This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evocations of that embodiment of (or perhaps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temptation that many of us have encountered in popular culture have little, if anything, to do with Biblical scripture. Here to explain Satan’s real textual origins is Religion for Breakfast creator Andrew Mark Henry, who in the video above goes all the way back to the ancient Israelites and the Hebrew Bible — in which “the notion of a singular, supreme evil entity and opponent to God is completely absent.”
Henry mentions that the Hebrew term śāṭān, which means “adversary or accuser,” does appear early in the Bible, but it “simply refers to human adversaries.” Only in later texts, like the Book of Job, does the word take on the meaning of a “divine job title, kind of like a prosecutor” or “legal adversary in a divine court.”
We’re still far from the current Christian concept of Satan, which may eventually have arisen, according to some scholars, out of centuries of cultural exchange between Christianity and Zoroastrianism. The ancient Middle Eastern religion proposes a perfectly good divine being Ahura Mazda “locked in battle with a wholly evil being named Angra Mainyu.” This encounter between civilizations would explain something about the emergence of the now widely acknowledged idea of “a cosmic struggle between good and evil.”
As one ancient text is layered atop another, “an evil leader of fallen angels or evil spirit in general becomes a recurring character,” and in the New Testament, “the chief adversary of God” is called by the name Satan — or by the Greek word diábolos, which gave us Devil and all its related words. In reference to the origins of Satan, the Book of Isaiah offers the line “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, Son of Dawn!” The term “Day Star,” which refers to the planet Venus, was rendered in the Latin Vulgate translation as Lucifer, which has become another common name for this ever-more-charged figure. Whether we fear him, condemn him, deny his existence, or even — depending on our musical genres of choice — imagine that we worship him, our culture does, in some sense or another, seem to need him.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall | Sciencx (2025-08-25T08:00:05+00:00) The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/25/the-origins-of-satan-the-evolution-of-the-devil-in-religion/
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