Sympathy for the Devil

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

In Zechariah we already see Satan likened to a malevolent entity, thrice rebuked by God.

That gives a strong indication that he was already viewed as a more hostile, baleful force much earlier than your gradual shift in later centuries would have it.

This is an instance where the accuser/the satan [the figure has yet to become a particular entity and a proper noun] stands with the people who stayed, against those who have returned from Babylonian exile.

However, the writer of Zechariah, and therefore Yahweh, takes the side of those returnees and their high priest.

[rogue06]

I only see that one instance in Zechariah, and by a messenger of God, not God himself. It was also just a vision, to clarify. The rebuke you cite doesn’t even hint at the dramatization of Satan’s war with God that occurred later and was recorded in Enoch.

It’s also quite the stretch to say being rebuked by God makes the rebukee hostile and baleful. The Lord rebuked David for killing Uriah. He chewed out Moses for not circumcising his son and striking a rock too hard. He killed Uzzah for a reflex action. You see where I’m going with this.

That "one instance" more than suffices to clearly demonstrate that Satan was already being viewed as more than someone just doing their job several centuries before you want that to start taking place.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

That "one instance" more than suffices to clearly demonstrate that Satan was already being viewed as more than someone just doing their job several centuries before you want that to start taking place.

On the contrary that is the satan taking the side of one group of Israelites who had remained in Judah against those exiles who had returned and wished to resume their previous roles.

That the writer of Zechariah in his "vision" has Yahweh backing the returnees is a literary ploy.

What we are noting is that by the sixth century BCE the satan figures are being presented by various writers as potentially malign characters.

The incident in 1 Chronicles with David and the census is another such example. There "Satan stood up against Israel" [N.B. not Yahweh] and persuades David to do something that his people and one of his senior commanders view as evil/wrong. Yahweh is also angry and despite David's abasement and confession the deity still punishes Israel with a plague.

[whag]

That "one instance" more than suffices to clearly demonstrate that Satan was already being viewed as more than someone just doing their job several centuries before you want that to start taking place.

Why are you putting “one instance” in quotes? Where are the two other rebukes?

I never said he was just doing his job. I said the character of Satan and his heavenly backstory evolved, which obviously means that by Zechariah and 1 Chronicles, Jewish perception of Satan had developed. By Enoch, it was fully fleshed out. What are you even arguing?

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Why are you putting “one instance” in quotes? Where are the two other rebukes?

I never said he was just doing his job. I said the character of Satan and his heavenly backstory evolved, which obviously means that by Zechariah and 1 Chronicles, Jewish perception of Satan had developed. By Enoch, it was fully fleshed out. What are you even arguing?

If you can find a copy read chapter six of Forsyth's The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. That looks at The Adversary as Rebel and includes the Enuma Eliš, Athtar in Canaanite mythology, Phaethon in Greek mythology, as well as Lucifer in Isaiah and the rebel prince in Ezekiel. Forsyth offers a very interesting commentary on comparisons and possible overlap.

[rogue06]

On the contrary that is the satan taking the side of one group of Israelites who had remained in Judah against those exiles who had returned and wished to resume their previous roles.

That the writer of Zechariah in his "vision" has Yahweh backing the returnees is a literary ploy.

What we are noting is that by the sixth century BCE the satan figures are being presented by various writers as potentially malign characters.

The incident in 1 Chronicles with David and the census is another such example. There "Satan stood up against Israel" [N.B. not Yahweh] and persuades David to do something that his people and one of his senior commanders view as evil/wrong. Yahweh is also angry and despite David's abasement and confession the deity still punishes Israel with a plague.

I think we read very different versions of Zechariah.

Oh wait. You've never read it.

[rogue06]

Why are you putting “one instance” in quotes?

I was quoting you there.

Where are the two other rebukes?

He's rebuked three times in those verses

I never said he was just doing his job. I said the character of Satan and his heavenly backstory evolved, which obviously means that by Zechariah and 1 Chronicles, Jewish perception of Satan had developed. By Enoch, it was fully fleshed out. What are you even arguing?

And I'm noting that this "evolution" of the character of Satan was much earlier than you give credit for as evidenced by how he is treated here.

[whag]

I was quoting you there.

He's rebuked three times in those verses

It’s a single rebuke for the sin of accusation. The double mention is for emphasis, not two separate rebukes.

And I'm noting that this "evolution" of the character of Satan was much earlier than you give credit for as evidenced by how he is treated here.

I don’t see any development from Job to the scant verses of Zechariah. In Job, he’s just as deserving of rebuke for his accusation of a blameless man and the bright idea to torture someone who God vouched for. By Zechariah, he’s still accusing, but this time he’s accusing a flawed man rather than a blameless one. If anything, God’s opinion of Satan changes from inexplicable tolerance to saying what should have been said earlier in the Job affair.

Moreover, I’ve been clear that the evolution that occurred was Satan’s characterization and story, which was being cooked through oral tradition to when it was finally recorded in Enoch. Zechariah’s author is silent on Satan’s motivation and backstory. He’s the accuser who finally gets a mild tongue lashing…from a messenger in a vision.

I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. To clarify, do you believe the Satan from Job is the same Satan in Zechariah? It seems you believe the story was transmitted fully fleshed out to Enoch’s author.

[tabibito]

It’s a single rebuke for the sin of accusation. The double mention is for emphasis, not two separate rebukes.

3:2 - definitely a single rebuke redoubled.

Zechariah’s author is silent on Satan’s motivation and backstory. He’s the accuser who finally gets a mild tongue lashing…from a messenger in a vision.

Not a messenger - YHVH himself said "YHVH rebuke you..."

וַ·יֹּ֨אמֶר said יְהוָ֜ה And the LORD אֶל־ to הַ·שָּׂטָ֗ן unto Satan יִגְעַ֨ר rebuke יְהוָ֤ה The LORD בְּ·ךָ֙

Right back into the Torah itself, THE angel of the lord is identified as YHVH.
It is a well known pattern for turning a general noun into a title: THE accuser is Satan, THE angel of YHVH is YHVH, THE apostle is Paul, THE white house is not just some whitened house down the street.

[whag]

3:2 - definitely a single rebuke redoubled.





Not a messenger - YHVH himself said "YHVH rebuke you..."

וַ·יֹּ֨אמֶר said יְהוָ֜ה And the LORD אֶל־ to הַ·שָּׂטָ֗ן unto Satan יִגְעַ֨ר rebuke יְהוָ֤ה The LORD בְּ·ךָ֙

Right back into the Torah itself, THE angel of the lord is identified as YHVH.
It is a well known pattern for turning a general noun into a title: THE accuser is Satan, THE angel of YHVH is YHVH, THE apostle is Paul, THE white house is not just some whitened house down the street.

I get that the message is from God and that there are instances where God takes the form of one of his messengers, presumably to cloak his dangerous photon radiation. The puzzling bit is why God, in the safety of a vision, appears as an angel.

It seems clear to me that the use of third person means God is acting as a divine messenger, rebuking Satan while maintaining the formalities of divine speech.

I find this a needlessly confusing form of transmission—the seeming necessity of communicating thru corruptible creatures to deliver what could be said plainly to groups and individuals. See how much confusion it caused in the early established churches.

[tabibito]

I get that the message is from God and that there are instances where God takes the form of one of his messengers, presumably to cloak his dangerous photon radiation. The puzzling bit is why God, in the safety of a vision, appears as an angel.

It seems clear to me that the use of third person means God is acting as a divine messenger, rebuking Satan while maintaining the formalities of divine speech.

I find this a needlessly confusing form of transmission—the seeming necessity of communicating thru corruptible creatures to deliver what could be said plainly to groups and individuals. See how much confusion it caused in the early established churches.

It is a matter of the Old Testament record pointing to God as somehow a multiple entity, but the Old Testament doesn't make it clear whether the multiple is modalism (God taking on a different form in different times and places) or a trinity. God referring to God in the third person does not conclusively answer the question.

When a person sees something in a vision, it may be wholly allegorical (Acts 10: 11-13) or actual (Acts 9:10-12), or some combination of the two. Seeing things by means of a (tele)vision has the same feature.

[Juvenal]

Near as I can tell, the story - sans supernatural elements - would be plausible, and dates to when the Hebrews did not exist as a distinctive racial grouping.

Mut. mut. Homer's Iliad.

It seems to me most likely that the author of Job built on real life events to create a morality play.

My brother went through Concordia on his way to becoming an LCMS minister. One of the more unusual takes he picked up in seminary, and a very conservative seminary at that, was the prospect that Job actually began as a parody of the long-suffering Jews told from the viewpoint of their Canaanite contemporaries before being redacted and adopted by the Jews themselves.

Not suggesting that was ever anything more than a minority position, but it's in harmony with how I've long felt the stress of divine inspiration prevents most Christians in the pews from fully appreciating the creativity that produced the Biblical texts.

[tabibito]

My brother went through Concordia on his way to becoming an LCMS minister. One of the more unusual takes he picked up in seminary, and a very conservative seminary at that, was the prospect that Job actually began as a parody of the long-suffering Jews told from the viewpoint of their Canaanite contemporaries before being redacted and adopted by the Jews themselves.

Possible veracity must be admitted, but given the generally accepted date of original composition, it is also possible that another tribe or nation's circumstances were rewritten as those of a given individual.

I wouldn't be laying my money down in favour of any reasonable scenario when it comes to Job.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

It has been noted that we start reading of the satan/the accuser as a more sinister entity when there is dissent within Israel. The tensions between those who stayed and those who were exiled by the Babylonians. The tension between David wanting a census and his people/military commanders who did not.

In the book of Job the satan, this angelic being is part of the heavenly host, one of the sons of God and with the others presents itself before Yahweh. This entity roams the earth walking up and down upon it.. For the Hebrew storyteller this figure is a sort of divine roving intelligence agent or spy not dissimilar to those human agents employed by the king of Persia whose role was to mix with the ordinary people within the empire listening and looking for signs of disloyalty. Governments having a secret police force is not a particularly recent phenomenon.

It should also be noted that in Job the satan is not acting alone. The figure merely suggests that if Yahweh decides to remove his divine benevolence from Job, Job will curse him.

Then the accuser^[f] answered the Lord, “Does Job fear God for nothing? ¹⁰ Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. ¹¹ But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”

The satan is then is given permission by the deity to test Job's faith and loyalty.

Very well, all that he has is in your power

This is not a figure acting in opposition to the deity but one working with it.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

I think we read very different versions of Zechariah.

Oh wait. You've never read it.

This might help you.

The Satan's role in Zechariah has an extra ingredient missing from Job: he is rebuked by Yahweh's angel (the mal’āḵ Yahweh) for his opposition or prosecutor's role, as if he has gone too far and needs to be restrained. For the first time we sense a genuine danger to the solid monotheism of Second Isaiah. This public official entrusted with the duties of seeking out and accusing unjust men now threatens to exceed the limits of his office, a J. Edgar Hoover or a CIA director who no longer clears his every move with the president but imperceptibly at first begins to act on his own initiative to plan the harassment of a Martin Luther King Jr. or to develop subtle stratagems to poison Fidel Castro's cigars. We still have some way to go before this politically useful official is disgraced and becomes the scapegoat for an unsuccessful or unpopular policy. But already the Satan of Zechariah's vision has taken on more color and character than the simple obstruction that waylaid Balaam's ass. The word ṥātān of the Balaam episode is merely in grammatical apposition with the mal’āḵ Yahweh, whereas in Zechariah the Satan is a separate being with his own official duties and is directly opposed to the mal’āḵ.

The political context of the Zechariah passage illuminates considerably the Satan's role. Following the return to Jerusalem after the exile, various groups with differing religious agendas contended for power. One such group was the inhabitants of the former Assyrian province, Samaria, inheritors of the northern kingdom's Mosaic traditions. Since the secession of the northern kingdom under Jeroboam, there had been long and bitter rivalry between Israel and Judah, and many Samaritans seem to have regarded the Babylonian exile of Judah as a divine judgment on the heretical direction of its monarchist theology. Now, however, the Samaritans were willing to help with the rebuilding of the temple. Another group consisted largely of the "people of the land," those who had remained in the area of Jerusalem after its destruction in 587. They too looked with suspicion on the returning exiles and clung to the vision of a prophet such as Second Isaiah that Yahweh was himself about to inaugurate a new age of peace and national reconstruction. But the group that eventually won the struggle, composed now chiefly of the Zadokite priesthood and its supporters, who had been scattered during the exile years, strongly espoused the rebuilding of the temple as the focus for a new and powerful monarchy. More significant, this priestly group, asserting that Yahweh himself had removed to Babylon with themselves during the exile, refused to allow its rivals any part in the rebuilding program and organized the temple cult so as to exclude the rivals from any but the most perfunctory participation.

This rebuff of Samaritans and of the "people of the land" sent both groups off in separate political and theological directions. The Samaritans would eventually build their own temple on Mount Gerizim overlooking Shechem, the earliest center of the Israelite confederacy, and so emphasize their own adherence to the Mosaic covenant expressed in the Torah, the only part of the Hebrew scriptures they regarded as sacred. The visionary "people of the land," on the other hand, unable yet to remove themselves from the new temple cult that disenfranchised their faith, would become the medium through which the eschatological fervor of the prophetic movement sustained itself and was transformed, through sects like the Essenes, into a cosmic and apocalyptic vision of the last days. [See Forsyth, N. The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, PUP, 1987, pp115-117]

In other words the author of Zechariah was a supporter of the Zadokite priesthood and his "visions" supported their claims.