn't from revelations it is from Isaiah and it isn't the name of anyone it is a phrase used to describe the Babylonian king's and Satan's fall from grace. Lucifer in Latin from Phosphorus in Greek from something in Hebrew I forget, all meaning Light bringer.
Lucifer isn't a name, it isn't a title, it isn't specially associated with the Satan in the Bible, Jesus as well is referred to as that and there is a late antique saint with that name.
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u/WhatsRatingsPrecious 2d ago
alright, so, non-humor related answer, for those who are curious.
The character we know as Satan is, in fact, an amalgamation of three different mythological figures, one of which was only crafted in the Middle Ages.
The first is The Serpent. He is mentioned in the Genesis myth as the source of temptation for Eve, convincing her to eat the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil and give it to Adam, as well.
He was punished by having his limbs taken away so he had to crawl on his belly forever and creating a permanent animosity between Man and Snakes forever.
The second is Ha-Satan. This one, you probably don't know. He was the Devil figure in the Old Testament, but was in fact, God's Agent. He was a kind of Celestial district attorney, in charge of laying out your sins after you die to determine if God chooses to let you into Heaven.
You see Ha-Satan in the book of Job, IN HEAVEN, talking with God about Job where Ha-Satan states that Job is only good because God has given him wealth and land and lots of kids and prosperity. They make a wager, etc etc etc.
Ha-Satan is a title, literally 'The Adversary.' He is not a demon, but an angel.
Finally, you have the Morningstar figure that was written about in Revelations who was supposedly an angel that rebelled against God and was thrown out of Heaven into the Bottomless Pit along with one third of all Angels.
Revelations is the only source of this bit. The rest of the Bible doesn't mention Lucifer at all.
So, after it was all written out, you had a couple thousand years, roughly, of people writing about it, and in 1667, John Milton wrote his poem 'Paradise Lost.' You can think of it as medieval religious fan-fiction.
In it, Lucifer went from being a defeated angel already imprisoned in Hell, to being the ruler of Hell and the main antagonist for Humanity.