The Making of Satan: How the Old Testament Functioned Without a Devil
The cosmic enemy most Christians (and Muslims) take for granted arrived late, and the Hebrew Bible got along fine without him.
Ask most people where Satan comes from, and they’ll point vaguely toward Genesis: the serpent in the garden, the fall of a rebel angel, a war in heaven that predates human history. It feels so foundational that even the suggestion of its non-Biblicality sounds like a conspiracy theory from someone with an axe to grind with Christianity.
However, the Devil as Christianity teaches him today, the adversary of God who rules hell and orchestrates human sin, doesn’t exist in most of the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the Old Testament’s version of Satan puts God in a much better light.
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The Accuser Who Works for God
“Satan” comes from the Hebrew ha-satan, which isn’t a name but a job title of an entity. It means “the accuser” or “the adversary,” and in its earliest appearances it comes with a definite article, “the satan,” the way you’d say “the prosecutor.”
Look at how ha-satan actually behaves in the oldest texts in their original language. In the book of Job, the satan appears in the heavenly court as one of the “sons of God,” a member of the divine council. He’s an employee whom God created with a purpose. God asks where he’s been, and he reports back like someone serving God. When he proposes testing Job’s faith by ruining his life, he needs God’s permission to do it, and God grants it, which is far from a rebel operating behind enemy lines. He’s the prosecuting attorney in God’s own court, doing a job God signed off on.
The same pattern holds in Zechariah, where the satan stands to accuse the high priest Joshua and gets rebuked by an angel. Again, a courtroom scene. Again, an accuser doing courtroom work. There’s no hell, no horns, no cosmic rebellion, no ambition to overthrow heaven. The figure is a kind of celestial internal-affairs officer, and he answers to management.
Numbers 22 goes further, using the word for an angel sent by God. When Balaam saddles his donkey and rides off, an angel of the Lord plants itself in the road “as a satan against him,” an obstacle, an adversary in the plain sense of something standing in your way. The being blocking Balaam isn’t evil. It’s a messenger of God carrying out God’s orders. The word describes a function, opposition, and God is the one deploying it.
God Takes the Blame Himself
When the Hebrew Bible needs to explain where evil and misfortune come from, it usually points at God, not a devil.
The clearest case sits inside the story of David’s census. In 2 Samuel 24, the text says God, angry with Israel, incited David to take a census, an act treated as sinful, and then punished the people for it. God provokes the sin and punishes the sinner. Centuries later, when the Chronicler retells the same episode in 1 Chronicles 21, that theology has become awkward, and the verse gets edited. Now it’s “Satan” who incites David. Same story, two versions, and you can watch the blame get transferred off God and onto a new supernatural agent between the writing of one book and the other. That’s not interpretation. That’s the invention happening on the page.
The story of David’s census isn’t alone. In Isaiah, God declares that he forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates calamity, “I the Lord do all these things.” The prophet Amos asks whether disaster befalls a city unless the Lord has done it, and expects the answer no. In this theology, a single powerful source is behind everything, blessing and catastrophe alike. It has no room for, and no need of, a rival dark power.
Persia Supplies the Missing Piece
The timing points east as the source of the cosmic Devil we came to know. During and after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, Jewish communities came into sustained contact with Persian religion, and specifically with Zoroastrianism, which ran on a stark dualism the Hebrew tradition lacked. Zoroastrian thought pits a good creator god, Ahura Mazda, against a genuinely independent evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, in a struggle that structures the whole universe and drives toward a final judgment. Good versus evil as cosmic principals, not a single deity juggling both.
You can trace the Persian fingerprints in what Jewish writing does next. The centuries after the exile produce a burst of new ideas: elaborate hierarchies of named angels and demons, a sharpening division between the present evil age and a coming good one, resurrection of the dead, a final reckoning. Scholars like Mary Boyce argued for direct Zoroastrian influence on these developments, and the parallels are hard to wave away. The satan, once a courtroom functionary, starts drifting toward the role of God’s cosmic opponent, the head of an evil order that mirrors the heavenly one.
By the time you reach texts like the ones found at Qumran, the shift is well underway. The Dead Sea Scrolls talk about a Prince of Light and an Angel of Darkness, sometimes called Belial, and human beings sorted into two camps in a war between them. That’s Persian architecture wearing Hebrew names. The intertestamental period, those roughly four centuries between the Old and New Testaments, is where the Devil grows up, in books that never made it into the Protestant canon but shaped the world Jesus was born into.
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What the New Testament Inherited
By the first century CE the transformation was finished, and it’s the finished product the Gospel writers assume. The New Testament opens with Satan already a fully realized enemy: he tempts Jesus in the wilderness, commands a kingdom of demons, gets called the ruler of this world, and ends up hurled into a lake of fire in Revelation. Nobody explains him because nobody needs to. The audience already knows who he is.
That knowledge came from somewhere, and it wasn’t Genesis. The serpent in the garden is never identified as Satan anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. That connection gets made retroactively, by later readers reaching back to fit an old story into a newer theology. Read forward instead of backward and the picture reverses. The Old Testament didn’t lose the Devil. It never had him. The most consequential villain in Western religion was assembled over centuries, borrowed in part from Persian neighbors, and read back into scriptures that had been getting along without him the whole time.
Sources and Further Reading
Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Random House, 1995)
Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Routledge, 1979)
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Tags: biblical criticism, history of religion, Satan, Zoroastrianism, Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, comparative religion
A wonderful history in this article... especially the Zoroastrian influence. Could it be bookended with another piece on the prime Canaanite religion and its influence in early Judaism? And how the war-god/ storm-god supplanted El/Baal?