Hyndis

While I've read the Bible, I am not a Biblical scholar by any means. And as I've got a question here, I figure I'll direct it at the people much smarter than myself.

From simply reading whats in the Bible, it seems that Satan doesn't actually cause all that much harm. If anything, it could be argued that he was trying to help humanity by giving them the knowledge of the gods. But then God got pissed and kicked 'em out of the garden before they could eat from the tree of life, which would have given them the immortality of a god.

Then skipping around to some of the more infamous sections of the Bible, and we've got God slaughtering all of the firstborn of Egypt, ordering rape and pillage of various countries as well as the slaughter of various cities, either by giving orders or doing it himself with orbital nukes.

There's that whole flood genocide thing, too.

Those are just the easy examples.


I may have forgotton some parts, but what exactly does Satan do that is so bad as recorded in the Bible? About all I can think of is that Job incident. He made a bet with God, then God tortured poor Job, killing quite a few innocents while he was at it.

But does Satan actually harm anyone in the Bible?


So, going back to my purpose here, what would the total bodycount be for both God and Satan after having read through the entire Bible? No fancy interpretations and twisting words around. Just a simple readthrough of the text that is actually there. And there will be some ambiguiity. In some places the number of dead are specified, but for the most part its a lot of handwaving and a mountain of corpses.

If some sort of official bodycount could be established, this might lead to some ackward moments as Christians try to explain away why God seems to have caused far more suffering than Satan has.

Diogenes the Cynic

Satan in the Hebrew Bible and in Judaism is not evil. He is an obedient servant to God. He also wasn't the serpent in Genesis. It was literally just a talking snake, not the devil. The identification of the snake with Satan is a much later retrojection.

In the NT, we see Satan as the tempter of Jesus and we see demonic possession. We also see Satan being defeated in Revelation. Off the top of my head, I can't think of the NT accusing Satan of any murders. He's a tempter.

Hyndis

I'm even willing to combine the snake and the NT Satan as the same character so that any evil deeds done would still accumulate.

However, I'm more looking for a list of attrocities. There's some of the obvious ones that I mentioned, but I also know there's umpteen million more minor events, such as sending a bear to go kill some children, orders to conquer this city or that city, and so forth. And there's a lot of these, too. An actual list of attrocities along with the associated bodycounts would be very tough to refute, especially as it would come literally from the Bible. For a supposedly benevolent and just deity to have slaughtered far more people than Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Julius Caesar, and Gengis Khan combined...


But more to the point, what bad deeds did Satan actually do, even if the fallen angel had taken snake form?

All I've got so far is:

Made a bet with God about Job's loyalty.
:huh:


And according to the Bible, he's even done some good things, too, such as giving humanity the gift of knowledge. Unless knowledge is a bad thing, that is...

GakuseiDon

Well, there is slaughter and pillage, but where does God actually order rape? This gets mentioned quite often. I know of the "keep all women who haven't known a man for yourselves" passage, which may or may not be such a reference, but are there any passages where God, Moses or anyone else clearly orders rape?

Hyndis

Dunno.

Thats why I'm asking the Biblical scholars.

But I do know that the "good guy" seems to have caused vastly more suffering than the "bad guy", according to the Bible. I'd just like to be able to quantify that somehow.

GakuseiDon

I usually don't recommend the "Skeptics Annotated Bible", since it is pretty awful, but you might find it interesting: Cruelty and Violence in the Bible

John Kesler

Most of Satan's malevolent activity is recorded in the NT, and even in the few places he makes an appearance in the OT, in only one place is "Satan" possibly used as a proper name--1 Chronicles 21--as opposed to simply being "the Satan," an adversary.

The New Testament claims that Satan, also called "the devil," was a "murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44) who has "the power of death" (Hebrews 2:14). Satan causes illness (Luke 13:16) and via his demons, possesses people. Luke (22:3) and John (13:27) claim that Judas Iscariot was under Satan's influence when he betrayed Jesus. Paul also attributes evil acts to Satan (1 Thessalonians 2:18, et al).

Joan of Bark

God still clearly holds the edge when it comes to mass slaughter. After all, what is the story of Noah's ark but the ultimate act of genocide?

Hyndis

I'm trying to be as open as possible here when attributing various evil acts to the bad guy, whoever the bad guy is.

About the worst that I can see this Satan guy doing, whatever name you want to use, is giving Job boils. But of course he's got God's okay to do that, since he's doing it right infront of God.

How does that compare to, say, this?

11:5 And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts.

11:6 And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.

From Exodus, of course.

Lets say each woman has on average 6 children. The first one is slain by God, regardless of how old they are. That means God wiped out almost 17% of Egypt's population as retribution. Egypt probably had several million people within its borders. Lets just call it 5 million, which I think is a reasonable estimate from that timeframe.

If my math is correct, and its not even 7am yet, that means God slaughtered about 700,000 people.


So...Satan gives an innocent guy boils. God kills 700,000 innocents.

One would be painful, but not lethal. The other is a good start towards genocide.

And thats only one incident. I found a couple other verses where God sends some angels to go slaughter a few hundred thousand people. Granted, they were soldiers, but killing them all while they were sleeping just ain't right. Go after the king or general leading them. The grunts don't have much say in the matter.

Nero's Boot

The Old Testament is clearly where Clive Barker got the idea for Hapeximendios, the Godly main villain from the novel Imajica.

--the Unbeheld and the God of the Bible share quite a few similarities NB