The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy

by John J. Collins (Foreword), Ryan E. Stokes

Many people today think of Satan as a little red demon with a pointy tail and a pitchfork—but this vision of the devil developed over many centuries and would be foreign to the writers of the Old Testament, where this figure makes his first appearances. The earliest texts that mention the Satan—it is always “the Satan” in the Old Testament—portray him as an agent of Yahweh, serving as an executioner of evildoers. But over the course of time, the Satan came to be regarded more as God’s enemy than God’s agent and was blamed for a host of problems. Biblical scholar Ryan E. Stokes explains the development of the Satan tradition in the Hebrew scriptures and the writings of early Judaism, describing the interpretive and creative processes that transformed an agent of Yahweh into the archenemy of good. He explores how the idea of a heavenly Satan figure factored into the problem of evil and received the blame for all that is wrong in the world.

Genres: Religion, Theology, History, Nonfiction, Biblical Studies, Christianity, Adult

304 pages, Paperback

Published July 9, 2019

About the author

John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School. A native of Ireland, he has a doctorate from Harvard University, and earlier taught at the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on the subjects of apocalypticism, wisdom, Hellenistic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and served as president of both the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature.

Reviews

[Emma Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

haha don’t be alarmed…this was for Dr. Stokes’s angels & demons class. pretty good book!

[Brian LePort]

I began reading Ryan E. Stokes’ Satan this summer. I was teaching a class on the Hebrew Bible at the time. It made me have to revisit my lesson on the Book of Job in order to update how I presented Ha-Satan. And I felt like each chapter had that effect on me. It introduced new ways of looking at the figure of Satan and his evolution that I hadn’t considered.

For more details, see: https://readingthebiblewithigen.home....

[Matthew Nisly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author offers a detailed look at the gradual changes in ancient Jewish and Christian thought regarding the identity of ha satan, the "satan" figure we now typically think of as God's foremost adversary.

It becomes clear that early on in the OT, both ha satan and its verbal form "to oppose or kill" sometimes refer to human agents (1 Sam 29:4), other times to the angel of Yahweh (Num 22), while other times to a member of God's heavenly court (Job). Only in later Christian tradition does the idea of Satan as God's arch enemy emerge.

The author also has a facinating section on the intertestamental literature's varying views on demons, evil, and election.

Since the author's aim was fairly narrow, he never touches on the implications for how his research might reorient our view of Scripture.

However, it seems to me that if we accept his conclusions, it makes the relationship of God and evil much more messy than I have often heard it portrayed.

[Neil Short · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is extremely thorough. It told me everything I wanted to know and 400% more.
If your interest is in the biblical Satan, you will be all caught up in about the first quarter of the book. The author goes on to cover completely all the cultural and pagan traditions that may have influenced the biblical Satan tradition.
Fasten your seatbelt.

[Luke Mizzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Direct, accessible and full of information. Highly recommend - not just as a source of biblical scholarship but for folks to get an idea of how theological ideas, even - especially those concerning evil, sin, and Satan, develop over time.
Also full of information about books excluded from the known biblical corpus.

[David Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic book

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Devil you know may not be the Devil you know. Given that Ryan Stokes has writing about Satan for a number of years, this book is the logical culmination of that work. As I mention elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) my current book project (under contract) is on a related topic. Stokes, however, systematically reviews material on the various characters associated with, and often identified with, Satan in the ancient world. Beginning with the very few Hebrew Bible references to the Satan, he doesn’t immediately leap into the New Testament. This is a wise move because much material lies between.

Over the past few decades scholars have been analyzing “Second Temple Judaism.” This material includes books that are not usually included in Bibles, such as Jubilees and 1 Enoch, and also the rather extensive, if fragmentary, material from ancient Qumran, collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Stokes examines this material meticulously, noting the various names of Devil-like characters and analyzing if they might be identified with the same figure who eventually became Satan. There will be lots of surprises here for those who think they know how the Devil is presented in the Bible. There are many divergences in this picture and not all specialists think the same character is referenced in each.

Appropriately for someone approaching this material as a Christian, Stokes ends his study with the New Testament. Even here, however, there is no uniformity. The character that we will later recognize from more modern forms of Christianity as “the Devil” took a very long time to coalesce. There were multiple “bad guys” in the biblical world and Stokes takes as his unifying theme their role as executioners. They are sometimes servants of God and at others enemies of God. They may have been quite numerous, and they aren’t always easily distinguished from demons. This is a careful, useful study by a biblical scholar who is careful not to overstate the case of what ancient texts actually record.