About seven years ago, I was challenged with the idea of where Satan came from and told that the ancient Hebrews didn’t believe in Satan. Well, that just didn’t fly with me because I knew that the Torah (the five books of Moses) was the foundation for the Psalms and the Prophets (the rest of the Old Testament writings) and the Old Testament was the foundation for the New Testament writing such as the gospels and the apostolic writings. And I knew, or at least I thought I knew, the Old Testament clearly taught about Satan. Believing this about the Bible, it was extremely difficult to accept there was no Satan. Particularly because, according to how I was taught to read the New Testament, it appeared Satan was a literal, cosmic, supernatural being who persisted to trouble humanity and oppose Yahweh and His work. Even through all the supposedly concrete understanding I seemed to have about Satan, I began to ask, “Could it be possible?” I questioned, “Is it possible that I had been taught wrongly about what the Old Testament said about Satan?”

I began my search to prove that Satan does exist. In my thinking I was certain the Hebrew characters of the Bible and the Hebrew believers of the first century would have believed in this nefarious immortal creature of wickedness. Well, my findings were more than shocking, and one by one, I was able to find answers to all the questions I had about Satan. I learned Satan is not found in the Bible and in fact the whole idea of Satan is a construct of human culture that stems from Persia almost 3000 years ago.

I learned the serpent in the garden is not Satan nor was it a literal snake inhabited by Satan. I learned, according to the biblical evidence, the Creator was the one who placed the potential to choose evil inside of man and then placed an opportunity to make the choice to disobey in front of man. This is seen by knowing who it was that placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden according to the Bible. The Bible story in Genesis puts it like this; God creates a garden, places the forbidden tree that represents knowledge of evil in the garden, and then places man in the garden. After placing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden the Creator tells man to not eat of that one tree. Why did the creator tell the man not to eat of the tree if the man didn’t have the potential to disobey? In its most simple form, one can quickly deduce that there is no need to tell a person not to do something if they do not have the potential to do it. I don’t tell my dog not to speed on the highway because my dog has no potential to drive the car.

What I came to understand about the garden story in Genesis, is that the first man and woman did not experience an encounter with Satan who enticed them to sin. Rather, they experienced what every human experiences every day…the opportunity to choose to do what is right or to choose to do what is wrong…thanks to an evil inclination. The story tells us the first man and woman chose to disobey and are now guilty of what some call the first sin. They never needed a Satan to entice them to sin just as you and I don’t need a Satan today to entice us to sin. Man had been created with the potential to choose good or to choose evil. Satan in the form of a serpent did not trick humanity to disobey God. The potential to disobey and choose evil was already present in Adam and Eve from the moment they were created. It is thanks to the Creator not to Satan, that these biblical characters had the privilege of choice already in their original programming…just like we all have from the moment we’re born.

What else did I learn in this exploration of the origins of Satan?  …I have learned a lot.

I learned that when bad things happened to characters in the Bible they didn’t blame a cosmic Satan. They knew the bad in their life came either from man or from God Himself. For instance, when Joseph was sent off to Egypt by his brothers and spent years in slavery only to rise to second in command of all of Egypt, we see upon being reunited with his brothers, he declares that what they had meant for evil, God has intended for good. The brothers intended evil for Joseph , not Satan.

Job too blames God for the horrific tribulation that happened to him. Why not take Job’s word about his own story instead of thinking that a supernatural Satan was prodding the Creator to get a chance to afflict Job and finally the Creator gives in and says, “Go ahead and kill Job’s family, take his riches, and make him sick”… That does not fit with Job’s idea of who afflicted him. Job says it was the hand of God and that wicked men have done these things to him. He is clear to inform his wife that one should accept the evil that comes from God when he says, “What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” It helped me to come to the place where I was able to kick Satan out of my house once I learned that the word for “Satan” in Job and elsewhere was never meant by the Hebrew writers to be a name. In fact, the word means adversary and usually refers to a human adversary or opposition.

I also learned that “Lucifer”, the popular name for Satan found in Isaiah 14, is not a name of Satan at all. We've just been told it's Satan's name by christian teaching.The word Lucifer appears only once in the entire Bible and most Bible commentators will confirm that the word Lucifer was never thought to be a name for Satan. Rather it is a Latin word for “day star.” Day Star refers to a title for the King of Babylon. At the time that story was written the author was identifying how the ancient King was about to lose his political might because he opposed God in certain ways. Any historian can tell us the King of Babylon was thought to be the God Venus. Venus the planet rose in the morning sky before the Sun, the widely worshipped King was called the “day star” because he was thought to be the earthly representation of this bright morning star, the planet Venus that rose each morning before the Sun. The word Lucifer was first used in the fourth century when Saint Jerome translated the Scriptures from Hebrew into the Latin Vulgate. Jerome would have known about the Hebrew meaning of the word and the passage but the Middle Ages brought scholars who believed in Satan and they then decided that verse was about Satan. It has been a relatively short period of history where Christians believed the word Lucifer is the name of Satan.

I would love to discuss all that I’ve learned about the misunderstandings surrounding Satan, however that would take far too much of your time. I have however compiled all the information in Satan Christianity’s Other God, which is available on the scog.ca web site. Just to share briefly a little more of what I learned I would like to mention the anointed cherub in Ezekiel. This anointed cherub is believed by many to be the musical version of Satan before he was thrown out of Heaven but he is called a man in the text. I was surprised to learn that this passage, long thought to be about Satan, is also about an ancient ruler of a city called Tyre. Nothing identifies the subject of a passage more than the context the passage is written in. Satan is not the anointed cherub; rather the King is because he was appointed by God to be an equitable ruler over the people. A ruler appointed to cover, protect, and lead the people in his kingdom. So I'd like to invite you to check out the book satan Christiainty's Other God and by all means try to join us on the blogtalkradio.com show calle Iamgine there's No Sata. This week we will be discussing who the satan in Job is. Here is the link for the call in show. Don't worry if you miss the live broadcast you can still downlaod the archive of the show. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/JRBrayshaw.