The Origin of Satan (11 page)

own coins, and to increase commerce with a worldwide network

of other Greek

46 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

cities. They could participate in such cultural projects as the

Olympic games with allied cities and gain the advantages of

mutual defense treaties. Many wanted their sons to have a Greek

education. Besices reading Greek literature, from the
Iliad
and

the
Odyssey
to Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, and participating

in public athletic competitions, as Greeks did, they could

advance themselves in the wider cosmopolitan world.

But many other Jews, perhaps the majority of the population

of Jerusalem and the countryside—tradespeople, artisans, and

farmers—detested these “Hellenizing Jews” as traitors to God

and Israel alike. The revolt ignited by old Mattathias encouraged

people to resist Antiochus’s orders, even at the risk of death, and

oust the foreign rulers. After intense fighting, the Jewish armies

finally won a decisive victory. They celebrated by purifying and

rededicating the Temple in a ceremony commemorated, ever

since, at the annual festival of Hanukkah.

Jews resumed control of the Temple, the priesthood, and the

government; but after the foreigners had retreated, internal

conflicts remained, especially over who would control these

institutions. These divisions now intensified, as the more

rigorously separatist party dominated by the Maccabees opposed

the Hellenizing party. The former, having won the war, had the

upper hand.

Ten to twenty years after the revolt began, the influential Has-

monean family gained control of the high priesthood in what

was now essentially a theocratic state. Although originally

identified with their Maccabean ancestors, successive

generations of the family abandoned the austere habits of their

predecessors. Two generations after the Maccabean victory, die

party of Pharisees, advocating increased religious rigor,

challenged the Hasmoneans. According to Tcherikover’s analysis,

the Pharisees, backed by tradespeople and farmers, despised the

Hasmoneans as having become essentially secular rulers who had

abandoned Israel’s ancestral ways. The Pharisees demanded that

the Hasmoneans relinquish the high priesthood to those who

deserved it—people like themselves, who strove to live

according to religious law.18

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 47

During the following decades, other, more radical dissident

groups joined the Pharisees in denouncing the great high priestly

family and its allies. Such groups were anything but uniform:

they were fractious and diverse, and with the passage of time

included various groups of Essenes, the monastic community at

Kirbet Qûmran, as well as their allies in the towns, and the

followers of Jesus of Nazareth. What these groups shared was

their opposition to the high priest and his allies and to the

Temple, which they controlled.

The majority of Jews, including the Pharisees, still defined

themselves in traditional terms, as “Israel against ‘the nations.’ ”

But those who joined marginal or more extreme groups like the

Essenes, bent on separating Israel radically from foreign

influence, came to treat that traditional identification as a matter

of secondary importance. What mattered primarily, these

rigorists claimed, was not whether one was Jewish—this they

took for granted—but rather “which of us [Jews] really are on

God’s side” and which had “walked in the ways of the nations,”

that is, adopted foreign cultural and commercial practices. The

separatists found ammunition in biblical passages that invoke

terrifying curses upon people who violate God’s covenant, and in

prophetic passages that warn that only a “righteous remnant” in

Israel will remain faithful to God.

More radical than their predecessors, these dissidents began

increasingly to invoke the
satan
to characterize their Jewish

opponents; in the process they turned this rather unpleasant

angel into a far grander—and far more malevolent—figure. No

longer one of God’s faithful servants, he begins to become what

he is for Mark and for later Christianity—God’s antagonist, his

enemy, even his rival.19 Such sectarians, contending less against

“the nations” than against other Jews, denounce their opponents

as apostate and accuse them of having been seduced by the power

of evil, whom they call by many names—Satan, Beelzebub,

Semihazah, Azazel, Belial, Prince of Darkness. These dissidents

also borrowed stories, and wrote their own, telling how such

angelic powers, swollen with lust or arrogance, fell from heaven

into sin. Those who first elaborated such stories, as we

48 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

shall see, most often used them to characterize what they

charged was the “fall into sin” of human beings—which usually

meant the dominant majority of their Jewish contemporaries.

As Satan became an increasingly important and personified

figure, stories about his origin proliferated. One group tells how

one of the angels, himself high in the heavenly hierarchy,

proved insubordinate to his commander in chief and so was

thrown out of heaven, demoted, and disgraced, an echo of

Isaiah’s account of the fall of a great prince:

How are you fallen from heaven, day star, son of the dawn!

How are you fallen to earth, conqueror of the nations! You said

in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God;

I will set my throne on high ... I will ascend upon the high

clouds. . . .” But you are brought down to darkness [ or: the

underworld,
sheol
], to the depths of the pit (Isa. 14:12-15).

Nearly two and a half thousand years after Isaiah wrote, this

luminous falling star, his name translated into Latin as Lucifer

(“light-bearer”) was transformed by Milton into the protagonist

of
Paradise Lost
.

Far more influential in first-century Jewish and Christian

circles, however, was a second group of apocryphal and pseud-

epigraphic stories, which tell how lust drew the angelic “sons of

God” down to earth. These stories derive from a cryptic account

in Genesis 6, which says:

When men began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were

born to them, the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that

they were fair.

Some of these angels, transgressing the boundaries that the

Lord had established between heaven and earth, mated with

human women, and produced offspring who were half angel,

half human. According to Genesis, these hybrids became “giants

in the earth . . . the mighty men of renown” (Gen. 6:4). Other

sto-

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 49

rytellers, probably writing later,20 as we shall see, say that these

monstrous offspring became demons, who took over the earth

and polluted it.

Finally, an apocryphal version of the life of Adam and Eve

gives a third account of angelic rebellion. In the beginning, God,

having created Adam, called the angels together to admire his

work and ordered them to bow down to their younger human

sibling. Michael obeyed, but Satan refused, saying,

“Why do you press me? I will not worship one who is younger

than I am, and inferior. I am older than he is; he ought to

worship me!” (
Vita Adae et Evae
14:3).

Thus the problem of evil begins in sibling rivalry.21

At first glance these stories of Satan may seem to have little in

common. Yet they all agree on one thing: that this greatest and

most dangerous enemy did not originate, as one might expect, as

an outsider, an alien, or a stranger. Satan is not the distant enemy

but the intimate enemy—one’s trusted colleague, close associate,

brother. He is the kind of person on whose loyalty and goodwill

the well-being of family and society depend—but one who turns

unexpectedly jealous and hostile. Whichever version of his

origin one chooses, then, and there are many, all depict Satan as

an
intimate
enemy—the attribute that qualifies him so well to

express conflict among Jewish groups. Those who asked, “How

could God’s own angel become his enemy?” were thus asking, in

effect, “How could one of
us
become one of
them
. Stories of

Satan and other fallen angels proliferated in these troubled times,

especially within those radical groups that had turned against the

rest of the Jewish community and, consequendy, concluded that

others had turned against them—or (as they put it) against
God
.

One anonymous author who collected and elaborated stories

about fallen angels during the Maccabean war was troubled by

wartime divisions among Jewish communities. He addressed this

divisiveness indirectly in the
Book of the Watchers
, one of the

apocryphal books that would become famous and influential,

especially among Christians, by introducing the idea of a

division

50 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

in heaven. The
Book of the Watchers
, a collection of visionary

stories, is set, in turn, into a larger collection called the
First Book

of Enoch.
It tells how the “watcher” angels, whom God

appointed to supervise (“watch over”) the universe, fell from

heaven. Starting from the story of Genesis 6, in which the “sons

of God” lusted for human women, this author combines two

different accounts of how the watchers lost their heavenly

glory.22 The first describes how Semihazah, leader of the

watchers, coerced two hundred other angels to join him in a pact

to violate divine order by mating with human women. These

mismatches produced “a race of bastards, the giants known as the

nephilim [“fallen ones”], from whom there were to proceed

demonic spirits,” who brought violence upon earth and

devoured its people. Interwoven with this story is an alternate

version, which tells how the archangel Azazel sinned by

disclosing to human beings the secrets of metallurgy, a

pernicious revelation that inspired men to make weapons and

women to adorn themselves with gold, silver, and cosmetics.

Thus the fallen angels and their demon offspring incited in both

sexes violence, greed, and lust.

Because these stories involve sociopolitical satire laced with

religious polemic, some historians have recently asked to what

specific historical situations they refer. Are Jews who thus

embellish the story of angels that mate with human beings

covertly ridiculing the pretensions of their Hellenistic rulers?

George Nickelsburg points out that from the time of Alexander

the Great, Greek kings had claimed to be descended from gods as

well as from human women; the Greeks called such hybrid

beings heroes. But their Jewish subjects, with their derisive tale

of Semihazah, may have turned such claims of divine descent

against the foreign usurpers.23 The
Book of the Watchers
says

pointedly that these greedy monsters “consumed the produce of

all the people until the people hated feeding them”; the

monsters then turned direcdy to “devour the people.”

Or does the story express instead a pious people’s contempt for

a specific group of Jewish enemies—namely, certain members of

the Jerusalem priesthood? David Suter suggests that the story

aims instead at certain priests who, like the "sons of God" in the

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 51

story, violate their divinely given status and responsibility by

allowing lust to draw them into impurity—especially marriages

with outsiders, Gentile women.24

Either interpretation is possible. As John Collins points out,

the author of the
Book of the Watchers
, by choosing to tell the

story of the watchers instead of that of the actual Greek rulers or

corrupt priests, offers “a paradigm which is not restricted to one

historical situation, but which can be applied whenever an

analogous situation arises.”25 The same is true of all apocalyptic

literature, and accounts for much of its power. Even today,

readers puzzle over books that claim the authority of angelic

revelation, from the biblical book of Daniel to the New

Testament book of Revelation, finding in their own

circumstances new applications for these evocative, enigmatic

texts.

The primary apocalyptic question is this: Who are God’s

people?26 To most readers of the
Book of the Watchers
, the answer

would have been obvious—Israel. But the author of
Watchers
,

without discarding ethnic identity, insists on moral identity. It is

not enough to be a Jew. One must also be a Jew who acts morally.

Here we see evidence of a historical shift—one that Christians

will adopt and extend and which, ever after, will divide them

from other Jewish groups.

The author of the
Book of the Watchers
intended nothing so

radical as the followers of Jesus undertook when they finally