Ha Satan

שטן


Ha Satan (השטן) is definitely more accurate than plain Satan. As to what he is doing here, since this is a dictionary of the Tanach and he does not appear in Judaism until the post-"Hebrew" period... the answer can only be that, according to middle-period Judaism anyway (3rd - 15th century CE), Ha Satan is as omnipresent as YHVH himself.

In early "Hebrewism" - the evolving and developing cult of the Beney Yisra-El in the epoch of the Tanach - he simply does not exist. In later Yehudism (6th century BCE - to 70 CE), as the Book of Job (an early book, but much revised by the later Redactor) makes clear, ha Satan was "the wanderer"*, a particular angel or minister of Elohim who functioned as a kind of minister without portfolio, wandering around the human world without necessarily causing any mischief, but required to report back to the deity on anything of interest - and from here the mediaeval construction of the "Wandering Jew" as a form of the Devil.

* Remember that the Yehudit word that is translated as "angel" was MAL'ACH, from the same root that gives the 39 Mel'achot - "work-tasks". The Mal'achim were the divine servants, sent out to do the gods' chores. Probably ha Satan was the original angel, the gods' spy on Earth, and only later did the other "angels", each with their specific role, become added.

By the late Ezraic period (c400 BCE) he had come to be called "the adversary", from which evolved the Christian concept of the fallen angel, later Lucifer, and all that goes with that story. It appears to have derived from the dualism of Zoroastrianism (erroneously described as a "montheistic" religion in many encyclopaedia) which the Yehudim (incipient Jews as they were then becoming) learned in exile in Persia and brought back with them after the exile (536 BCE ff).

But this was not the Jewish concept of the "adversary": in a debate, there is the Proposition and there is the Opposition, and neither is "good" while the other is "evil", they are simply the debaters: Hillel v Shammai. Hasid v Mitnaged, Labour v Tory, Oxford v Cambridge... and in a court of Law, ha Satan was the Counsel for the Prosecution...

The simple intention here, and key to this era of patriarchalisation, was to break the link between divinity and priestess, to establish an enmity between serpent and woman (cf Genesis 3:15, but also see my notes on the cult of the serpent) that would bring about the termination of the goddess cult.

And that is why he appears in this dictionary. Because, after Persia, after this new dualistic idea entered Yehudism, the reinterpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden began that was to have such a powerful impact, first upon proto-Judaism, later upon Christianity, introducing as it does such fundamental nonsense as "woman is the root of all evil", "woman the temptress", "original sin", "exile from Paradise", "a whited sepulchre" and all the other pseudo-Zoroastrian misogynies which have since been superimposed upon the Eden story, and which have twisted both it and the civilisation based upon it - the real "evil" of ha Satan, though not his doing!

Cf 1 Chronicles 21:1; Zechariah 3:1 (in which ha Satan plays the Inquisitorial role of "Devil's Advocate" rather than being a devil himself); Job 1:6 ff and 2:2.

See also my notes to Sitnah.



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