In the last post, I summarized the argument of Gary Anderson about sin’s intellectual history in social transition from a metaphor of weight, a physical substance that had to be carried or transferred, to a metaphor of debt, a matter of incurred obligation in the spiritual economy of the world that obligated the sinner’s repayment or invited the debtor’s remission of the debt. Under both metaphorical apparatus, it becomes clear quite quickly that there is no single obvious arrangement for how the expiation of sin works. Sin can be put off by being physically transmitted into another being, like the goat for Azazel on Yom Kippur, or it can be remitted by being paid in the physical suffering of death, perhaps vicariously by the death of a martyr, or it can be paid off through alms. To whom the payment is made is also unclear: in Deutero-Isaiah, the holder of Israel’s debt is God, while in Early Christianity, the holder of the cheirographon against the human race is typically assumed to be a personified, monstrous Sin, Death, the Underworld, and/or the Devil (sometimes constituting a kind of menagerie of evil cosmic beings in Early Christian literature). In this post, I will trace out a little more clearly and carefully the growth of Jewish and Christian mythic etiologies for sin, explaining why people sin, where sin comes from, and how people’s sin-debt is accounted, as well as to whom. We will see both that there was no single, common answer to this question in antiquity and that no answer given was ever fully satisfactory to every party.
A preliminary caveat: I will ignore for a moment the etiology provided in Genesis 2:4-3:24 as the origin of sin mainly because the vast majority of Early Jewish literature until the New Testament ignores it. Adam and Eve were simply not seen by the majority of Jews as the humans principally responsible for the world’s problems, as they became in Early Christianity. Some Jews, of course, felt that the events of the Garden were significant, and that is partly how Paul comes to view Adam’s relationship to Christ the way he does in the Letter to the Romans. But as this was a minority view, it will help us to assess it more astutely to ignore it for now, and to read it in the wider context of how Ancient Jews and Christians did believe that sin and its consequence of death came into the world.
If there is a text in Genesis that Ancient Jews found useful on that score, it was not 2:4-3:24 but 6:1-6. In that brief passage, we are told:
When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. Yhwh said, ‘My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.’ It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth—when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. Yhwh saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. (JPS, modified)
When ancient readers looked at this text as an explanation for the origins of evil (more on this below), they were making two logical observations about the passage. The first is that while we have had disobedience to a divine mandate (in the Garden scene) and a couple of murders in the lineage of Cain (Gen 4:8-24), this is the first time the text itself has bothered to tell us that things are going really wrong among, specifically, the children of Seth, who is the replacement child for Cain and Abel (4:25). After all, the wrap-up in the present form of Genesis to the story of the divine beings descending to copulate with human women and produce demigod offspring is to remark on how evil humans seem to be in God’s eyes, necessitating the Flood. Second, this passage introduces us to the Noah cycle (6:6-9:29), in which God will, dependent on the source from which one of the two overlapping accounts of the story is drawn from, either flood the earth because he regrets having made the things that live on it (6:6-7) or to purify it because human violence renders it impure (7:11-12; 8:20-22). The intermixture of the divine and human realms is theoretically the reason for this destruction, though the text does not spell out the connection in full detail.
A brief aside on the typical theodicy of this passage: Christian apologists will sometimes make the suggestion that the Israelite mythology retained in Genesis here is distinct from Mediterranean and Near Eastern myths about demigods or about the Flood for a variety of reasons. Where, supposedly, the Greek world and the Mesopotamian world celebrated their divine-human heroes, the Israelite author sees them as problematic, wicked, and causing the destruction of the world; where the gods of other flood myths are capricious and flood the world on a whim, the biblical God does so for reasons having to do with ethical justice or moral outrage. These complaints do injustice both to the “pagan” sources and to Genesis. One would have to be almost wholly ignorant, for instance, of the Age of Heroes as it was recalled in the Greek poetic tradition in Homer and Hesiod and their literary heirs to think that the Greeks in general found heroic behavior civil, acceptable, and praiseworthy: the Greeks thought that it was none other than Zeus who wanted the heroes killed off, presumably on the grounds of trying to avoid future patricide and chaos (Iliad I.6). While it is true that the gods of, say, Gilgamesh or Atrahasis seem petty in their decision to flood the world (basically because humans are noisy), it is special pleading to give Yhwh a pass in his reasons in this text. When we are first told that Yhwh regrets creating humans, it is because they are evil and their hearts are continually wicked in intention, but we are not told much concerning why or how this is the case; just the mere assertion that it is so. It is only later that we are told that Yhwh is flooding the earth because humans are violent. That hardly explains why he is killing all the animals and plants, of course, other than that logically, the animals having been created on the same day as humans in the Priestly creation story, their fate is bound up with that of humans; in the Yahwistic creation story to which the other version of the flood narrative belongs, the logic would likewise be that humans and animals alike are both n’fashot chayyot, “living creatures” (Gen 2:7, 19). But from either angle, the Yhwh in this text is a mythic Yhwh, and the etiology given for sin is a mythic etiology that goes back to Yhwh himself. Yhwh made the humans; the humans are defective; Yhwh must now rectify his mistake, just as he did when he created animals to be Adam’s helpmeet instead of the woman. Once the Yhwh of the Yahwistic source has been spliced with the transcendent Deity of the Priestly Source, however, the notion that Yhwh himself is at fault for the sins of the humans will become a problematic calculus in need of revision, qualification, or outright rejection. Hence the story is reframed from within the cultic perspective of the Priestly author, which sees the matter as one of purity and impurity, sanctity and profanity, illicit mixture and the need once more to separate the constituent elements of the universe to their proper places.
That last point also explains what is so devastating from the author’s point of view about the tale of divine-human copulation: orders of creation are being mixed that need to stay separate in the cultic mindset of the author (or at least the readers of the later, unified text). The story of the descending sons of God was connected by Early Jews to another, even briefer tale in the Book of Genesis, from the previous chapter: that of the patriarch Enoch. Enoch, we are told, “walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him” (5:24). Early Jewish and Christian interpreters of Genesis generally took it to be obvious that these two stories were related, perhaps at first because of their reciprocal character: Enoch is a human who, the text implies, is translated to heaven; the sons of God are divine beings who descend from heaven to earth. In both instances a traversing of the heaven-earth divide occurs, both are attributed to divine intention, but one is seemingly a praiseworthy act of God, while the other is an act of lesser divine beings that leads to terrestrial calamity. If these later stories are an etiology of sin, then they are the first we get that attributes sin to divine beings other than God or connects it to them in some way. It is not God’s fault, but the fault of other beings like God in the universe—gods, angels, humans—that sin exists.
Riffing on this tale, in the Book of Jubilees, we get a far more intense description of the earth’s corruption:
When humanity began to multiply on the surface of the entire earth and daughters were born to them, the angels of the Lord…saw that they were beautiful to look at. So they married of them whomever they chose. They gave birth to children for them and they were giants. Wickedness increased on the earth. All animate beings corrupted their way—(everyone of them) from people to cattle, animals, birds, and everything that moves about on the ground. All of them corrupted their way and their prescribed course. They began to devour one another, and wickedness increased on the earth. Every thought of all humanity’s knowledge was evil like this all the time. (Jub. 5:1-2)
Significantly, we get more backstory on the sons of God and their demigod children, the “giants” (probably the appropriate translation of the etymologically challenged Nephilim). We are told both that God has locked them up and that the spirits of the Nephilim, which survived the Flood, have become “impure demons” who desire to “mislead Noah’s grandchildren, to make them act foolishly, and to destroy them” (10:1). When Noah prays for the demons to be imprisoned, “Mastema, the leader of the spirits, came” and implored God: “Lord Creator, leave some of them before me; let them listen to me and do everything that I tell them, because if none of them is left for me I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among humanity. For they are meant for (the purposes) of destroying and misleading before my punishment because the evil of humanity is great” (10:8). So, says the interpreting angel of the apocalypse, “All of the evil ones who were depraved we imprisoned in the place of judgment, while we left a tenth of them to exercise power on the earth before the satan” (10:11). Noah is given knowledge of the medicinal cures for the effects of the demons, which he passes on in a book to Shem. We are also told later that these demons are the gods of the other nations: “Separate from the nations, and do not eat with them. Do not act as they do, and do not become their companion, for their actions are something that is impure, and all their ways are defiled and something abominable and detestable. They offer their sacrifices to the dead, and they worship demons. They eat in tombs, and everything they do is empty and worthless” (22:16-17).
The Book of the Watchers (now included in an anthology with other Enochic apocalypses as the chapters 1 En 1-36) gives us more thorough descriptions of the sinful behaviors that humanity learns from the Watchers through their human wives. These are, in a nutshell, sciences of magic and warfare; like in Jubilees, the Watchers, the sons of God from Genesis 6, are imprisoned in the underworld as punishment for their crimes prior to the Flood (think the Titanomachy from Greek myth) while the divine half of their sons, the Nephilim, survive to become demons who tempt and infect the human race even in the aftermath of God’s purification project for the world. In other words, the question could be phrased like this: when humans started sinning in the mythic, antediluvian past, God theoretically purified the world with the Flood; so why is humanity still so sinful? The Enochic answer: the Nephilim endure as demons who prey upon human weaknesses. This etiology of sin will serve as the backstory for later Enochic eschatologies in which God will again have to purify the world of evil through judgment and purification, so that demonic knowledge and the human error it causes, as well as the death that is consequential to it, may cease.
Of interest is that in these Enochic apocalypses the patriarch himself plays a special role in the divine drama of cultic purification for the world, intercession on behalf of the fallen angels, and the world’s judgment. In The Book of the Watchers, Enoch is hired by the imprisoned Watchers to go and implore God on their behalf, which requires him to ascend in a visionary trance to heaven and entreat God in his divine court; Enoch does so, though the Watcher’s requests are denied (12-16). God’s answer to the Watchers through Enoch is also telling:
“Fear not, Enoch, righteous man and scribe of truth; come here, and hear my voice. Go and say to the watchers of heaven, who sent you to petition in their behalf, ‘You should petition in behalf of humans, and not humans in behalf of you. Why have you forsaken the high heaven, the eternal sanctuary; and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men; and taken for yourselves wives, and done as the sons of earth; and begotten for yourselves sons, giants? You were the holy ones and spirits, living forever. With the blood of women you have defiled yourselves, and with the blood of flesh you have begotten, and with the blood of men you have lusted, and you have done as they do—flesh and blood, who die and perish. Therefore I gave them women, that they might cast seed into them, and thus beget children by them, that nothing fail them on the earth. But you originally existed as spirits, living forever, and not dying for all the generations of eternity; therefore I did not make women among you.’” (15:1-7)
Then the author offers a concluding explanatory note:
The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling; But now the giants who were begotten by the spirits and flesh—they will call them evil spirits on the earth, for their dwelling will be on the earth. The spirits that have gone forth from the body of their flesh are evil spirits, for from humans they came into being, and from the holy watchers was the origin of their creation. Evil spirits they will be on the earth, and evil spirits they will be called. The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling; but the spirits begotten on the earth, on the earth is their dwelling. (15:7-10).
If it were not compelling enough that the angelic-human role has been reversed, with Enoch taking a position of the heavenly cult the Watchers have abandoned, we also get here a theorization of what they did wrong that in turn provides a kind of hamartiology: they have mixed with the fleshy humans, in their fleshy manner, in a way unbecoming of immortal spirits. So the problem of sin is also traced in this tradition to the quality of body that humans subsist in, specifically its mortality and the way that mortality necessitates periodic ritual impurity through sex.
The myth of fallen angels and their demonic offspring was not a universally believed concept in Ancient Judaism, necessarily, but it was a powerful cultural story that explained why people, especially non-Jews, were sinful. It is evident in the New Testament at various points, in the writings of some Church Fathers, and also in those of various generations of Rabbis. Medieval Jews and Christians would sometimes take issue with this mythic etiology precisely for its fantastic nature: angels siring demigod offspring was a problem in a high medieval Christian tradition that, for instance, believed that angels were incorporeal (first suggested by Aquinas, against the unified patristic witness and the ancient belief in pneuma as a kind of body). And, a multiplicity of fallen angels teaching humans sinful behaviors did not, for Christians at least, really resolve the problems they used sin language to name. Fallen angels did not provide a neat explanation for the role of a singular Satan figure that was increasingly important to Christian thinking about the origin and character of sin.
Satan has an evolutionary history in Early Judaism, chiefly drawn from three streams. The first is the myth of fallen angels in which a single angel—Shemyazah, Mastema, Beliar, Azazel—is seen as the leader of the Watchers and the primary architect of their sin. The second is the mythic backstory of the Hebrew Bible, in which Yhwh takes the place of Baal as the divine champion against Yamm, the Sea, the sea monsters, and Mot, Death, which lend various of their characteristics to the developed figure of Satan in later Christianity especially (and to some degree Judaism too). And the third is the transformation of Yahwistic/Judahite cosmology during the Babylonian and Persian periods, when Yhwh became a heavenly emperor with an extensive bureaucracy in which prosecuting attorneys and executioners were core members of the court. These are the contexts in which the Garden story, the Chaoskampf theomachy, and the Temple are all best approached for what they have to say about sin, too.
The myth of fallen angels in texts like Jubilees and Enoch is probably older than its composition in those texts, and the texts themselves evidence an already pluriform tradition in which different angelic names, roles, and influences change dependent on textual layer and pericope; but common to the tradition is the idea of a commander of the Watchers who is responsible for their fatal decision. We can find parallels to this myth in Canaanite texts from Ugarit as well as in Greco-Roman myth; especially, the story of Helel Ben Shachar, the Day-Star, Son of Dawn, who is an upstart that attempts to usurp El’s rule and make himself king of the gods, only to be cast down to the underworld. His story appears in the texts recovered from Ugarit and is referenced in Isaiah 14 in an oracle against the king of Babylon, comparing him to the rebellious deity. The Watchers do not attempt to usurp God, by contrast, but they do disrupt the divine order of the universe, and they, like Helel, end up condemned to the underworld for their crime. The concept of a demonic ruler of the wilderness and/or the underworld is in evidence in Ancient Israel and Judah probably in the figure of Azazel from the Yom Kippur ritual, but also, probably, in the evidence for Israelite and Judahite religion as sharing Canaanite myths, deities, and cosmology, in which the wild spaces of the unsettled peripheries of the world are the haunts of monsters and demonic entities, not subject to the rule of the gods (or at least not fully subject).
It is here too that the Satan figure clearly borrows from the more powerful and epic divine adversaries of Yhwh in the Chaoskampf motif of the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. Like Baal and Marduk, Yhwh has defeated the Sea and the various sea monsters in the mythic past, as well as in the human past, when he repeated his victory over the Sea in the events of the Exodus. Like Baal in particular, Yhwh awaits a future showdown with Death, his ultimate enemy in the universe (Isa 25:7-8). And this is the point of intersecting relevance for the Temple and its cult with respect to sin, demons, and Satan, too. The Yhwh who fights monsters and evil gods is fundamentally the Yhwh in his liturgical or supernatural body, the one that sits enthroned in the Jerusalem Temple just as Baal did in his Temple on Mt. Zaphon in modern Jebel Aqra, Syria: and as such, he is the God of Life-giving and Life-saving power, sending forth both fecundating rain and warlike power against enemies of his domain. This is the mythic explanation for the taboo against Death in the Temple cult: Yhwh is the God of Life, and Death is his enemy, unwelcome in the space of his royal palace, the Temple, in turn a miniature of the cosmos over which Yhwh is destined to reign. The Temple is also in the background of the myth of fallen angels as we encounter it in the Enoch literature: scholars suggest that the Watchers are pulling double duty in the text, not just as primordial inventors of human sin, but also as textual stand-ins for priests in the author’s day violating their restrictions on marriage to a limited pool of female candidates (namely, daughters of priests). The Watchers, like these priests, have abandoned their posts in heaven, violated their cultic obligations and restrictions, and have in the process both ritually defiled earth and made it morally impure, making the purification of the Flood necessary. In this context, the connection of the Watchers and the cosmic monsters to the Temple mythos provides a mythic structure too for understanding the consequences of human sin and how to deal with them. When sin is considered a miasma, a burden, a kind of physical substance, it is a cosmic threat to Yhwh’s divine order as king of the world, and must be banished to the domains where Yhwh’s enemies reside: not in the settled space of the Temple in Jerusalem, Judah, or Israel, but into the liminal space of the wilderness, to the underworld, or to the Sea from which his cosmic enemies reside. Where it cannot be allowed in any way is in his physical presence in the Temple, and it cannot be allowed to persist unchecked in the community of Yhwh’s worshipers, either.
But Yhwh has provided ample means in the cult and in law for managing, absolving, and circumventing sin. There is no assumption in the Torah that sin can ever be fully expunged from human beings, nor that Yhwh’s love is predicated on human sinlessness, nor that the mere presence of sin in someone’s life fully nullifies their capacity for justice in Yhwh’s sight. Much like ritual impurity, which is contracted through everyday, ordinary human activities that are morally licit in themselves (sex, childbirth, burying the dead), moral impurity from sin is an unavoidable consequence of life: humans are made of flesh, they are limited in their understanding and ability, and they regularly fail to meet the demands of Law and Wisdom as a matter of pedagogical fact. What is avoidable, and what really matters, is the avoidance of egregious moral impurities from sins that Yhwh finds outrageous. Simple error in everyday matters of cult and covenant may be unavoidable, but things like idolatry, adultery, and murder—things that Yhwh commands against, in other words—are avoidable. Ritual impurity provokes God’s reaction against liturgical offenders because the miasmic sources of that impurity are connected to Yhwh’s great foe, Death; moral impurity, however, threatens punishment and rebuke from Yhwh, and later the removal of the Divine Presence which will result in exile. Sin, in other words, is measurable as one among other such cosmic substances that threatens the stability and harmony of the world that Yhwh rules, in a phase of Yahwistic thinking where that rule is, if not necessarily fragile, also not (yet) plenipotentiary.
The metaphorical logic changes in the seventh, sixth, and succeeding centuries as the image of Yhwh does. As Judahites or Judeans reconceived Yhwh not in his liturgical or supernatural body (recycled as the Glory and Name of Yhwh), but as a mystical or cosmic body, dwelling at the summit of, filling, and transcending the universe, Sin and Death cease to be enemies of Yhwh on par with his power, as do the chaos monsters associated with the sea. Theomachy remains a part of the language of this kind of Yahwism, but the terms of the battle are now uneven. Yhwh fights with Sea, with sea monsters, and with Death, but as supreme cosmic creator and sovereign, whose powers are unmatched by their fledgling strength; hence the duality of Yhwh’s battle with Leviathan on the one hand and Leviathan’s status as his pet in postexilic literature on the other. Likewise, Death does not threaten the divine presence in the Temple, since God himself does not live in the Temple: only his Name or his Radiance or his Angel or his Wisdom (etc.) does. Instead, Sin and Death threaten human (and angelic) access to the divine presence. Indeed, in the Book of Revelation, God himself summons and commissions Death as one of his agents in the world (Rev 6:7-8). This is not the kind of theology one can have with a lesser Yhwh.
It is also in the context of these centuries that, as we saw Gary Anderson argue in the last post, sin transitions from being conceptualized as a burden to being conceptualized as a debt. In the bureaucratic, economic, and multicultural context of the Achaemenid Empire, Judeans found the vision of Yhwh as a heavenly emperor, with a vast system of angelic ministers and satraps that helped him keep tabs on and rule his divine and human subjects, the most appropriate image for conceptualizing his supremacy in human terms. Hence in the Book of Daniel, each nation has its own angelic “prince” (Heb: nasi), and in apocalyptic literature of the late Second Temple period generally, there is an angel assigned to every natural phenomenon. If the Temple was previously a royal palace for the deity a la the Bronze Age Near Eastern palatial complex, the Temple was now a royal residence that double-functioned as the imperial headquarters on earth, matched to the imperial headquarters in heaven, just as the Persian emperors enjoyed not one but many imperial capitals. And among this Yhwh’s servants were angelic scribes, responsible for recording the merits and demerits of humans on earth, as well as satans, responsible for attacking and executing Yhwh’s enemies.1 This heavenly bureaucracy matched the reemergence of a scribal class in Second Temple Judaism that was at the time also beginning to compile and redact the earliest portions of what we now think of as the Hebrew Bible, specifically the Pentateuchal Torah and the prophetic corpora, though these would not exercise normative influence as “scripture” within mainstream Judaism for centuries to come.
This is both where we get the myth of the fallen angels as we now possess it and the figure of the Satan from. Hašatan in Hebrew means “the attacker” or “the adversary,” and is not an individual but a role at court that can be played by any divine being. In Numbers 22:22, it is the Angel of Yhwh who is the Satan against Balaam; in Zechariah 3, the Satan is a supernatural being that wants to “attack and kill” the high priest, Joshua; in 1 Chronicles 21:1, “a satan” incites David to take a census of Israel.2 As Ryan Stokes argues, “The origin of the satan tradition should be understood in the context of other traditions pertaining to superhuman agents of death in the Hebrew scriptures. Such divine bringers of death include ‘the destroyer’ (hammašḥît) who kills the firstborn children of Egypt on the eve of the exodus (Exod 12:23). Ezekiel 9 speaks of superhuman executioners as well. The angel of Yhwh also serves in the capacity of executioner in several passages. It is the angel of Yhwh who, in response to the prayer of Hezekiah, strikes down 185,000 Assyrians who have marched on Judah (2 Kgs 19:35 // Isa 37:36). It is also the angel of Yhwh who kills 70,000 Israelites as a result of David’s census in 2 Sam 24.”3 However, “While the satan tradition likely developed from the idea that the angel of Yhwh would at times serve as an executioner of the wicked into the idea that there was a particular satanic attacker distinct from the angel of Yhwh, it is not the case that this tradition exhibits a simple linear progression corresponding to a chronological arrangement of the biblical texts.”4 In the Book of Job, it is the satan’s job is to seek disloyalty to Yhwh in the imperial domain, and Yhwh invites him to test the allegiance of Job, the most righteous of Yhwh’s earthly subjects. In the Enoch literature, satanic attackers assault heaven on a daily basis seeking to test the earthly righteous and are intercepted by angels; they are, however, notably distinct from the Watchers, their chief, and the demons. Indeed, Early Judaism had a wide and disputed “taxonomy” of supernatural beings that might cause harm to humans, including by inducing or punishing sin: śəʿîrîm, spirits that haunt wild places, šēdîm (Deut 32:17; Ps 106:37) andʾĕlîlîm for foreign deities, all translated in the Septuagint by daimonia. The sons of God or the Watchers and their demonic children map unevenly onto this terrain, which was “teeming with invisible forces that are out to harm humanity, beings who would arbitrarily attack the righteous and the wicked alike. These beings would cause various sorts of illnesses, and special procedures were prescribed to relieve a person of their afflictions.”5 In much of the Hebrew Bible, “the sovereignty of Israel’s one God” means that it is he who is the primary agent “in meting out punishment to those who deserve it” through the medium of “certain ‘spirits’ that carry out God’s work of bringing trouble upon human beings” (exemplorum gratia, Judg 9; 1 Sam 16-19; 1 Kgs 22).
It is not until the various chief angels of the Enochic traditions in The Book of Watchers and later apocalypses on the one hand and the “Prince of Mastema” in Jubilees on the other that we get a single spirit considered to be the quintessential personification or ruler of evil in the universe. This figure is the precedent for the figure of Belial in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is noteworthy that these are post-Persian texts, too, given that Achaemenid-era and later Zoroastrianism postulated a secondary, evil divine entity, Angra Mainyu/Ahriman, as the origin and force of evil in the universe (though some cosmogonies in Zoroastrianism stress that this secondary divinity takes its ontological origin ultimately from Ahura Mazda/Ohrmazd, the supreme deity of good and life). Indeed, as Stokes writes of the Dead Sea Scrolls, “Both these scrolls and Zoroastrian sources, for example, describe the world in terms of a polarity between light and darkness and between truth and deceit. And both speak of two warring, evenly matched superhuman figures, one representing good and the other evil.”6 The parallels are “not merely a matter of a handful of shared motifs, but is systemic,” and the influence probably coincided well with the apocalyptic reconceptualization of the angelic prince of sin, evil, and darkness with the war leader of dark forces in a cosmic, eschatological war with the powers of light.7 The New Testament inherits and makes use of a variety of these evolving Jewish traditions about the Satan figure, seeing him variously as a deputy of God for punishing evil (1 Cor 5:5; 2 Cor 12:7; 1 Tim 1:20; Jude 8-10) as well as an enemy of God (Matt 13:38-39; 25:41; Lk 11:18-21; Acts 26:18; 2 Cor 6:14-15; Heb 2:14; 1 Jn 3:8; Rev 20:10), but also witnesses two crucial expansions of the Satan tradition in Early Judaism, by depicting him as “the accuser of our comrades” (Rev 12:10) and as the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Rom 16:20; Rev 12:9; 20:2). In the first expansion, Satan is the “accuser” less in the function of prosecutor and more in the function of tester, as in Job 1-2 and other early texts surveyed above (e.g., Jub 17:15-18:16; 4Q225 2 i 9-10; Matt 6:13; Lk 22:31). In this context, John of Patmos’s description of Satan as “the accuser of our comrades” should be read as meaning “that the prophet John and other early Jewish writers regarded the Satan as one who would malevolently incite God to test the righteous with adversity.”8
In the second, the NT has not coined the concept of the Satan as the figure at work in the Garden, but it has capitalized on it to further extent than other Early Jewish literature where the idea is developed. Moreover, the invocation of the serpent from Eden in reference to Satan in the New Testament is a species of a type of Jewish exegesis where the emphasis is on who Satan is more than on explaining the mythic history reported in Genesis 3: the serpent is probably aggregated to Satan because other serpents and dragons were already being aggregated to him, like Leviathan and Rahab, and serpents, together with other dangerous animals, were considered by some Early Jews to be under Satan’s command (Jub 11:11-13; Lk 10:18-20). Hence, “Revelation’s references to the Satan as ‘the ancient serpent’ [are not] an attempt to explain the story of Gen 3 or any other passage from the Hebrew scriptures that refers to a primordial serpent. Revelation appropriates these traditional images in order to portray the Satan.”9 Perhaps the most crucial evidence that members of the Jesus Movement did not universally see the serpent in Eden as Satan is the fact that when Paul does connect Adam typologically to Christ, it is to emphasize Christ’s obedience to God’s will in contrast to Adam’s disobedience, not to emphasize Christ as victor over Satan where Adam was victim.
So, by the time that the fundamental structure of Christian Theology was forming in the second through the eighth centuries CE, and that rabbinic literature and culture was reaching its apex in the same time period, a thoroughly developed mythic cosmology of gods, spirits, demons, and Satan had been formulated over many prior centuries to which they were heir, and which they coordinated in various ways with the divine hierarchies of the Greco-Roman world, especially with the daimonia, numina, and genii, the lesser gods, godlings, and divine spirits that populated the lower heavens, the sublunary realm, the natural world, and human domestic spaces (and bodies), and which could be subdivided into eudaimonia, good daemons, and kakodaimonia, bad daemons, the former eventually sublimated to gods and angeloi, “messengers” of the gods, leaving the latter to assume daimonia completely. This spiritual landscape also boasted the spirits of the undead, ghosts, hungry or angry ghosts, monsters, and nefarious, infernal deities who were invoked by magicians, everyday folk magic, and who could prey upon the living given the opportunity. The cosmology of late antique and medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims comes from the fusion of those Mediterranean and Near Eastern spiritual menageries. Early Christians in particular were obsessed with the demon-haunted world of antiquity, and their catechetical, ritual, and homiletical literature and activity all assume the constant threat of the demonic as an incitation to sin. Pay-off or conquest of the demonic is also, therefore, the primary lens through which Early Christians thought about atonement.
But importantly, there remained Jews, Christians, and pagans who found the blame for sin on superhuman entities to be less than fully satisfactory, presenting as it did a somewhat deterministic, fatalistic, and infantilized view of human nature. The Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach advises: “Do not say, ‘It was the Lord’s doing that I fell away,’ for he does not do what he hates. Do not say, ‘It was he who led me astray’; for he has no need of the sinful” (Sir 15:11-12). Instead, “It was he who created humankind in the beginning, and he left them in the power of their own free choice [yēṣer]. If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice” (15:14-15). Indeed, “He has not commanded anyone to be wicked, ad he has not given anyone permission to sin” (15:20). Given that most Early Jews beyond the sectarian community at Qumran and that composed the New Testament saw the Satan figure as an agent of God rather than his enemy, the implication of Sirach’s rejection here of divine temptation includes the idea that culpability for sin can be deferred to Satanic attack or temptation. Sin is entirely the volition or inclination, the yēṣer, of the person. (Elsewhere, though, Ben Sirach openly declares that God has either made people good or evil; see, e.g., 33:14-15.) The Epistle of Enoch (1 En 91-108) says, “[I]t was not ordained <for a man> to be a slave, nor was <a decree> given for a woman to be a handmaid; but it happened because of oppression. Thus lawlessness was not sent upon the earth; but men created it by themselves” (1 En 98:4). Similarly, James says: “No one, when tempted, should say ‘I am being tempted by God’” (Jas 1:13). Importantly, none of these texts denies that there are evil spirits who engage in attack and temptation and even incitation against human beings; only that the blame for sin remains with the sinner.10
In brief, then, we can say the following: the concept of sin was connected by Ancient Jews and Christians to a variety of cultic and social ideas, such as burdens, debts, purity and holiness, and death and evil; a variety of evolving mythic etiologies for sin, culminating in the concept of a singular Satan figure, helped to explain why people sin as part of explaining why there is evil in the world. But in addition to intuiting by these traditions the idea that sin and evil are in some sense baked into the universe, and not exclusively human in origin, many also strongly felt that the blame for sin could not be simply deferred to supernatural, non-human beings. Humans also actively, volitionally participated in the struggle between good and evil. Seeking to reconcile these two poles of the mystery of iniquity would prove a fundamental concern of apocalyptic and philosophical literature in these traditions, as well as among contemporary pagans. It is thither we turn next.
See, once more, my mentor Leslie Baynes’s excellent The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses: 200 BCE - 200 CE (SJSJ 152; Leiden: Brill, 2001).
See Ryan E. Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 10-25.
Stokes, The Satan, 26-27.
Stokes, The Satan, 27.
Stokes, The Satan, 52.
Stokes, The Satan, 192-193.
Stokes, The Satan, 194-195.
Stokes, The Satan, 214; for the wider context and citations, see 210-214.
Stokes, The Satan, 219.
See Stokes, The Satan, 120-142.
Does the conception of sin as burden connect at all with the conception of an oracle as a burden (cf. “the burden of the LORD came to me”)?