Satan, the Devil, and Lucifer

Of the many things Christianity completely fucked up in its transition from the first century Judasim of Palestine to the hybrid Judeo-based but Gentile-dominated religion it became, standing alongside its invention of the Holy Trinity and the logical paradoxes of its Christology is its creation of a supreme enemy to both its deity and humanity in the character known interchangeably as Satan, the Devil, and Lucifer as well as by more than a few derogatory epithets.  This character in Christian myth and legend is an amalgamation of three separate characters in its parent Judaism.

Satan, or more properly The Satan (ha-Satan), in Judaism is the member of the heavenly court charged with recounting the sins of the dead before the throne of judgment, a heavenly prosecutor so to speak.  The Hebrew word “satan” literally means adversary or accuser, and is a title of an office rather than a name.  Talmudic literature makes The Satan an archangel and gives him the name Samael.

The Satan in Jewish lore is a trickster who uses guile to tempt humans to sin as part of his divinely commanded mission, not to condemn them to hell but to give them the opportunity to resist temptation or not.  By resisting that temptation humans prove their worth; by succumbing to temptation they show themselves unworthy  or at least unready.  This is the function performed by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden in then third chapter of the  Book of Genesis and by “the Devil” in the “Temptation of Christ” in the wilderness in the fourth chapters of both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.

Thus in Jewish thought The Satan is in a very real sense the author of freedom of choice, the patriarch of ‘Team Free Will’ as it were, not in defiance of the Divine Will but in its furtherance for the benefit of humanity.

In Middle Judaism (300 BCE-200 CE), the character later combined with Satan by Christians was known as Beliar, later Belial.  Beliar was the leader of fallen angels, devils, and demons, in essence The Devil.  While his presence is often considered evidence of Jewish dualism, Beliar was rather cast as the peer antagonist of the archangel Michael, guardian of Israel, than as an equal direct rival of Yahuweh.

The name Lucifer occurs but once in the English Bible, in the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and clearly refers not to any supernatural being but to an earthly ruler.  The name Lucifer is a Latinization of the Hellenization (Phosphoros) of the Hebrew name (Heylel) for the planet Venus, called the morning star and the evening star.  The passage in Isaiah refers superficially to the Canaanite deity Attar, the god of the dawn who ascends to the throne of the Children of El when it becomes vacant, only to in turn be overthrown and cast out.  In truth, the author uses the story of Attar (who goes unnamed) as allusion to Nebuchadnazzar II of Babylon, conqueror of the Levant.

By combining these three characters and defaming the Heavenly Prosecutor, Christianity effectively created an Unholy Trinity of Three-in-one and One-in-three, similar to the way the Book of Revelation treats the Devil, the Beast, and the False Prophet.  A classic of very Jewish apocalyptic literature, this Christian work is one of the earliest extant to explicitly combine the Devil and the Satan and to identify the two with Genesis’ serpent in the Garden of Eden (chapter 12).