The Devil

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The Devil is the chief adversary of God in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition: the personification of evil, the tempter and accuser of humankind, and — in the developed Christian picture — a created angel who rebelled and fell. He is one figure assembled, over many centuries, out of several that began apart.

In the Hebrew Bible there is no Devil in the later sense. The word satan means “adversary” or “accuser,” and where it carries the definite article — in the prologue to Job and in Zechariah — it names an office rather than a proper name: a member of the divine court whose task is to test and to prosecute, acting within God’s permission, not against it. In Chronicles the word stands without the article, and many readers take that single verse as the place where satan begins to harden into a name. The turn toward a cosmic enemy comes later, in the Second Temple period, under Persian and Hellenistic pressure. The apocalyptic literature of those centuries — above all the traditions around the Book of Enoch, where angels descend, corrupt the earth, and are bound — supplies the materials: a host of rebel spirits and a leader to head them. By the time of the New Testament, Satan is a singular power, “the ruler of this world,” opposed to the kingdom of God and destined for defeat.

The name Lucifer enters by a separate route. Isaiah mocks a fallen Babylonian king as hêlēl ben-šaḥar, “shining one, son of dawn” — the morning star brought low. The Latin Vulgate rendered the phrase Lucifer, “light-bearer,” and Christian readers, joining it to Jesus’s saying about Satan falling like lightning, read the passage as the autobiography of the rebel angel before his fall. The proud light-bringer cast from heaven is thus an interpretation laid over the text, not a claim the text makes of itself — though it became one of the most durable images in the tradition.

The traditions hold him in their own terms. Rabbinic Judaism largely kept ha-satan as a tester and inclined away from a rival to God. Christianity made him a defeated but active enemy, the source of temptation and the prince of a fallen order, whose end is fixed at the last judgment. Islam tells of Iblīs, who refused God’s command to bow before Adam and so became Shayṭān, the whisperer — a refusal scholars have read variously, some even as a strange fidelity to God’s oneness. Gnostic and dualist currents went further, casting the maker of the material world itself as the hostile power.

Scholarship treats the Devil less as a fixed being than as a long accumulation: a way successive communities gave a face and a story to the problem of evil, of why a world made good should go so wrong. What the figure holds together, across its sources, is that question — and the refusal to set evil at the origin of things.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: Eschatology · Revelation · Book Of Daniel · Gnosis · Emanation