Today, Christianity (as well as Islam) asserts that evil comes from the devil.
In Christian teaching, Satan lied to Eve, Satan tempts you at the office, and someday God will pitch him into a lake of fire for all the trouble he’s caused.
The whole idea conveniently lets God run the universe while keeping his hands clean.
However, the people who wrote most of the Old Testament would’ve been puzzled by this conclusion.
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“I Make Peace, and Create Evil”
Isaiah 45:7 in the King James Version says:
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”
Most modern Bibles change “evil” to “disaster” or “calamity,” and apologists love to point this out, as if it gets God off the hook. Think about what calamity meant to a farmer in ancient Judah. It meant drought, locusts, plague, a dead child, and a foreign army burning the town. That list is the problem of evil for most of human history, and the verse says God makes all of it on purpose.
Isaiah has plenty of company in Amos, who asks, “Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” (Amos 3:6). Lamentations asks whether evil and good both come out of the mouth of the Most High (3:38), and the expected answer is yes. In Deuteronomy God announces, “I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal” (32:39). When Job loses his children, his health, and everything he owns, he tells his wife, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10), and the book praises him for it.
Evil Spirits Sent Straight From Heaven
If you’re still hoping this is only about weather and bad harvests, the Old Testament has more. When God turns against King Saul, “an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him” (1 Samuel 16:14), and two chapters later that spirit has Saul hurling a spear at David. In Judges 9:23, God sends an evil spirit to start a feud between a would-be king and the city that put him on the throne.
The best example is in 1 Kings 22. The prophet Micaiah describes a vision of God on his throne, surrounded by the host of heaven, asking for a volunteer to trick King Ahab into a battle that will kill him. One spirit steps forward and offers to be “a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” God approves the plan and sends him off to do it.
Add the verses where God hardens Pharaoh’s heart so he can keep punishing Egypt, and the strange night in Exodus 4:24 when the LORD meets Moses on the road and tries to kill him, and the picture comes into focus. The God of early Israel lied, attacked, sent madness, and delivered disaster, and his worshippers took all of it as proof he was in charge.
Same Census with a Different Culprit
In 2 Samuel 24:1, “the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.” David takes the census, God counts it as a sin, and 70,000 Israelites die of plague as punishment. God provokes the sin and then kills tens of thousands of people over it.
First Chronicles tells the same story again, copying much of it nearly word for word. Chronicles was written centuries after Samuel, after the Babylonian exile, when Judah was a small province of the Persian Empire. Here’s how its version opens: “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” (1 Chronicles 21:1).
The census is the same, the plague is the same, and the dead are the same. The one detail the writer changed is the name of whoever started it.
Even the word had to grow into the job. In Hebrew, “satan” is an ordinary noun meaning adversary or accuser. In Numbers 22, the angel of the LORD stands in the road as a satan to block Balaam and his donkey. In Job and Zechariah, “the satan” is a member of God’s court, a heavenly prosecutor who works for God and needs permission for everything he does. God even admits to him in Job 2:3, “thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.” Chronicles drops the “the,” and most readers take it as the first place in the Bible where Satan works as somebody’s name.
Two Centuries Under Persian Rule
So what happened between Samuel and Chronicles? Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE and hauled off its leading families. In 539 BCE, Cyrus of Persia took Babylon and let the exiles go home, and Judah spent the next two centuries inside his empire.
Persian religion had a good god, Ahura Mazda, locked in a long war with a destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu. Each side commanded armies of spirits, and the war would end with a final battle, the dead raised, and the wicked judged. Every piece of that shows up in Jewish writing after this period, and later in the New Testament.
Look again at Isaiah 45:7 and you’ll see a verse that sits in a speech addressed to Cyrus himself (45:1). A God who makes both light and darkness, both peace and evil, reads like a direct answer to a religion that split those between two rival powers. Over the following centuries, Isaiah’s side lost that argument.
From Heavenly Prosecutor to Prince of This World
Once the idea got in, it grew fast. The Book of the Watchers, now part of 1 Enoch, blames the world’s corruption on rebel angels who came down, took human wives, and taught people weapons and sorcery. The Book of Jubilees, from the second century BCE, retells Genesis and Exodus with a spirit named Mastema handling jobs God used to do himself. In Genesis 22, God decides to test Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice Isaac, while in Jubilees, Mastema is the one who suggests the test. In Exodus, the LORD attacks Moses on the road, and in Jubilees, Mastema does it.
The Dead Sea Scrolls describe a coming war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, with a figure called Belial leading the dark side. By the time the gospels were written, Satan could offer Jesus every kingdom on earth (Luke 4:5-6), John calls him “the prince of this world” (12:31), and Paul calls him “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). In a few hundred years, Satan had gone from a clerk in God’s court to a rival running the planet.
Moving the Blame Left God Holding It Anyway
In older stories of the Bible, God doesn’t present himself as a likeable figure you’re required to love. He asserts authority and puts submission ahead of morality. You’re meant to fear God as the source of both good and evil. This God has human flaws: he makes mistakes, has regrets, and finds the future as much of a puzzle as anyone else does.
As Christian theology developed, moving the blame for evil from God to Satan bought God a cleaner reputation and dug him a new hole in the same stroke. Satan’s heavenly father is God, too, and God knew all too well he was creating the source of all evil and created him anyway. By modern moral standards, knowingly enabling evil makes you guilty of it.
So, what do you think? I’d like to hear from you, especially if you believe in the existence of Satan as part of your faith. How do you square an all-knowing God with a devil he knew he was making? Tell me in the comments.
The Snake Nobody Called Satan
There’s one piece I’ve left out, and it’s the one most people assume holds the whole thing up: the serpent in Eden. If you check Genesis 3 and you won’t find Satan anywhere in it. So how did a talking animal become the devil, which ancient text made the switch first, and why did it take roughly a thousand years to stick?
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Exclusive Content for Supporters
How a Snake in Eden Got Promoted to Devil
Genesis 3:1 introduces the serpent as “more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” It’s an animal, one of God’s own creatures, set apart only by being clever. It talks, but so does Balaam’s donkey, and nobody thinks the donkey is a demon…
