Satan, in fact, developed out of Yahweh himself, in response to changing ideas about the nature of God.(1) When Yahweh ceased to be a tribal god and became the Lord of the universe, he was at first regarded as the author of all happenings, good and evil. Thus we read in Amos (eighth century B.C.): “. . shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?”(2) Even Deutero-Isaiah (sixth century B.C.) can still make Yahweh say: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create eviclass="underline" I the Lord do all these things.”(3) But gradually the religious consciousness changed until it was felt as an incongruity that God should be directly responsible for evil. At this point the threatening, hurtful functions of God detach themselves from the rest and are personified as Satan.(4)
In the prologue to the Book of Job (probably fifth century B.C.) Satan appears as a courtier in the court of God, and his achievement is that he induces God to inflict suffering on a blameless man. Earlier, God would have been perfectly capable of doing this without inducement, and moreover the very idea that God could be induced or influenced to do anything at all would have been theologically intolerable. This older view pervades the story of job itself, as distinct from the prologue; in this ancient folk-tale Job has no hesitation in ascribing his misfortunes to Yahweh, and he knows nothing of Satan. A similar development can be observed if one contrasts a story in the Second Book of Samuel, which may date from as early as the tenth century B.C., with the same story as it is told in the Book of Chronicles, which is no older than the fourth century B.C. II Samuel 24 tells how the Lord tempted David to number the people, and with what results. Any census was regarded as an infringement of divine power because it made a human being conscious of his own power. So, to punish David for carrying out the census, the Lord sent a plague to reduce the population; after which the Lord “repented him of the evil”. Six or seven centuries later such behaviour was felt to be incompatible with the divine nature. In I Chronicles 21, the same story is told, and in exactly the same words, save for one vital difference: the responsibility for tempting David is transferred from God to Satan.
This story in Chronicles seems to be the one instance in the whole of the Old Testament which in any way suggests that Satan exists as a principle of evil; it is also the one instance where the noun “Satan”— meaning “adversary”—is used without an article, so that it becomes a proper noun. No longer a function of the divine personality, Satan emerges here as an autonomous being, a power which tempts men to sin against God. It was indeed a turning point; for during the following three centuries the Jews produced a new, complex and comprehensive demonology. From the second century B.C. to the end of the first century A.D. there grew up a body of literature which is sometimes called apocalyptic, because it is full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future, and sometimes apocryphal, because the separate works carry spurious attributions ascribing them to such Old Testament figures as Enoch, Ezra and Solomon. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world.(5)
Although such a notion is quite foreign to the Old Testament, it had somehow to be sanctioned by the authority of the Old Testament. This was achieved by invoking a couple of sentences in Genesis 6: “And it came to pass. . that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. . There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” This mysterious passage seems to reflect a popular legend concerning giants and their origin; and considerable ingenuity must have been required to relate it to evil spirits and their origin. But the Apocrypha manage it.
The Book of Enoch, or I Enoch, tells how the angels, led by Semjaza and Azazel, fell from heaven through lusting after the daughters of men; from their miscegenation came the evil and destructive race of giants. Impiety spread through the earth until, in an effort to restore order, God sent the Flood to destroy most of mankind and at the same time chained the angels in the dark places of the earth — there to await the Last Judgement, when they will be cast into fire.(6) But the giants themselves remained on earth, and in due course they produced evil spirits. Just how this happened is unclear, but the point is immaterial; what matters is that the evil spirits “rise up against the children of men and against the women”.(7) In other words they are demons, who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods(8) — a role which was to persist under Christianity, as one of the main and most sinister activities of demons.
This account in I Enoch dates from the second century before Christ; and later Apocrypha were to elaborate on it. Many of them treat of these demons and the nefarious activities which they carry on under the command of their leader, who is called now Mastema, now Belial or Beliar, now Satan. In the Book of Jubilees (c. 13 5-105 B.C.) Mastema commands a tenth part of the evil spirits, the other nine-tenths being bound in “the place of condemnation”. Within the limits prescribed by God the evil spirits or demons wreak destruction on the earth — but they are also seducers, they tempt human beings to every kind of sin.(9) This is still plainer in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (109–106 B.C.). Here the chief of the fallen angels, Belial, emerges as the antagonist and rival of God, with whom he competes for the allegiance of men: “Do you choose darkness or light, the law of the Lord or the works of Belial?”(10) His subordinates tempt men to fornication, jealousy, envy, anger, murder — and also to idolatry, or the worship of the pagan gods.
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls present a very similar picture. Whatever the sect that produced them, it clearly subscribed, at least at certain times, to much the same demonology as the Jews who wrote or read the Apocrypha. Moreover in some of its writings one finds an idea which was to undergo a spectacular development in later centuries: the idea that the Devil (Beliar, Satan or whatever) has his servants amongst living men and women — human collaborators, as it were, of the host of evil spirits. In the document known as The war of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness which dates from about the time of Jesus, the sect is looking forward to a fifty years’ war in which its members, as “the sons of light”, will exterminate the heathen, who are called “the sons of darkness” and also “the sons of Belial”. “This shall be a time of salvation for the people of God, an age of dominion for all the members of His company, and of everlasting destruction for all the company of Satan. . (for the sons) of darkness there shall be no escape.”(11) And again, “Cursed be Satan for his sinful purpose and may he be execrated for his wicked rule! Cursed be all the spirits of his company for their ungodly purpose and may they be execrated for all their service of uncleanness! Truly they are the company of Darkness, but the company of God is one of (eternal) Light.”(12) In other words, the Devil and his servants, human and demonic, form a single host and are all alike doomed to be overthrown and annihilated.