John A. Broussard

In 1 CH 21:1 Satan orders a census of the people of Israel.

In 2 SA 23:1 God does the ordering.

Same census, same results. David, who did the actual count, feels he has committed a sin by doing so.

The standard interpretation of these passages is that god is the one who does the ordering and that the commentator, in the first instance, merely points out that Satan was the intermediary--hence no contradiction.

Assuming that interpretation is correct, doesn't this mean that all of Satan's acts are simply obedience to god's wishes?

If that interpretation isn't correct, how can the contradiction be resolved?

Anat

Compare that to satan in Job: the satan there reports (truthfully) to God and doesn't intervene in worldly events without explicit permission of God and according to parameters set by God. Evidently the author of Job saw the satan as yet another divine messenger.

John A. Broussard

Right. I sometimes wonder if Satan wasn't a replica of the Greek god Mercury. And, come to think of it, Mercury had a seamier side. If I remember correctly, he was the god of thieves. In any event, Satan in the OT does seem to be strictly an agent of god, with no free will of his own.

However, the book of Job may be entirely borrowed from some other religious tradition, since almost all of the dozen or so references to Satan are contained there. It does seem somehow very much out of place in even such an eclectic collection as the OT.

Anat

It is my understanding that the concept of Satan as enemy of God is the result of Zoroastrian influence.

John A. Broussard

If so, then it's a later accretion. In the OT, Satan is almost uniformly doing god's will.

I suspect Satan as the enemy of god was picked up from Mithraism's Ahriman who they got from Zoroastrians. Maybe the Manichaeans were a later influence too.

Loomis

Well … here’s a slant you probably haven’t heard before:

Maybe it’s not a contradiction. Yahweh is Satan.

Keep in mind:

1) The god in question is Yahweh.

2) ‘Satan’ is not the spirit creature’s proper name. A better translation is ‘the satan’ or ‘the adversary.’

Consider the hypothesis (presented by Lloyd Barre and many others) that says that Yahweh was a foreign god who was assimilated into El-worship. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 has El dividing up humanity amongst his sons and assigning Yahweh to guard over the nation of Jacob. Barre’s hypothesis says that this was an attempt to combine Yahwism and El-worship (by portraying Yahweh as one of El’s 70 sons).

Now consider Psalm 82, which more or less ‘undoes’ what Deuteronomy 32:8-9 did. In this section El is reclaiming the nations for himself and condemning his sons to die like mortals. This would include Yahweh.

The assimilation that began at Deut 32:8-9 ended at Psalm 82. The experiment failed! The Yahwists and the El-worshipers did not get along. Psalm 82 was written by an ‘Elist’ who did not worship Yahweh. That author was kicking Yahweh out of Elism.

Get it?

Yahweh was a bad guy! (At least in the eyes of the El-worshipers.)

Now I would like to take Barre’s hypothesis one step further: Consider the possibility that the concept of ‘the adversary’ was born out of this failed experiment. In other words, Satan was invented by an Elist to apologize for dragging Yahweh into El-worship. Over time the concept of Satan stood on its own. Yahwism eventually won out. Yahweh assimilated El (and Baal, and Asherah, etc.), and El-worship fell by the wayside.

That would position Yahweh as the one-and-only monotheistic god, and “Satan� as his archrival.

Now for the resolution you are looking for:

2 Samuel 24:1 calls him Yahweh because a Yahwist wrote it.

1 Chronicles 21 calls him ‘the adversary’ because an Elist wrote it. The author knew it was Yahweh but went one step further to identify him as ‘the adversary.’

Get it?

What I’m trying to say here is - it looks to me like ‘the adversary’ and ‘Yahweh’ are the same character. Over time their origins were forgotten and they became two discrete super-powers.

I’m I making any sense?

BTW, we could also take this same idea and apply it to the concept of “the messiah� because El-worshipers would want to further apologize for the “Yahweh embarrasment� by claiming that some day a ‘real’ son of El would show up.

I’m I making any sense?

John A. Broussard

It makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, the way the world is I'm becoming more and more convinced that Satan exists and is in charge.

Anat

Loomis, I thought Chronicles is ascribed to the 'Chronicler' (duh) who wrote in 2nd temple times (5th century BCE or maybe 4th), long after the El vs Yahweh (vs Baal) conflicts. OTOH this would also mean living in a culture that had been exposed to Zoroastrianism and/or its derivatives.

andrewcriddle

FWIW Auld in 'Kings Without Privilege' and other works argues that Samuel/Kings and Chronicles are both revisions of an earlier text which is sometimes preserved more accurately in Chronicles than Kings.

IF he is right then elements in Chronicles but not Kings might be from early (pre-exilic) times.

Andrew Criddle

Chris Weimer

That's what he was trying to say, that HaSatan was merely part of the elohim, the hosts of angels, until the Zorastrian influence dichotomizing them into enemies.

On the other hand, and Hebrew linguistics is not my strong area, but I read that the prologue to Job (prose) differs greatly from the body of Job (poetry) enough that they think the introduction (and conclusion if I recall correctly) were later additions. I hypothesize that something like God himself was testing Job may have been the original.