Satan Is Evil Now (And How He Became God's Scapegoat)

In Part 2, we discussed how the śāṭān figure was developed in the postexilic era as the one that brought about calamity on YHWH’s chosen people, while still being under YHWH’s command. We see this balancing act between removing moral culpability from God while preserving his sovereignty. We also mentioned that this use of the śāṭān was at least partly motivated by theodicy: explaining the origin of evil and why it persists in the world.

In the second temple period, this was taken further, with Israel’s theology of Satan (although the name wasn’t used yet) developing so that he becomes the actual persona of evil, the enemy of God and humanity. Much of this development appears outside of the Western canon, with the New Testament only reflecting their products or effects in the 1st century CE when they were already well-established and taken for granted.

Jubilees, a work dating to the second century BCE, marks a significant shift in Jewish thinking about evil spiritual forces and their involvement in human sin and suffering. It introduces the character of (The Prince of) Mastema as the chief of the evil spirits who deceive and afflict humankind.

Jubilees draws upon 1 Enoch for the origin of these evil spirits. Enoch tells of the Watchers who copulated with human women who birthed giants on the earth, also known as the Nephilim of Genesis 6. This incurred God’s judgment, killing the giants, and the spirits that arose from their dead bodies became known as the evil spirits who afflict humanity.

This is where Jubilees adds to the story. As God prepares to imprison all the evil spirits at Noah’s request, Mastema steps forward to strike a deal: he asks God to let him keep some spirits to tempt humanity, arguing that humans are too wicked to be left without temptation and punishment. God agrees to leave 10% of the demons in Mastema’s charge to test, tempt, and punish humanity on Earth.

In the theology of Jubilees, the evil spirits serve to lead humanity astray to their destruction, and Mastema was exercising his God-given authority to do so.

One big thing that Jubilees contributed to the Satan tradition is the association of Satan with evil spirits. From this point forward in the history of the tradition, it becomes common for early Jewish texts to speak of the Satan as the leader of evil spiritual forces. Another thing it brings is its depiction of Mastema as the deceiver of the nations, not merely a punisher or attacker.

At the same time, Mastema also appears in several stories as the antagonist of Israel who attempts to harm God’s elect. And we see this in the biblical stories Jubilees rewrites…

The book of Jubilees went out of its way to insulate God from committing harm. In the original text of Genesis and Exodus, God performs acts that ancient readers found troubling, such as commanding human sacrifices or attempting to kill his own prophets.

Jubilees rewrites these stories by inserting Mastema to do the dirty work, shifting the blame away from YHWH. Here are some examples:

• In Exodus 4:24, God mysteriously meets Moses at a lodging place and tries to kill him. Jubilees changes this so that it was Mastema who tries to assassinate Moses (chapter 48).

• The killing of the Egyptian firstborn (Exodus 11). Instead of the angel of the Lord killing the firstborn of Egypt, Jubilees attributes the slaughter to Mastema’s angelic forces, while God steps in to protect Israel (chapter 49).

• During the ten plagues, Exodus describes the Egyptian magicians replicating some of Moses’ signs. Chapter 48 of Jubilees states that it was Mastema who empowered Pharaoh’s sorcerers to perform those signs to actively oppose Moses.

• In Genesis 22, God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. In chapter 17, Jubilees rewrites this story, taking inspiration from the Book of Job: It was Mastema who challenges God, claiming Abraham will fail the test if his son is demanded.

Jubilees’ retelling of Gen 22 is a particularly interesting one, not least because of how it resembles Job.

The story opens (Jub. 17:15) as Abraham’s faithfulness is lauded in heaven. Mastema, however, devises a test of Abraham’s devotion:

“Behold, Abraham loves Isaac his son, and he delights in him above all things else; bid him offer him as a burnt-offering on the altar, and Thou wilt see if he will do this command, and Thou wilt know if he is faithful in everything wherein Thou dost try him.”

Even though God doesn’t doubt Abraham’s devotion, God agrees to the test and orders Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. And just as in the Genesis account, Abraham obeys.

With Abraham about to slay his son, the angel of Yahweh narrates:

“And I stood before him, and before the prince Mastêmâ, and the Lord said, ‘Bid him not to lay his hand on the lad, nor to do anything to him, for I have shown that he fears the Lord.’” (Jub. 18:9)

The picture of the angel standing before Abraham and Mastema mirrors the scene in Zechariah 3, which we looked at in Part 1 of this series, where the angel of the Yahweh stands before the high priest Joshua and ha-śāṭān. And just as the angel intervenes on behalf of Joshua, so the angel here intervenes on behalf of Abraham.

In Jubilees, Mastema is a participant in God’s court, but he doesn’t merely take orders from God. He is capable of independent thought and action, and, as exemplified in this story, at times even plays the contrarian to God.

Ryan Stokes suggests, “One purpose of this version of Isaac’s near sacrifice is to remove any suspicion that God might harm the elect without provocation and to present the Prince of Mastema instead as the superhuman individual behind the chosen people’s undeserved troubles.”1

Just like in Job, Mastema creates trouble for a righteous person by calling his commitment to God into question. In this sense, Mastema functions as an accuser of sorts.

Later Jewish theologians would eventually formalize this activity on the Satan’s part, depicting him as the official accuser of the righteous before God, as well as the prosecutor of sinners.

There were other Jewish texts emerging in the second temple period that contribute to the development of a head malevolent figure in charge of evil spirits. We find many of these among the noncanonical Dead Sea Scrolls.

One such instance is the Damascus Document, which explicitly draws upon Jubilees. The name this document gives to its satan figure is Belial, who is described quite similarly to Mastema in Jubilees.

Like Mastema, Belial punishes wicked humans, commands a host of spirits, leads humans to sin, and sides with Israel’s enemies in battle. Belial is also said to empower the Egyptian magicians’ opposition to Moses.

One significant development in these scrolls concerning the relationship between the Satan figure and evil is the language of ‘light” and “darkness,” with darkness associated with Belial.

We see this worldview of a cosmic conflict between light and darkness in the texts of the Treatise on the Two Spirits and the War Rule, which are also among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Treatise describes the Angel of Darkness, a superhuman figure who leads all of humanity to practice falsehood in a conflict against the forces of Light that can be traced all the way back to the creation of the world. The War Rule offers instructions for the eschatological conflict between the Sons of Light (led by Belial) and the Sons of Darkness (aided by the angel Michael).

Here we see another significant difference between these scrolls and the preceding literature. While Mastema’s relationship with God is somewhat ambiguous—serving his divinely ordained role as God’s functionary while at other times opposing God’s chosen people—Belial is directly at odds with God, appearing less like one of God’s angels and more like God’s enemy.

Like Belial, the Angel of Darkness also has his scope of activity extended. He exercises influence over both the wicked and the righteous, leading them into sin. There seems to be no type of moral evil for which the Angel of Darkness is not responsible.

These are important steps in the development of the Satan tradition.

Belief in a personified evil power only developed from the second century BCE onward, the period in which Jubilees and the previously mentioned noncanonical Dead Sea Scrolls were likely written. Chad Pierce indicates two large contributing factors to this development:

First, the development of a celestial enemy was heavily influenced by the Jews’ experience under Babylonian and Persian rule. Exposure to Zoroastrianism with its emphasis on cosmic dualism played a fundamental role in the expansion of the good versus evil dichotomy found early Judaism. Similar to the rival gods in Persian literature, Jewish tradition never gives Satan equal status with God. YHWH alone is God, with no evil equivalent. The dichotomy of good and evil found its personified counterpart in unequal leaders in the respective figures of God and Satan. Accordingly, the idea in the Hebrew Bible of a sovereign God responsible for all things, both good and evil, was replaced with a celestial conflict between God and Satan as the leaders of two distinct warring camps. Thus, Satan may have partly evolved from those attributes earlier assigned to God that appeared questionable to both Jews and Christians in the Second Temple period.

Second, the concept of Satan as a personification of evil solidified with the rise of brutal enemies who oppressed Israel. Israel’s battles against foreign enemies (especially Antiochus IV) eventually became cosmically represented in a heavenly war between God and his angels against Satan and his minions. Thus, the clash between Israel’s theology of election and the reality of its foreign oppression aided in the development of Satan as an autonomous figure.2

It remains heavily debated among scholars how much Zoroastrianism influenced the authors of these Dead Sea Scrolls, if at all. But it’s noted that they share a lot of ideas.

For example, both describe the world in terms of a polarity between light and dark, between truth and deceit. Both speak of two warring, evenly matched divine figures, one representing good and the other evil.3

If this influence occurred, the dualistic worldview that developed in the late Archaemenid (First Persian Empire) era played a major role in the personalization of evil into a Satan figure that happened in the pre-Christian era.4

I’ve provided only a very, very brief and oversimplified view of these books. Each one deserves its own study. According to Jubilees, for instance, Mastema and the evil spirits are authorized by God to lead astray all the pagan nations of the earth except Israel, whom God maintains sole jurisdiction and protection over. It would be interesting to look deeper into the theological implications of this as well. But for the purposes of this essay, the above overview will have to do.

From the fallen angel myth of 1 Enoch to the figure of Belial in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we witness the development of the archetype of Satan as the cosmic ruler of darkness, a malevolent attacker, tempter, and enemy of light and truth.

While the name “Satan” doesn’t appear in these apocryphal literature, these developments set the backdrop for, and influenced the portrayals of, Satan in the Gospels. By the time Mark wrote of Jesus’ temptation by the devil in the desert, the figure of Satan had already developed into a malevolent superhuman being who opposes God and humanity.5