The Devil Made Us Do It

Dan McClellan In some of these other texts, like the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, it's the angel of God that is saying, "Balaam, psst, hey, wake up." In Exodus 4:24, so this is where God confronts Moses at the Motel 6 or whatever, and tries to kill him, and then his wife circumcises him and throws it at his feet and says, "Thou art a bloody husband unto me." In the Targumim and in the Septuagint, it's the angel that confronts Moses and tries to kill him. It's not God themselves. So this is something that was done quite commonly anciently. And so my argument here is that this is God themselves- Okay ... who is confronting Balaam. Because they're going to-

Dan Beecher I don't think that that helps me understand the story more- No, no

Dan McClellan ... but it makes it

Dan Beecher more interesting,

Dan McClellan that's for sure. It just muddies the waters. Yep. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And evidently, you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are you doing today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Rocking and rolling, baby.

Dan McClellan That's the best.

Dan Beecher Today's going to be a fun one. I'm kind of excited about today. We're going to be just diving headfirst into some stuff on today's show.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's going to get interesting, that's for sure.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We're going to start it off with a little chapter and verse. And we're going to do a story that I thought just had sort of one interesting element, but it turns out that it has stuff that when you read it carefully, you're like, "Wait, what's that? What's happening right there?" Yep. So we're going to dive into that, and then afterwards, we're going to start a whole new segment.

Dan McClellan It's going to get weird.

Dan Beecher Yeah. About the evil one, the great Satan himself.

Dan McClellan Could it be Satan?

Dan Beecher Satan? All right. Okay. But first, chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan What are we looking at today?

Dan Beecher Well, today, we're in Numbers. Numbers 22 to be specific.

Dan McClellan Okay. All right. That is a number.

Dan Beecher That's a number. There's lots of numbers. Almost an infinite number of numbers. And I want to give us some background. I'm actually going to bury the lead here, or not bury the lead. Okay. I'm actually going to just sort of spill the beans. We're talking about Balaam. We're talking about a talking donkey. And to be honest with you right now, the talking donkey is the least interesting part of this story to me now. Yeah. So yes, a donkey will talk, but there's so much more to it. And I wanted to start by giving us some background about what's happening. And Numbers is weird to me. We're back in the Exodus story. We're not in Exodus, but we're kind of rooted in that story. Am I right about that? We're sort of in the Moses leaving Israel, or rather Egypt story, correct?

Dan McClellan Yes. We are where they are kind of wandering. They're camped in the plains of Moab, across the Jordan River from Jericho.

Dan Beecher And they are not just wandering, because you go back one, two chapters, they are slaughtering people as they go through. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They are absolutely committing mass genocides as they sort of plunder through this part of the world.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They've just defeated the Ammonites, is that right? Mm-hmm. And just like, they are tearing through the land. Yeah. They're a barbarian horde at this point. So, now we cut from the Israelites to the Moabites- Mm-hmm ... who have heard of this horde of Israelites who are just shredding through the world, and head aimed directly at them. Mm-hmm. And they are justifiably, I think, very concerned. So, the Moabite king, who is King...

Dan McClellan I'm drawing a blank. Balak.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. Balak. Decides to send-

Dan McClellan Well, yeah. Sorry,

Dan Beecher go ahead ... for Balaam- Mm-hmm ... who seems to be the go-to guy for curses, for blessings, for communing with God.

Dan McClellan He's a bit of an itinerant blesser/curser. This is one of the things that prophets could be hired to do at the time- Mm ... would be to show up and, "We don't like these guys," throw some money at him, and let him curse them.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, the king sends emissaries with money to Balaam and says, "Hey, need you to curse these guys. We are in trouble. We might all die." Because to be clear, the last battle that the Israelites had, they left no one alive.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think that's actually the Amorites, isn't it? And then Balak hears what has happened to the Amorites and- Yeah ... and that's what catalyzes this call for help.

Dan Beecher Yeah. He's freaked out. Understandably so. So Balaam says to these emissaries, "Chill out for a night. I'm going to talk to God. I'll see what he says- Mm-hmm ... and I'll come back to you." He talks to God, and God says, "No, no. These Israelites are blessed, so you can't curse them, so send these dudes away." He sends the dudes away. The king, disappointed, sends even more important dudes, I guess- Yep ... with even more money, or the promise of more money, and says, "Dude, just come and help us. I'll give you literally anything. I will make sure that you are paid well." The actual line is, "Thus says Balak, son of Zippor: 'Do not let anything hinder you from coming to me, for I will surely do you great honor, and whatever you say to me, I will do. Come, curse this people for me.'" Balaam says, "I'm not going to do anything that the Lord tells me not to do, no matter how much money you give me. But hang out overnight again. I'll see what God says to me this time." And then verse 20 says, "That night, God came to Balaam and said to him, 'If the men have come to summon you, get up and go with them, but do only what I tell you to do.' So he got up in the morning, saddled his donkey, and went with the officials of Moab." Mm-hmm. So far, everything seems clear and understandable. And then the next verse happens, and I don't know what's going on. Right. So the next verse is, "God's anger was kindled because he was going." Okay. So before I even get to the second clause, or the second half of that verse, help me understand why God said go with them, and then was mad when he did.

Dan McClellan So there are actually a couple of incongruities between what we just read and what is coming up in this story. And overwhelmingly, scholars agree that this is likely a separate tradition that has been worked into this story in an effort to kind of editorialize Balaam a little bit. Because the punchline of this story is Balaam is stupider than his own ass, his own donkey. Wonk. But Balaam is not being mocked in the rest of the narrative. The narrative around this story is talking about how Balaam is being faithful, is trying to do what he's instructed to do by the God of Israel. And so this is a little independent tradition associated with Balaam that is basically there to just give the finger to Balaam, just kind of an aside from the rest of the story.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Now when- And you see this a lot where separate traditions get woven together, and the rhetorical value of having the tradition there is more important than any incongruities that may be caused by the wedding of these two traditions. I think the story of Joseph being sold into Egypt is one of the easiest- Mm ... ones to see, where it's like, "So then there were these Ishmaelites, and then the Midianites took them out, and then the brothers sold them to the Ishmaelites, then the Midianites took them to Egypt." And there's no coherence to the story. And to try to create coherence, you have to imagine, you just have to fabricate a number of scenarios that are nowhere in evidence. Right. However, if you just peel apart the two different layers and disentangle them, you get two perfectly coherent, perfectly full stories with their own beginnings, middles, and ends. And so we see this happening from time to time, particularly in the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. And so this story is an example of this, and it makes you wonder, wait a minute, two verses before, God says, "Yeah, go ahead, go with him." And then it's like, "Wait a minute. Why are you going with him?" And so, it is a little confusing. It's just a product of these editorial stitches.

Dan Beecher Yeah. In my reading, I see that come up a bunch, and I've never been able to piece it together in that way. It's always been very confusing because it does seem like a bunch of times, especially in the Pentateuch, God says, "Go do the thing," and the person goes and does the thing, and then God's like, "Why did you do that?" Yeah. It can be very confusing. Before you and I talked about this, I had come up with an alternate guess or- Yes ... or that I understand it makes sense what you just explained, but I don't understand why Balaam, who is an Moabite himself, would be in touch with Adonai, the God of Israel. Mm-hmm. So my theory, this is a hypothesis by a non-scholar that means nothing to anybody, so don't take this with you, but my theory was that it was Chemosh, the god of Moab, that had said you can go with him. Mm-hmm. And that it was Adonai, the God of Israel, who said, "Yes, you can." Hmm. Or rather, who was mad and said, "No, don't do it." Yeah. Anyway, that's my personal theory. I'm not sticking with it because I'm not a scholar. I don't know. Anyway, someone take that and run with it. Anyway, regardless, God's anger was kindled- Mm-hmm ... because he was going, and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his adversary. Now, I'm guessing you're going to jump on that last word. Right.

Dan McClellan So in Hebrew, it says "lasatan," or as a Satan. So this is the noun. This is one of only a handful of places in the entire Hebrew Bible where this noun, satan, appears. And one of the things that this indicates is that a satan is more of a role that someone fills rather than the personal name of a specific individual. And so throughout the Hebrew Bible, you have different entities that are filling that role. And here it is the very angel of the Lord who is acting as a satan, and it's "ha-satan lo," so his satan or his adversary, his opposer, something like that. But I would go even further and say that everything else in the story suggests that this is God themselves. So this is Adonai who is standing in the way. The only reason we would not think that is because we have that word angel there, which is in Hebrew, malach, which literally just means messenger and is used a number of times to refer to perfectly human messengers throughout the Hebrew Bible. But when we have malach Adonai or malach Elohim, or malach ha Elohim, that is frequently understood to be some kind of supernatural entity and specifically a specific kind of leading angel. But, I have argued in print, in more than one place, and will continue to argue in print that many of these places, particularly in the Pentateuch, but also in places like Judges and perhaps even Joshua, where we have the malach Adonai, where the identities of God and their angel seem to be overlapping, seem to be confused. Those stories were originally about God themselves and theological discomfort with the direct physical interaction of God and humanity, or where God seems to be doing something uncomfortable, like confronting Balaam here after saying, "Yeah, go with them." They would slip in this word malach as a way to kind of prophylactically distance the deity from these events. And this actually occurs in later literature when we look at the Targumim, which are the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible. When we look at the Septuagint, and other later versions of the Hebrew Bible, we see a proliferation of the word for angel, where in the original Hebrew it referred to God themselves. So for instance, in chapter 21, where we have God coming to Balaam, standing at the foot of his bed saying, "Balaam. Balaam. Hey, you awake?" In some of these other texts, like the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, it's the angel of God that is saying, "Balaam. Psst. Hey, wake up." In Exodus 4:24, so this is where God confronts Moses at the Motel 6 or whatever, and tries to kill him, and then his wife circumcises him and throws it at his feet and says, "Thou art a bloody husband unto me." In the Targumim and in the Septuagint, it's the angel that confronts Moses and tries to kill him. It's not God themselves. So this is something that was done quite commonly anciently. And so my argument here is that this is God themselves- Okay ... who is confronting Balaam. Because they're going to-

Dan Beecher I don't think that that helps me understand the story more-

Dan McClellan No, no ... but it makes it

Dan Beecher more interesting,

Dan McClellan that's for sure. It just muddies the waters. Yep. But the angel is speaking as God-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... in confronting Balaam.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Very clearly, one way or the other, whether it's an angel or God themselves, it's very clear that this is in God's name that this is happening.

Dan McClellan Right. Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay. So the angel of the Lord takes a stand in the road as Balaam's adversary, as his satan, if you will, and we're going to get into the satan later, so that's going to be fun. And he's riding on his donkey, and his two servants are with him. I'm not sure why we need to know about the servants, but the donkey is the only one who manages to see God or the angel, whichever

Dan McClellan it is. Quick interruption.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The princes of Moab are not mentioned, even though- No ... in Numbers 22:21, it says he went with the princes of Moab. Right. So another indication that we've got a separate tradition here.

Dan Beecher No, he's just on a slow donkey. They're way ahead. Donkeys are slow. Man, those guys are on horses or camels or something. You never know. Anyway, the donkey sees the angel. Nobody else seems to, and so the donkey turns. The donkey's like, "There's a dude with a sword."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "And I don't like this idea, so I'm going to swerve, and turn off the road, and go into a field." And Balaam angrily strikes his donkey and says, "Get back on the road." And then the angel-- I love this because it does paint the picture of this angel just sort of corralling the donkey. Yeah. Just like, "Oh, no. You go, nope. Go over there.

Dan McClellan Oh, nope."

Dan Beecher Contain.

Dan McClellan Contain. And

Dan Beecher eventually the angel pins the donkey against a wall. So three times this happens, and three times Balaam strikes the donkey, at which point the donkey is very upset, having been thrice struck, and- For whatever reason, the Lord decides to give the gift of speech to the donkey. You'd think that the Lord would just reveal himself to Balaam, but instead he has the donkey speak. Which

Dan McClellan doesn't seem to throw Balaam off his game at all. At all. He takes it in stride. Very much so.

Dan Beecher The donkey says, "What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?" And Balaam, as you say, just sort of turns to him and is like, "Dude, it's because you keep turning wrong." He says, "Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand. I would kill you right now." You're right. Doesn't go, "Holy crap, a talking donkey." Look, God visits this guy all the time. He knows donkeys can talk. He's totally been down with that. Anyway, the donkey says, this is the sweetest part, the donkey says, "Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?" And he said, "No."

Dan McClellan So- No, donkey. No.

Dan Beecher Does Balaam speak with a Scottish accent? I think he might. We need to get Mike Myers in here to do the Balaam voice. So there you go. Then after the conversation with the pack animal- Mm-hmm ... the Lord does make himself visible to Balaam, and- Opened Balaam's eyes-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... is what

Dan McClellan we have here. Yeah.

Dan Beecher And he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with his drawn sword in his hand, and he bowed down, falling on his face.

Dan McClellan And then the angel-

Dan Beecher And then the angel goes after him. Yeah, and is like,

Dan McClellan "What are you doing?"

Dan Beecher Why are you hitting your donkey? Which, by the way, that's so unfair. Yeah. I know that you claimed that this story is about him being dumber than his donkey, but if you don't see the guy, and your donkey is making all these crazy turns, and you're just trying to stay on the road, I'm not faulting Balaam on that one. I'm giving it to him. You would hit your donkey to go back, I think. I don't know.

Dan McClellan Well, it strikes me as very similar to a lot of traditions we have from the broader world of ancient Southwest Asian literature, where the gods are playing tricks on people, and they're coming down disguised as people, and they're like, "Ooh, what do you think about this God?" And just in general being jerks to-

Dan Beecher Yeah ... to

Dan McClellan humans. And frequently they kind of corner them. They trap them- Yeah ... and then reveal, "Aha, I got you." And so it's kind of entrapment here because, and particularly where it says, "Then Adonai opened the eyes of Balaam." So, which suggests that God is somehow controlling Balaam's ability to perceive- Exactly ... the angel or God themselves.

Dan Beecher And then is like, "How come you can't see me?" "Why weren't you looking for me?"

Dan McClellan Yeah, it's like, "Because you are obscuring yourself from him," or something like that. Right. And says, "The donkey saw me, turned away these three times. If it had not turned away from me, I would've just killed you and let the donkey live." And yeah, the point here is to be like, "Look at this moron. He's not even aware that God or the angel of God is standing in front of him. His donkey sees it." Yeah. "You can't understand things going on as well as your own donkey?"

Dan Beecher It does seem unfair. This seems like a very- Yeah ... unfair test. But Balaam takes the bait, says, "I have sinned, for I did not know that you were standing in the road to oppose me. Now therefore, if it is displeasing to you, I will return home." It seems like Balaam is just trying to do what's right the whole time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And God is, like you said, it does feel a little trickstery. Feels a little Loki-ish maybe. Mm-hmm. So the angel of the Lord said to Balaam, "Go with the men, but speak only what I tell you to speak." And Balaam went on with the officials. Do you want to give us the rest of the story on this?

Dan McClellan Well, basically, Balak hires Balaam to curse Israel, and then every time Balaam goes out and blesses Israel instead, and each time Balak is like, "What did I just say?" And is just getting increasingly upset with Balaam. And every time Balaam's like, "Look, man, I told you I can only do what God commands. And it turns out God commands me to do the exact opposite of what you've paid me to do."

Dan Beecher So- He's like, "Well, what am I paying you for, man?" "Thought we had a deal here."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the rhetorical point here is to suggest that if you're trying to counter Israel, if you're trying to oppose Israel, God's not on your side. God is going to stop these efforts. And what's interesting is we actually have an inscription from around the 8th century BCE that mentions a dude named Balaam of Peor. Oh. So this itinerant blesser/curser probably existed. This inscription comes from Deir Alla, which is a place on the east side of the Jordan River, in the Jordan Valley. So a little further north from Jericho. But it's in a language that's kind of Aramaic-y, but has some oddities to it. But we do have this story about him being hired to do prophetic stuff. So this was probably an itinerant prophet, but one of the interesting things is, this person existed like 400 or 500 years after these stories are supposed to have taken place. A strong indication that these stories were written many centuries later and are reflecting the circumstances, and reflecting rhetorical goals that are embedded within much later social circumstances.

Dan Beecher Well, and it sounds like it's using sort of known characters- Yeah ... like Balaam- Mm-hmm ... in the storytelling just sort of as fun cultural touchstones or something along those lines. Yeah. Does that jive with what you're thinking?

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely. And this is how these stories are supposed to kind of resonate with their audiences. They're like, "Oh yeah, we know a guy like that. We're kind of familiar with this motif, with what goes on here." And in that inscription, it talks about the gods coming to Balaam at night and speaking to Balaam. And so there's some interesting parallels that indicate the story here is supposed to kind of sound familiar and is supposed to appeal to kind of existing literary conventions.

Dan Beecher Okay. That's fun. Yeah, that's interesting.

Dan McClellan I think that's how they're hoping you will react to this story. "That's fun."

Dan Beecher I mean, my reaction is not, "That makes a lot of sense," but it's kind of fun. So that's where I'm going with it.

Dan McClellan Okay. That sounds good.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, I think it's time for Could It Be Satan? Satan. All right. All right. It's the devil time. It is. The devil is in the details, so give us the deets.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, a lot of people use the word devil, the devil, to refer to Satan. Now, devil comes from a Greek word. So the word doesn't occur anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. It's not until it was translated into Greek that we have this Greek word diabolos, or devil. So I'm going to talk first about the word Satan- Okay ... which is frequently taken by Christians as the proper, the personal name of God's adversary, as some kind of-

Dan Beecher That certainly seems how the church lady was using it.

Dan McClellan Yes. A malevolent figure who has some kind of authority over a divine retinue, some kind of army or something like that, and basically stands opposed to the God of Israel. There is not a single syllable in any part of the Hebrew Bible that supports that understanding of the word Satan. As we mentioned in the previous segment, with Balaam, satan is a noun, a generic noun that means something like accuser, adversary, opponent. There's one kind of conceptual parallel that helps people to think about it in contemporary terms, is it's kind of like the prosecutor for the divine council for God. Hmm. And there's at least one story where it seems to kind of come close to that idea. But for the most part, it just means if you're accusing someone, if you're opposing someone, if you are acting as their adversary, you are acting as a satan, an opposer.

Dan Beecher So when people say, "Jack Smith is Satan," or yeah, he is an adversary.

Dan McClellan He is. Yes. He's functioning in that role. So just like- That's right ... the angel of the Lord comes to function as Balaam's satan, adversary, yes, Jack Smith is functioning as the satan to a serial sexual predator who can barely read.

Dan Beecher You said it, not me.

Dan McClellan But that is neither here nor there. So Numbers 22 is one of the earliest references that we have to this, at least canonically, this is the earliest reference we have to this noun, satan. In fact, actually, I'm going to just look and see how many total occurrences we have. I used to know off the top of my head how many occurrences we have, but I have forgotten, so right now- Of satan? Yes. Okay. It looks like 27 occurrences. In the entire Hebrew Bible? In the entire Hebrew Bible, yes.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. That is not a lot, because- Yeah ... there's a lot in the Hebrew Bible itself. It's a big book.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And a lot of these are humans referring to other humans. So in 2 Samuel 19:22, "But David said, 'What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, that you should today become a satan to me?'" Ah. "But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side. There is neither satan nor misfortune." There is no adversary. There's nobody standing in my way. We have, "The Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon, Hadad the Edomite." So it's a role that people are filling. Now, Numbers 22 is- A pretty interesting one because it's the angel of the Lord or God themselves who is functioning as a Satan. Another place where we actually see somewhat of an overlap is 2 Samuel 24:1, which is where we have David's census. Mm. The infamous census. And it says there, "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, 'Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.'" So this is Adonai, this is the God of Israel, is upset, and I love that, by the way, the anger of the Lord, when it gets kindled, it actually means the nose gets hot. So, glows red with heat is- Yeah ... God getting angry.

Dan Beecher You don't want the Lord going Rudolph on you. Right. That's a bad time.

Dan McClellan So we have that passage in 2 Samuel 24:1. Now, a little later, we have Chronicles, which is basically retelling a lot of these stories, using probably Samuel and Kings as a source, but also using other sources. And so, if we go to 1 Chronicles 21:1, we have the same story, but it says, "Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel."

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And here it's not ha-satan, it's not the Satan. It's just Satan. Some people will argue this suggests it's functioning more as a name, but it's probably something more like a title, the accuser or an accuser or something like that. And, what I would argue here, when we put these two texts in parallel, that the 1 Chronicles text is probably trying to avoid the theological discomfort of the 2 Samuel 24 passage. Rather than having God themselves get angry and incite David, it's kind of masking it. But instead of saying the angel of the Lord did it, they're using this other option. "We're going to do the Satan who did this." And so- Right ... Chronicles is kind of updating, superseding the story as told in 2 Samuel 24. And so, it's like somebody's like, "I heard the Lord did this," and 1 Chronicles is saying, "No, no, it was a Satan. It was an adversary." Yeah. So, obscuring who's responsible there for that. We also have Zechariah 3, where we have the angel of the Lord, and we have Joshua, and we have the Satan standing by, trying to accuse. And this is another instance where it seems to be someone who is filling a role, but we get this impression that this role is beginning to crystallize into some kind of formal office somehow associated with the divine council, and that seems to be what's going on in Job 1 and 2, which is the last famous part from the Hebrew Bible where we have this reference to Satan in a way that sounds an awful lot like this divine bad guy. And this is where the story starts off talking about Job, and then in verse six, it says the bene Elohim, the children of God, came before God one day, and it says Satan was with them. Now, I'm going to check. So, it says ha-satan, so the. Now, you don't normally have a definite article with a proper name, so this is not a personal name. This is like a title. Right. So, it's kind of like the accuser came with them.

Dan Beecher So this is almost like a divine prosecutor. This is someone who-

Dan McClellan Yeah, this is where we're approximating this idea of someone who is in God's employ. This is someone who is doing God's bidding. And they're coming with the bene Elohim, and bene Elohim, children of God, this has been interpreted a number of different ways, but it's pretty much the second-tier deities. You have the high deity and their consort, and then their offspring are the second-tier deities. These are the bene Elohim. This is Genesis 6. And the accuser is one of them- Okay ... which suggests the accuser is one of the children of God, is part of the divine council. So this-

Dan Beecher Yeah, not outside of the divine council- Right ... but actually a member with this particular employment.

Dan McClellan Yes, an assignment within the divine council. And there are different takes on this. For instance, there's a wonderful book called "The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy" by a scholar named Ryan Stokes, and Ryan argues that Satan there should be understood to mean executioner. Interesting. And so, this again, is someone in God's employ. This is someone doing God's bidding, filling a specific office within God's administrative infrastructure. So here, the Satan comes sidling up to God and is like, starts to challenge Job's faithfulness. "Oh, Job just likes you because you bless him. So if you take away everything, he'll curse you." And I don't know. I have not seen the first episode of the second season of... Oh, what's the name of the show? With the two angels, the good angel-

Dan Beecher Oh, "Good Omens"?

Dan McClellan "Good Omens." But evidently, it starts off-

Dan Beecher Start that sentence again. I have not seen the-

Dan McClellan Okay. Now, I have not seen the first episode of the second season of "Good Omens," but I heard that it starts off with the good angel coming to confront the bad angel, and it's like, "Oh, it's you." And he's like, "You're not supposed to be doing this." He's like, "No, I have a permit. God told me I could." And he's harassing Job.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh. So,

Dan McClellan I look forward to catching up on "Good Omens."

Dan Beecher Yeah. I mean, yeah. It's a great show.

Dan McClellan So, this is not the contemporary Christian concept of Satan. This is something very different. Now, and this text comes from the Persian period. A lot of people think Job is one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible. It's not. It's one of the youngest texts in the Hebrew Bible. It is a tale that was written in the Persian period, and it's kind of foreignizing and archaizing. It's trying to sound old and foreign in an effort to kind of dislodge it from any discernible historical context. It's kind of a long, long time ago in a kingdom far, far away kind of story. And so, we're starting to move in the direction of Satan being something individuated. Hmm. But the real linchpin for that is the traditions that develop in the Greco-Roman period around the tradition of the fall of the angels, the watchers, the Nephilim, all this kind of stuff. So, the Book of Enoch, the Book of Giants, Jubilees, Genesis Apocryphon. Some of the other, what used to be called rewritten Bible. That's not really a handy genre anymore, but basically, we're taking famous stories, particularly from Genesis and particularly Genesis 6, the story where the bene Elohim, the children of God, come down and marry and reproduce with the daughters of humanity. And in Genesis 6, it says these were warriors of old, men of renown, and they were on the earth at the same time as the Nephilim. And in the Greco-Roman period, these traditions accrete to this story. They're kind of retelling these traditions, and these now become angels, and we have a whole raft of like 200 angels who descend upon Mount Hermon, and they are rebelling. And traditions are kind of, we get different takes on this tradition all the way into the medieval period within Christianity. Hmm. Where we have the story where basically Adam and Eve are created, and God tells the angels to go worship Adam and Eve. And then one of the angels is like, "Why are we worshiping this dude? We're better than this dude. Can you..." And basically kind of ginning up a mutiny against God, and that's responsible for the fall of the angels. And in a later period, Satan is kind of the leader of these angels. But in the Greco-Roman period, Satan is still kind of a generic noun. And so in the Enochic and other literature, you actually have the plural use of this noun. You have Satans- Oh, wow ... which is just kind of a generic, these deities.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But you do begin to see a hierarchy among the angels, and you do begin to see some names popping up for some of these leaders. Belial, which is worthless. This is the name of a leader. You get this concept of the bene Belial, the sons of the children of Belial. And then there's an alternative spelling, Beliar. Hmm. Satan, like I said, you get the plural of Satan, and you have an alternate spelling of that as well. You have this word Satam with an M on the end. And this is a verb that means to persecute, to pursue, to entrap, to hate. And so one of the names of one of these leaders is Mastema, which is taking that verbal root and turning it into a noun. So Mastema would mean persecution, pursuit, entrapment, things like that. Hmm. And we see that in Hosea, in the Book of Hosea 9:8. It talks about persecution, this abstract noun. But that becomes one of the names of the leaders of these fallen angels. And so you get this hierarchy that's developing, and you get these ideas about these different folks who might be in charge of these wicked angels. And one of the names that also comes up is Beelzebub.

Dan Beecher Yes. Which- We've all heard that one

Dan McClellan ... we've all heard that one. That's a very famous one, which is actually an editorialization of a name, a title that actually exists in ancient Northwest Semitic traditions. It was originally Zevul Baal or Baal Zevul, which means Prince Baal. But Beelzebub would mean, and so Baal means Lord, so Prince Lord, Prince Baal. But when you say Beelzebub, it's Lord of Flies. So, it's kind of taking the name and corrupting it to make it an editorialization on that name. And you actually have-

Dan Beecher And presumably, flies were not thought to be good.

Dan McClellan No. Yeah. This is a pretty demeaning, denigrating title.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But in the New Testament, you usually see it transliterated in the English as Beelzebub. It's actually spelled correctly in the Greek. It's Beelzebul in the Greek. Oh. But because of the tradition of that editorialization, usually translations will will render Beelzebub. So a little oddity of how modern translators render that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So some of the places where Satan is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible that are going to be roped in in later periods. The serpent in the Garden of Eden nowhere in the entire Bible is identified as Satan.

Dan Beecher Yeah, we talked about that a little bit in our first episode that- Yeah ... it's just a snake.

Dan McClellan Yep, just a snake. And snakes were associated with a few different things anciently, with wisdom, with healing, also with eternal life. And so in the story of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is trying to get this flower that's going to give him eternal life. And then I think he's in the sea, and he's trying to get to this flower, and a snake steals it from him. And so it's associated with eternal life. It's also associated with obstructing human access to eternal life, which somewhat overlaps with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Dan Beecher Yes, but opposite, because in that case- Yeah ... the snake is actually granting access to- Yeah ... at least knowledge.

Dan McClellan So that's interesting. It's moving them in that direction, and then God is the one who steps in and says, "No, no, no, no, no." Another figure that is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible that actually has nothing to do with Satan is Lucifer. Mm. So Isaiah 14:12, this chapter is explicitly about a king of Babylon. The author says, "This is about this king," and then goes on to say these things, and then says, "Oh, how you have fallen. Oh..." And, the Hebrew is Heylel ben Shahar, which means shining one, son of the dawn. And there have been a number of attempts to try to situate this within an existing kind of traditional background. I think probably the most popular is to associate Heylel with this Northwest Semitic deity, Athtar, known from the Baal Cycle and from some other literature. Irrespective, however, this is talking about the king of Babylon that way, and kind of sarcastically saying, "Oh, you tried to exalt yourself up above the stars of heaven," which is a reference to the gods, "over the throne of El. You wanted to be higher than all of them, but you've been thrown down. You've been buried under the earth. You are in the underworld." In other words, you wanted to be high, but now you're the lowest of the low. And so it's mocking the king of Babylon. And we have no connection of that story with Satan, no explicit connection until the middle of the second century CE. I think around Justin Martyr or somewhere around there is the first time somebody says, "Hey, this is Satan."

Dan Beecher Will you connect with, for me, because I didn't catch how the name Lucifer is connected into that.

Dan McClellan Oh, right. Sorry. So, this Heylel ben Shahar, or ben Shahar, this is probably a reference to the planet Venus and traditions that deified this planet and that connected certain deities with this planet. Son of the dawn, this is the morning star. This is the brightest star in the sky that's actually a planet before the sun comes up. And so in the Greek translation, they rendered Ἕωσ Φῶρος, which is light-bringer, light-bearer, which is a similar reference to Venus as a deity. Right. In fact, that was one of the names of the deity who was connected with Venus. In the Roman pantheon, you had a deity named Lucifer, which also means a light-bearer, light-bringer. And so, you have Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate into Latin, who renders Lucifer for Ἕως Φῶρος in the Greek. So this is all parallel. They're all different kind of socially contingent ways to refer to a deity linked with the planet Venus. As time goes on, Lucifer as kind of a title for the planet Venus, takes on the qualities of a proper name. Mm. And so you start to see, and particularly when it gets connected with Satan, the adversary, then Lucifer becomes a proper name. I've heard some people say that it's the King James Version that first capitalizes the L or something like that, and that's simply not true. Every English translation back to Wycliffe capitalized the L, treated that, if not as a personal name, as a title, that was referring to a specific individual. Interesting. And that probably goes back to early traditions of how the Vulgate was read. But, so yeah, Lucifer, nowhere connected with Satan. There are two places in the New Testament where people suggest this is connected with Satan, and I think it's probably closer to some other traditions. So one is in Luke where Jesus says, "I saw Satan falling from heaven like lightning." And so this kind of sounds like Isaiah 14:12, "Oh, how thou art fallen from the heavens."

Dan Beecher Mm. But it- Kind of, but- Kind of ... not really. I mean- But ... lightning is a little more direct than a-

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's kind of a flash. Yeah. But this also sounds an awful lot like the traditions of the fall of the angels from the Greco-Roman period with the Enochic literature- Mm ... and others, where the angels are rebelling and are being ... thrown down with their leader, who in the Greco-Roman period has not yet been named Satan, but by the time of the New Testament is going to be associated with Satan. And then we also have in the Book of Revelation, it talks about Satan as that ancient serpent. And so people think, "Ah, serpent. The serpent from the Garden of Eden. Case closed." But that's probably a reference to Leviathan, who is mentioned in a handful of places. Isaiah 27:1, one of them. Mentioned in Job, mentioned in some of the Psalms. But Leviathan is kind of a prehistoric chaos monster that is associated with other divine entities from the traditions around them. In the Ugaritic literature, the word is Lotan, which is cognate, meaning it's the same word but in another language. And in the Ugaritic literature, Lotan has seven heads, and in Revelation, the ancient serpent is the dragon who has seven heads. So I think, at least in Revelation, it's much more closely linked with the tradition of the Leviathan rather than the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And there are some folks who think that see the Wisdom of Solomon 2:24. I think it says, "Because of the," what is it? "Because of the envy of a devil," diavolou, that's the genitive of devil, "death entered the world." And I mentioned diavolo, or diavolos, devil, in the beginning of this segment. That's a Greek word that literally, etymologically, it means to cast through or beyond, basically to miss the mark. And the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible uses that to translate Satan, and so there's a connection there. And so some people think, "Ah, diavolos there must be Satan, therefore it was Satan who allowed death to enter the world in the Garden of Eden." So we see some loose maybe connections, but we don't really see an explicit identification of Satan either with the serpent in the Garden of Eden or with Lucifer until we get into the second and third centuries CE within early Christianity. So I would argue that these are most clearly post-biblical identifications. But by the time we get to the New Testament, we have Satan functioning kind of as the proper personal name of an individual who stands opposed to God, has rule over the evil spirits, the malevolent forces of the world. And some people have asked, "Where does this come from? Does this have to do with Zoroastrianism?" And I don't think we have enough data about Zoroastrianism to say for sure, but I think it's likely that-

Dan Beecher Does Zoroastrianism have a Satan figure? Is that what we're saying?

Dan McClellan So Zoroastrianism has a leader, Ahura Mazda. This is the divine leader. And there are two spirits that derive from Ahura Mazda. One is called Angra Mainyu, which is like the opposing spirit, and the other is called Spenta Mainyu, which is the holy or the bountiful spirit.

Dan Beecher And these- Do they live on our shoulders? Yes. Because I've heard of that one.

Dan McClellan They dress in white and in red, and they sound an awful lot like Patrick Warburton. But this is this dualism that kind of exists within Zoroastrianism as near as we can tell, and Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu represent opposite sides of this spectrum. And so people think it's reasonable to think that while the Judahites were in exile in Babylon, the empire that ruled over them was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism. These traditions would have been there. These traditions would've influenced their understanding of God's relationship to good and to evil. And so maybe this concept, this dualism of a good deity and then a bad deity was brought back to the land of Israel. But there were an awful lot of Jewish folks who remained behind in Babylon as well and stayed there for many centuries. And so we have the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness in the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are spiritual forces, and some of them are also humans. So we have a dualism that seems to pop up within early Judaism following the Babylonian exile, and a lot of scholars would say Zoroastrianism seems like the most likely source of that. And so this may have contributed to the need to whittle these different figures down to a single one, and a lot of these different figures that exist, all these sources of evil in the Hebrew Bible and in Greco-Roman period Judaism get consolidated within this one figure. So Satan, the devil, the serpent, Lucifer, Leviathan, Beelzebub, all of these things all just get consolidated into one figure who then takes the name Satan or the title The Devil.