Satan of the OT and the NT

[patrick457]

Interesting information, full of pertinent details, as always, Patrick! You are so right to state that the Jews could not imagine an evil being in even the slightest way coequal in its opposition to G-d and forging a nearly interminable battle of evil vs. good. However, in your last statement, you suggest that angels have the free will to disobey G-d, whereas in Judaism, at least according to present-day belief, none of the angels are thought to have free will since the latter attribute is uniquely reserved by G-d for humans. Any thoughts about this feature of Judaism?

As I said in my last post, I think it has more to do with Christianity and modern Judaism essentially descending from different schools of Jewish thought: Christianity derives from the more apocalyptic strains. And in apocalypticism, the idea of a perpetual conflict between good and evil (with the good triumphing in the end) is a key idea. Giving the angels personalities (and hence free will) is a necessary side element for the system to work, since apocalypticism believes in cosmic powers of Evil who oppose God and His plan. Obviously you could not say that this Evil was coeval or equal in power to God (in other words, a second god), since that would compromise monotheism. The only other alternative would be to say that these powers of Evil were actually angels (creatures superior to men but still inferior to God) who had fallen from grace. And how could angels come to oppose God if they don’t have free will?

I’ll reply to your other post later.

 

[bisco1]

I think the post of mine that you just commented on suggests the difference. And Patrick’s post goes into much more detail on the historical context, including both the common origin (apocalyptic Zoroastrianism) and the divergences between Jewish and Christian beliefs regarding Satan.

no one can understand patricks posts.

 

[bisco1]

It is true. The Jewish interpretation of HaSatan is that of an angel (not a fallen one) who severely tests mankind’s free will, while hoping we will remain faithful to G-d. Judaism does not conceive of a battle between Satan and G-d. Satan also plays the role of the Angel of Death and the one who forces us to defend and pass judgment on our own lives before G-d in the heavenly court. If we are unsuccessful, it is thought to be Satan who executes the sentence passed by G-d in leading us to a place or state of separation from G-d since G-d cannot bring Himself to do so.

How this all changed in Christianity, as well as Islam, is something I am also curious about.

okay, i’ll phrase it differently. where in the to is there support for your hypothesis?

 

[patrick457]

no one can understand patricks posts.

We have an honest man here! I’ll take that as a compliment.

 

[meltzerboy]

okay, i’ll phrase it differently. where in the to is there support for your hypothesis?

I assume you mean where in the Torah? The Written Law (Torah) does not explain much of this and that is why we need the codified Oral Law, including the Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud, and the Gemara, which is the rabbinical commentary upon commentary, comprising the second part of the Talmud, to fill in the gaps and the details. Both parts of the Law are believed, by Orthodox Jews in particular, to have been divinely inspired in the writing of Moses.

 

[bisco1]

We have an honest man here! I’ll take that as a compliment.

absolutely.

 

[bisco1]

I assume you mean where in the Torah? The Written Law (Torah) does not explain much of this and that is why we need the codified Oral Law, including the Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud, and the Gemara, which is the rabbinical commentary upon commentary, comprising the second part of the Talmud, to fill in the gaps and the details. Both parts of the Law are believed, by Orthodox Jews in particular, to have been divinely inspired in the writing of Moses.

than that doesn’t explain the o/p’s consternation regarding the o/t and the n/t.

 

[meltzerboy]

than that doesn’t explain the o/p’s consternation regarding the o/t and the n/t.

Technically you may be correct. However, from the mainly Orthodox Jewish perspective, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) includes not only the Written Law (Torah), the Prophets, and the Writings, but also the Oral Torah, which is the Talmud. (The Karaite Jews disagree, of course.) And for some Orthodox, such as Hasidim, the Kabbalah, though not considered as holy as Torah or Talmud, is also included as an interpretive guide to a more profound understanding of the Law.

 

[bisco1]

ah, that explains it, thanks.

 

[patrick457]

Was the Apocalyptic ideology ever a dominant worldview within Jewish theology and culture, including mystical Kabbalistic movements?

I don’t know about whether it was really ‘dominant’ - that’s still a controversial issue - but it is a fact that we have quite a lot of works from the Second Temple period which apparently have an element of Apocalypticism in them: 1-2 Enoch, Daniel, Jubilees, the Assumption of Moses, works from the Qumran Community (The War Scroll, the Genesis Apocryphon, etc.), 4 Ezra/2 Esdras, 2 Baruch, to name a few. But then again, much of the surviving data we have is probably one-sided.

What we can say for sure though is that rabbinic Judaism distanced itself from Apocalypticism and related forms of mysticism (while keeping a few aspects of it) partly because it encouraged disastrous messianic movements like that of Bar Kochba or even Jesus (from a Jewish POV). I think it’s safe to say only that in some forms of Judaism (the Qumran community and the first Christians), apocalypticism was important, but in others (such as the Pharisees and the later rabbis) it was less so.

I would note that even relatively minor demons, while found within Jewish folk culture, are sometimes considered manufactured products of sinful human behavior, a counterpart of guardian angels created by good human deeds, so that a major divine adversarial force such as Satan would not appear so likely to be a dominant entity according to Jewish thought, even though it was, as you note, influenced by Zoroastrianism.

I think the rationalistic explanation of angels and demons you can sometimes find in modern Judaism mainly comes from scholars like Maimonides (whose Guide to the Perplexed - you know this better than I do - dominated the subsequent development of Jewish thought), though you can already find a trend towards rationalizing them among some of the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud.

‘Official’ rabbinic Judaism retained the developed concept of angels and demons from Apocalypticism, but in many cases their role was downplayed and weakened: instead of thinking of them in terms of being more superior and powerful than humans, their status as fallible beings is often highlighted more. Rationalizing them as being just symbols for natural or psychological phenomena I think is just the natural conclusion of this process. I guess this was a reaction against the larger-than-life status angels and demons were accorded in folk Jewish lore and superstition. (We Christians also had this same problem, if you must know.)

 

[Kaninchen]

I don’t know about whether it was really ‘dominant’ - that’s still a controversial issue . . .

With whom, who’s involved in all this controversy?

I wouldn’t like to accuse Christians of apologetic sleight-of-hand but, sometimes, there does seem to be an implication that, somehow, we Jews are descended from a small heretical minority while Christianity became the mainstream version - except that the only evidence is something like an apparent continuity of Christian thought with what could well have been the beliefs of half-a-dozen guys starving themselves out in the desert.

 

[patrick457]

Further, can you elaborate on the issue of the relation between the name and meaning of Lucifer and that of Satan in that, if I recall, Judaism asserts that the latter name preceded the former whereas, I believe, Christianity claims the opposite?

You probably know the passage in Isaiah about the fall of the king of Babylon who is likened to the ‘morning star’ (14:12-18), right? Since early Christian days, there was already a tendency to interpret this text typologically as referring to the fall of the Evil One - Satan (though they also recognized the literal reading of the text).

I need to qualify your statement that “Judaism asserts that the latter name preceded the former whereas, I believe, Christianity claims the opposite.” I know me quoting Wikipedia will raise some eyebrows, but I think at least it sums the data well enough (from the article Lucifer):

Origen (184/185 – 253/254) interpreted such Old Testament passages as being about manifestations of the Devil; but of course, writing in Greek, not Latin, he did not identify the Devil with the name “Lucifer”. Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225), who wrote in Latin, also understood Isaiah 14:14 (“I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High”) as spoken by the Devil, but “Lucifer” is not among the numerous names and phrases he used to describe the Devil. Even at the time of the Latin writer Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), “Lucifer” had not yet become a common name for the Devil.

Some time later, the metaphor of the morning star that Isaiah 14:12 applied to a king of Babylon gave rise to the general use of the Latin word for “morning star”, capitalized, as the original name of the Devil before his fall from grace, linking Isaiah 14:12 with Luke 10:18 (“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”) and interpreting the passage in Isaiah as an allegory of Satan’s fall from heaven.

I’ll let you in on a secret. (Well, maybe it’s not so much a secret.) That popular story among us Christians about Satan/‘Lucifer’'s fall has more to do with John Milton’s Paradise Lost than it has about the actual Scriptures.

In the Christian Scriptures, what you really have is a brief statement from Jesus about seeing Satan falling from heaven “like lightning” (Luke 10:18), John’s vision of the war in Heaven (Revelation 12:7-9), as well as typological/allegorical interpretations of certain Old Testament passages such as the Isaiah 14 passage or Ezekiel’s prophecy against the king of Tyre (28:11-19), likening him to a ‘covering cherub’ who was “on the holy mountain of God” (at least in the Hebrew text; the Septuagint instead seems to compare the king of Tyre to Adam instead). That’s it. All you can infer from those passages is the idea that Satan was thrown out of Heaven; if you add in the Isaiah passage, you might infer that the cause of the fall was maybe due to pride on Satan’s part.

Everything else you might hear (Satan’s original name being ‘Lucifer’, Michael getting his name because he literally said, “Who is like God?” Lucifer/Satan’s defiant line: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” etc.) is more the product of centuries of pious Christian imagination and/or John Milton ‘filling in the blanks’. In other words, it’s more in the realm of legend/folklore/poetic license than actual doctrine. Nobody was there to witness the actual event of course, so I guess that can’t be helped.

In fact, the Catechism only lays out the barest essentials as to who and what the Devil is, and does not go into specifics. This pretty much sums up some of what we Catholics believe about Satan.

391 Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church’s Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called “Satan” or the “devil”. The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”

392 Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This “fall” consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter’s words to our first parents: “You will be like God.” The devil “has sinned from the beginning”; he is “a liar and the father of lies”.

 

[patrick457]

With whom, who’s involved in all this controversy?

I wouldn’t like to accuse Christians of apologetic sleight-of-hand but, sometimes, there does seem to be an implication that, somehow, we Jews are descended from a small heretical minority while Christianity became the mainstream version - except that the only evidence is something like an apparent continuity of Christian thought with what could well have been the beliefs of half-a-dozen guys starving themselves out in the desert.

It’s an academic issue, if you must know.

At one time, there were actually some scholars who imagined that there were two worldviews that were prominent, even dominant, in Second Temple Judaism (or Jewish literature, I should say): the ‘Wisdom’ tradition (found in works like Sirach or Ecclesiastes) and the ‘Apocalyptic’ worldview. Problem is, upon closer scrutiny, things were not as clear-cut as they imagined it to be. In other words, it’s likely that they aren’t as ‘prominent’ or as ‘dominant’ as was once imagined, and that there was no clear divide or opposition between ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Apocalyptic’. For one, texts usually classified as apocalyptic are found to actually contain ideas associated more with ‘wisdom’ literature; not to mention that the Qumran Community (often thought to be an ‘Apocalyptic’ group) did produce ‘wisdom’ literature.

 

[Kaninchen]

It’s an academic issue, if you must know.

Ah, so it’s all ‘purely academic’. Which academics are we talking about?

It’s nice to know.

At one time, there were actually some scholars who imagined that there were two worldviews that were prominent, even dominant, in Second Temple Judaism (or Jewish literature, I should say): the ‘Wisdom’ tradition (found in works like Sirach or Ecclesiastes) and the ‘Apocalyptic’ worldview.

Throughout those several centuries . . . .

Meanwhile, I’d suggest that the popularity of apocalyptic views tended to grow in more apocalyptic times.

 

[patrick457]

Throughout those several centuries . . . .

Meanwhile, I’d suggest that the popularity of apocalyptic views tended to grow in more apocalyptic times.

I’ll reply to this first.

Exactly. That’s why most apocalyptic literature we have date from the times when Jews were undergoing some form of domination by a foreign power - be it the Seleucids or the Romans. Meaning, the time period between the 3rd century BC up to the 1st century AD.

 

[Kaninchen]

I’ll reply to this first.

Exactly. That’s why most apocalyptic literature we have date from the times when Jews were undergoing some form of domination by a foreign power - be it the Seleucids or the Romans. Meaning, the time period between the 3rd century BC up to the 1st century AD.

Ah, but we’re back at the problem I raised earlier - are we talking about the experience of the Jewish People as a whole, over hundreds of years, so that Christianity was a continuation of a mainstream apocalyptic base, or are we talking about on/off outbreaks of the ‘apocalyptic’?

 

[Mintaka]

The main problem with researching the continuity of Judaism and Christianity is that a big chunk of Jewish people “went away” during the relevant time.

1. Obviously you ceased to be influential on passing down info if you got slaughtered by the Romans during a revolt. There’s a good chunk of the Jewish people in Jerusalem and Israel right there. Temple Judaism died too. This is part of why the Judaism version of the guys out East near Babylon mostly won out - they were the ones who were used to being unable to get to the Temple.
2. A lot of Jewish people became Christians, mostly regarding themselves as Jews during the first century or so. But after that, devout Jews didn’t really care what those weird Christian Jews thought. After a while, both Jews and Christians tended to reject theological opinions that were too close to being in agreement with the other’s position. Both were involved in aggressive conversion and apologetics efforts until about the fifth century; and differentiating the brands was seen as important, because some Christians and Jews frequently converted back and forth. (Later on, when Jews stopped trying to convert Christians and pagans, apologetics was only a thing to help retain Jews. All this had its effect on Jews’ views of the content of their faith.)
3. There was a big rabbinic controversy between the guys out East and the guys in Alexandria (who supposedly retained more of the customs and prayers of Israel and Jerusalem, and who tended to use Greek texts like the Septuagint). The guys out East won, and many of the Jews in the West kinda took it badly. (A lot of Christians got totally paranoid, and insisted the guys out East just changed stuff to make Christians look less Jewish.) But the guys out East are the ones who wrote the Talmud that won, also.

My understanding is that this is why all those “document morgues” in Egyptian synagogues are a Big Thing, because they partially document the versions of Jewish life that lost.

1. Of course, when the Muslims invaded and big chunks of the Jewish world were cut off from each other, their opinions also “went away” to a certain extent. But AD 33, AD 70, and the rabbinic decision not to be so pluralistic anymore after AD 70 – there’s just no day by day diary of everything that happened while the Jewish world was falling apart and being remade. The best academic and theological sources, both Jewish and Christian, can do no more than make educated guesses. We need a time machine and a lot of pollsters to do more than that.

OTOH, a lot of times opinions may not have been so much lost as disagreed with vehemently. Here’s an article about whether the Bavli Talmud writers had any content with the Yerushalmi Talmud.

I really really don’t know much about this stuff, although I do frequently read articles linked by the Paleojudaica blog. (An academic blog.) Somebody just started another blog called Ancient Jew Review (which is where I got that article above), so that’s another potential source.

 

[bisco1]

ah, so that’s why satan is so different, father of confusion.

 

[Kaninchen]

The best academic and theological sources, both Jewish and Christian, can do no more than make educated guesses.

Wouldn’t discussions be so much more interesting if people acknowledged that?

 

[meltzerboy]

The main problem with researching the continuity of Judaism and Christianity is that a big chunk of Jewish people “went away” during the relevant time.

1. Obviously you ceased to be influential on passing down info if you got slaughtered by the Romans during a revolt. There’s a good chunk of the Jewish people in Jerusalem and Israel right there. Temple Judaism died too. This is part of why the Judaism version of the guys out East near Babylon mostly won out - they were the ones who were used to being unable to get to the Temple.
2. A lot of Jewish people became Christians, mostly regarding themselves as Jews during the first century or so. But after that, devout Jews didn’t really care what those weird Christian Jews thought. After a while, both Jews and Christians tended to reject theological opinions that were too close to being in agreement with the other’s position. Both were involved in aggressive conversion and apologetics efforts until about the fifth century; and differentiating the brands was seen as important, because some Christians and Jews frequently converted back and forth. (Later on, when Jews stopped trying to convert Christians and pagans, apologetics was only a thing to help retain Jews. All this had its effect on Jews’ views of the content of their faith.)
3. There was a big rabbinic controversy between the guys out East and the guys in Alexandria (who supposedly retained more of the customs and prayers of Israel and Jerusalem, and who tended to use Greek texts like the Septuagint). The guys out East won, and many of the Jews in the West kinda took it badly. (A lot of Christians got totally paranoid, and insisted the guys out East just changed stuff to make Christians look less Jewish.) But the guys out East are the ones who wrote the Talmud that won, also.

My understanding is that this is why all those “document morgues” in Egyptian synagogues are a Big Thing, because they partially document the versions of Jewish life that lost.

1. Of course, when the Muslims invaded and big chunks of the Jewish world were cut off from each other, their opinions also “went away” to a certain extent. But AD 33, AD 70, and the rabbinic decision not to be so pluralistic anymore after AD 70 – there’s just no day by day diary of everything that happened while the Jewish world was falling apart and being remade. The best academic and theological sources, both Jewish and Christian, can do no more than make educated guesses. We need a time machine and a lot of pollsters to do more than that.

OTOH, a lot of times opinions may not have been so much lost as disagreed with vehemently. Here’s an article about whether the Bavli Talmud writers had any content with the Yerushalmi Talmud.

I really really don’t know much about this stuff, although I do frequently read articles linked by the Paleojudaica blog. (An academic blog.) Somebody just started another blog called Ancient Jew Review (which is where I got that article above), so that’s another potential source.

All of this is most interesting. Thank you!