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. To read him backward as a single being who was always there is to miss how he was made; the seams still show, and the seams are most of the story.

The accuser with the article

In the Hebrew Bible there is no Devil in the later sense. The word satan is an ordinary noun meaning “adversary,” “obstructor,” or “accuser,” and it is used freely of human opponents — a foreign enemy, a courtroom prosecutor, even, in one episode, the angel of the Lord who stands in the road to block Balaam’s path. Where the word carries the definite article, ha-satan, “the accuser,” it names not a person but an office. In the prologue to the book of Job, the satan is a member of the bene ha-elohim, the sons of God, the heavenly court that presents itself before the Lord; his function there is to patrol the earth and to test, to ask whether Job’s righteousness would survive the loss of its rewards. He acts within God’s permission, never against it: he can touch Job only as far as he is allowed, and not a step further. The same office appears in Zechariah, where the satan stands at the right hand of the high priest Joshua to accuse him, and is rebuked — the prosecutor overruled, not an enemy defeated.

There is one verse where the article drops away. In 1 Chronicles the Chronicler retells an older story: where the book of Samuel had said that the Lord incited David to take a census, Chronicles writes that satan incited him — no article, the bare word standing where a name would stand. Many readers take this single, late verse as the place where the office begins to harden into a proper name, the prosecutor’s title slipping toward the title-holder. The shift is small on the page and enormous in consequence: an attribute of God’s own court is beginning to peel off and become a figure in its own right.

The cosmic enemy takes shape

The turn toward a true cosmic enemy comes in the Second Temple period, in the centuries between the close of the Hebrew prophets and the Common Era, under Persian and Hellenistic pressure. The Persian context matters in particular. Iranian religion held that the world is the arena of a real war between Ohrmazd, the wholly good Wise Lord, and Ahriman, the destructive spirit — two principles locked in conflict until a final renovation purges evil from creation. Jewish thought under and after the Achaemenids did not borrow this scheme wholesale; it remained insistent that God is one and that creation is good. But the apocalyptic imagination of the period absorbed something of its temper: a sense of the present age as a battleground, of unseen powers ranged against the faithful, of a coming judgment that would set the cosmos right. Second Temple Judaism gave the inherited accuser a darker office and a host to command.

The materials for that host came above all from the traditions clustered around the Book of Enoch. Its earliest stratum, the Book of the Watchers, takes a terse and troubling line in Genesis — that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and took them as wives — and expands it into a myth of cosmic corruption. Two hundred angels, the Watchers, descend to the summit of Mount Hermon under the leadership of Shemihazah; they take human wives, who bear the giants, the Nephilim, and they teach humankind forbidden arts. Asael (Azazel) shows men the making of swords and shields and the smelting of metals, and women the use of paint and ornament; others teach sorcery and the reading of the stars. The earth is filled with violence and cries out, and the archangels intercede. The judgment that follows supplies the template the later Devil would inherit: Asael is bound hand and foot and cast into a pit of darkness in the wilderness, the giants are turned against one another, and the Watchers are imprisoned in the valleys of the earth to await the great judgment. Here, before any single satanic leader is named, is the picture of rebel spirits who corrupt the world, are bound, and are reserved for destruction — a host in search of a head. The Charles translation that long carried this text into English renders the binding plainly: the archangel is told to bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. Across the rest of the Second Temple corpus the head acquires names — Belial, Mastema, Beliar — each a prince of the spirits of error, each a foil to the spirits of truth.

By the time of the New Testament the figure has consolidated. Satan is now a singular power, the tempter who confronts Jesus in the wilderness, the figure the Gospel of John calls the ruler of this world, whose order is passing, the prince of demons whose kingdom is divided against itself and cannot stand. He has a host — the demons that possess and are cast out — and a destiny: his defeat is treated as already decided in principle, to be completed at the end. The vision of the Book of Revelation gives the end its imagery: a war in heaven, the great dragon thrown down to the earth, the ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, and, at the last, the lake of fire. The Christian doctrine of last things (eschatology) fixes his career as an arc with a known terminus — active now, judged then.

Lucifer: an interpretation laid over the text

The name Lucifer reaches the Devil by a separate route, and the route is worth keeping distinct from the figure it ends at. Isaiah contains a taunt-song against the king of Babylon, picturing the tyrant’s fall as the fall of a star: hêlēl ben-šaḥar, “shining one, son of dawn,” who boasted that he would climb above the stars of God and make himself like the Most High, and was instead brought down to the pit. In its own setting the song is a piece of political mockery — the morning star, brilliant at dawn and then swallowed by the daylight it announces, as an emblem for an arrogant ruler undone. The Latin Vulgate of Jerome rendered the Hebrew phrase as Lucifer, “light-bearer.” Christian readers, joining the verse to a saying attributed to Jesus — that he had watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven — read Isaiah’s fallen star as the autobiography of the rebel angel before his ruin: an angel of light, highest of the host, cast down for pride. The proud light-bringer expelled from heaven is thus an interpretation laid over the text, not a claim the text makes of itself. It became one of the most durable images the tradition produced, and its fuller astral and literary career — the morning star, Milton’s rebel — belongs to the name itself rather than to the figure assembled here.

The traditions hold him in their own terms

What the strands fuse into differs sharply from one community to the next, and each holds its own version with its own internal logic.

Rabbinic Judaism largely kept ha-satan close to its origin: a tester, a prosecuting angel, the evil inclination’s heavenly correlate, an agent who does a difficult and necessary work within God’s economy rather than a rival to God. The tradition inclined firmly away from a second power that could threaten the divine sovereignty; where Satan is most vivid in the rabbinic imagination he is still, finally, on a leash. Evil is genuine and is reckoned with, but it is not enthroned at the origin of things.

Christianity made him a defeated but active enemy. He is the source of temptation and the prince of a fallen order, a created angel who fell through pride and drew others after him, permitted to operate in the present age but whose end is fixed at the last judgment. The accent falls on a victory already won and not yet consummated: the strong man is bound, his goods are being plundered, and the outcome is certain even as the fight goes on. The Devil here is a real adversary with no independent claim on existence — a creature who turned, not a co-eternal principle.

Islam tells of Iblis, who refused God’s command to bow before Adam and so became al-Shayṭān, the Satan, the whisperer. The Qurʾān stages the scene more than once: God forms Adam, orders the angels to prostrate, and all comply except Iblis, who answers that he will not bow to a creature of clay when he himself was made of fire. For that refusal he is cursed and expelled, but granted a reprieve to tempt Adam’s descendants until the Day of Resurrection. His sin is read in the mainstream as pride and disobedience, kibr; yet a strand of Sufi reflection has read his refusal more strangely — as a perverse fidelity to God’s oneness, a lover who would bow to none but the Beloved and was damned for the excess of his devotion. The figure remains the tempter, but the meaning of his fall is contested within the tradition itself.

Gnostic and dualist currents went furthest of all. Where the others kept the adversary subordinate or created, these read the hostility into the structure of the cosmos. In the Gnostic myth the maker of the material world is not the high God but a lower, ignorant, often malevolent power, the demiurge, born of a flaw within the divine fullness and ruling the world he botched together with his archons; salvation is escape from his order through gnosis. The full metaphysics of that maker belongs to gnosticism and the wider study of dualism; what matters for the adversary is that here the chief hostile power is not a rebel within a good creation but the author of the creation itself. The medieval West inherited a related logic. The Bogomils of the Balkans and the Cathars of Languedoc and Lombardy taught, in their more radical forms, that the visible world is the work of an evil principle — in one widely circulated Bogomil text, an elder son of God who rebelled and fashioned the material order — so that the Devil is not merely the prince of this world but, in a real sense, its god. The eastern reach of Manichaean teaching (Central Asian and Chinese Manichaeism) carried a comparable two-principles cosmology far along the Silk Road, with a kingdom of darkness arrayed against the realm of light from the beginning. In all of these the adversary is promoted from rebel to maker, and the demons under him — cataloged in the long tradition of demonology — become not stray spirits but the staff of a hostile government, with hell as its end and its prison.

The figure and the problem of evil

Across its sources, then, the Devil is less a fixed being than a long accumulation: the name successive communities gave to the problem of evil, a way of holding together the conviction that the world was made good with the overwhelming evidence that it has gone wrong. The accuser of the divine court, the bound Watcher, the ruler of this world, the light-bringer fallen for pride, the whisperer, the hostile maker — each is an attempt to locate the source of wrong without locating it in God. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mainstreams hold that line tightly: evil is genuine, personal, and resisted, but it is derivative, a creature’s turning rather than a first principle, and its defeat is written into the shape of time. The dualist currents pay for a cleaner account of evil’s reality with a costlier metaphysics, setting a second power at or near the origin. What every version refuses, in its own way, is the one move that would dissolve the problem by surrendering it — the placing of evil, finally and without remainder, at the foundation of things.

Scholarship and sources

The modern study of the Devil treats him precisely as a composite assembled in history, and the philological spadework underlies everything else. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s multivolume history opens with The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Cornell University Press, 1977), tracing the personification of evil from the ancient Near East through the New Testament and continuing across later volumes into the medieval and modern periods. Henry Ansgar Kelly’s Satan: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2006) argues the strict philological case that the unified Devil of later tradition overreads the scriptural data — that the satan of the Hebrew Bible and even much of the New Testament is closer to a celestial official than to the cosmic rebel that doctrine made of him. Elaine Pagels’s The Origin of Satan (Random House, 1995) reads the figure socially, following how the early Christian movement deployed Satan to demonize its opponents, and how the intimate enemy came to wear human faces.

The primary materials are largely hostable in the public domain. R. H. Charles’s editions remain the standard English gateway to the apocalyptic substrate: his translation of the Book of Enoch, with its account of the Watchers’ descent and binding, and his two-volume Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), which gathers the wider corpus in which Belial, Mastema, and the rebel host take shape. For the Persian dualism that pressured the Second Temple turn, the Mazdean opposition of Ohrmazd and Ahriman and the doctrine of the final renovation are documented in the Avestan and Pahlavi sources synthesized in Mary Boyce’s standard surveys of Zoroastrian religion. The medieval dualist afterlife of the hostile maker is preserved in the nineteenth-century critical editions — Charles Schmidt’s history of the Cathars (1849) and Döllinger’s Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters (1890), the latter printing the editio princeps of the Bogomil-Cathar Interrogatio Iohannis, the apocryphon in which an elder son of God rebels and fashions the material world. The standard English sourcebook for that medieval corpus remains Wakefield and Evans’s Heresies of the High Middle Ages.

→ 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 · Lucifer · Iblis · Book Of Enoch · Second Temple Judaism · Isaiah · Zechariah · Christianity · Islam · Hell · Demon · Demonology · Gnosticism · Dualism · Catharism · Bogomilism · Central Asian Chinese Manichaeism