Is the Satan in Job the Devil? From the Heavenly Adversary to the Father of Lies

Satan, the Devil and the problem of evil across Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism

Introduction: A Name and a Character

In the first chapter of Job, a figure called ha-satan, "the adversary," comes before God with the divine beings. He has been roaming the earth. He asks whether Job's piety is disinterested, receives permission to test it, and acts within limits God sets. Nothing in the book makes him a rebel, gives him a kingdom, or traces him to the beginning of the world.

The First Letter of John speaks of someone else: "Whoever does sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this: to undo the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his opponents that they are of their father the devil, who "was a murderer from the beginning" and "does not stand in the truth," a liar and the father of the lie (John 8:44).

The usual question is how the first figure became the second: how a member of God's court turned into the ancient enemy of God and humanity. Put that way, the question assumes one character with one biography, and it invites either a theological harmony or a story of decline. This essay puts the question differently. The Devil of the Johannine writings is a composite. His name descends from the adversary of Job and Zechariah, through Greek translators who rendered "adversary" as diabolos, "slanderer." His character descends from elsewhere: from the lying spirit that volunteers in God's council, from the serpent and from Cain in Genesis, from the angelic rulers of the nations, and from the chiefs of evil spirits that Jewish writers developed between the third century BCE and the first century CE. These strands fused gradually, first in Jewish texts and then in Christian ones, and Revelation 12 gathers them into a single figure.

Three claims follow from that thesis. First, contact with Persian religion may have catalyzed the dualistic frame in which the strands were joined, but the Devil's specific features have Jewish roots, and the closest Iranian parallels to the Johannine texts are either structural or late. Second, I will suggest that the merger was not arbitrary. The adversary in Job imputes a hidden motive to a human being before God; the serpent in Genesis imputes a hidden motive to God before human beings. Both can be read as slanderers, and the Greek word for the one came to name the other. Third, the theological question, whether Job and John describe the same being, differs from the historical question, whether their authors shared a concept. History can answer the second, and the answer is no. It can also show how later readers built the identification. It cannot settle whether the being exists.

One principle governs everything below, so it is stated once here: a shared name does not establish a shared identity, and a later interpretation does not reveal an earlier intention. What an author meant, what a translator did and what later readers made of both are three kinds of evidence, and they must be kept apart. The sections that follow trace the strands in order: the Hebrew Bible's adversary, the Greek translation, the Persian question, the Second Temple sources, the New Testament merger, the Johannine texts and their uses, and the later rabbinic, Kabbalistic and theological readings. Figure 1 maps where each attribute of the Johannine Devil comes from.

Figure 1. The five strands of the Johannine Devil. Each row traces one attribute from its Hebrew Bible root through a Second Temple or early Christian carrier, and only the first row begins in Job. Revelation 12:9-10 names the fused figure: serpent, Devil, Satan, deceiver and accuser. † marks the carriers where Iranian influence on Jewish dualism is most often argued.

I. The Adversary in the Council

In the Hebrew Bible the functions later gathered into the Devil are scattered among different figures, most of them God's own agents, and the adversary is only one of them.

The noun śāṭān means an adversary, someone who stands in the way. It occurs 27 times, and most uses are ordinary. Philistine commanders fear that David will become their śāṭān in battle (1 Samuel 29:4). God raises up human adversaries against Solomon (1 Kings 11:14, 23, 25). In Numbers 22:22 and 32 the adversary blocking Balaam's road is the angel of YHWH, sent by God to stop him. A śāṭān can be human or divine, hostile or loyal. The word names a role, not a being.

Seventeen occurrences carry the definite article, and all of them are in two books. Fourteen are in Job 1-2, where ha-satan comes with the "sons of God" to present himself before YHWH. He arrives from roaming the earth, and his question is the hinge of the book: "Does Job fear God for nothing?" (1:9). He receives permission to strike Job's possessions and then his body, within limits God sets each time (1:12; 2:6). The narrator gives him no history, no rebellion and no kingdom. He is not innocent, though. When they speak again, God observes that Job still holds fast to his integrity, "and you incited me against him, to destroy him for nothing" (2:3). The Hebrew is ḥinnām, the word the adversary used in 1:9, now turned back on him. The test has shown that Job's piety was not bought.

The other three are in Zechariah 3, a vision the book's framework dates to early 519 BCE. Joshua the high priest stands before the angel of YHWH, "and the adversary standing at his right hand to accuse him" (3:1). The Hebrew puns on the root: ha-satan stands lə-śiṭnô, "to adversary him." This time the accusation fails outright. "YHWH rebuke you, adversary," comes the reply (3:2; the Hebrew gives the line to YHWH, the Syriac to the angel), and Joshua's filthy garments, which stand for his iniquity, are exchanged for clean ones. Zechariah supplies what Job lacks: an accuser whose case is thrown out and who is himself rebuked. And while Job's date is disputed, this scene belongs firmly to the early Persian period.

Even the adversary's function is contested. Peggy Day argued that these passages describe different accusing figures, not the later Satan read back into them (Day 1988). Ryan Stokes argues further that śāṭān denotes an attacker, in judicial settings an executioner, rather than a prosecutor (Stokes 2014; 2019). On his reading the adversary of Zechariah threatens the high priest's life, and the adversary of Job is the Hebrew Bible's most developed figure because he attacks a righteous man. Accuser or executioner, he is God's agent, not God's rival. A second proposal connects him to Persian administration. The verb for his roaming in Job 1:7 (šwṭ) is the verb used of the "eyes of YHWH" that range over the earth (Zechariah 4:10; 2 Chronicles 16:9), and Ezra 4:6 calls a written accusation made in the reign of Ahasuerus a śiṭnâ. A. Leo Oppenheim proposed that the heavenly adversary was modeled in part on the imperial network of informers and inspectors known as the King's Eye (Oppenheim 1968), and Jason Silverman reads Zechariah 3 as a satrapal confirmation hearing, with the adversary as the accuser of the satrap's court, a function separate from the King's Eye (Silverman 2014). The case rests on lexical overlap and is plausible rather than proven, but it locates one Persian contribution where few look for it: in bureaucracy, not dualism.

A third text shows the adversary taking over one of God's own acts. In 2 Samuel 24:1 YHWH's anger burns against Israel and "he incited David against them" to number the people, an act God then punishes. The Chronicler retells it: "an adversary stood up against Israel and incited David to number Israel" (1 Chronicles 21:1). The verb is the same in both (wayyāset, root swt), and it is the verb God uses in Job 2:3. The Chronicler kept Samuel's verb and changed its subject. His śāṭān lacks the article, so it may be a common noun, "an adversary," rather than the proper name Satan (Stokes 2009). The change may reflect discomfort with God as the direct cause of David's sin, though scholars dispute how far theodicy drives it. Either way, an act once attributed to God has been assigned to an agent.

Other texts place deception and destruction inside the divine court itself. In 1 Kings 22:19-23 the prophet Micaiah sees YHWH enthroned among the host of heaven. God asks who will entice Ahab to his death, and a spirit volunteers to be "a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets." God answers: "You will entice him, and you will succeed." An "evil spirit from YHWH" torments Saul until he hurls his spear at David (1 Samuel 16:14; 18:10-11; 19:9-10), and God sends "an evil spirit" between Abimelech and the lords of Shechem to avenge the murder of Gideon's sons (Judges 9:23-24). In an oracle set in Cyrus's time, God says: "I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil" (Isaiah 45:7). Lying, killing and evil itself are here instruments in God's hand. The nations, meanwhile, have angelic rulers of their own. In the Qumran text of Deuteronomy 32:8 the Most High divides the peoples according to the number of the sons of God (most Greek manuscripts read "angels of God"), and in Daniel the "prince of Persia" and the "prince of Greece" contend with Michael, the prince of Israel (Daniel 10:13, 20; 12:1).

One more figure must be placed, because it is the real background of the Johannine texts. The serpent of Genesis 3 is introduced as "more cunning than any beast of the field that YHWH God had made" (3:1): a creature, not a spirit. It contradicts God's warning, persuades the woman to eat, and is cursed as an animal, to go on its belly (3:14). Genesis never calls it an adversary, gives it a motive, or connects it to any heavenly being. In the next chapter Cain kills his brother (4:8), and Genesis links that story to no adversary either.

So the Hebrew Bible has a satan, but it does not have the Devil. It has a tester and accuser in God's court (Job, Zechariah), an inciter (Chronicles), a lying spirit (1 Kings 22), evil spirits sent by God, angelic princes of the nations and, standing apart from all of them, a speaking serpent and the first murderer.

II. Translation: How ha-satan Became ho diabolos

The bridge between Job's adversary and the Devil of the New Testament is a Greek word, chosen by Jewish translators generations before Jesus.

When the Hebrew scriptures were rendered into Greek, beginning with the Torah in the third century BCE and continuing with books such as Job and Chronicles over the following generations, the translators had to decide what to do with śāṭān. For the heavenly figure in Job, in Zechariah 3 and in 1 Chronicles 21:1 they used diabolos, a noun meaning slanderer or false accuser, which they also applied to human accusers, as when Haman is called ho diabolos (Esther 7:4). For most other human adversaries they used epiboulos, "plotter," or simply transliterated the Hebrew (3 Kingdoms 11:14), and Balaam's angel opposes him with a verbal form of the same root as diabolos (endiaballein, Numbers 22:22). The choice shows how the translators read the heavenly figure: as an accuser and a slanderer.

Translation is also interpretation. The Old Greek Job is roughly a sixth shorter than the Hebrew, and at 2:3 it changes the theology of the verse that matters most here. Where the Hebrew has God say "you incited me against him, to destroy him for nothing," the Greek has "you told me to destroy his possessions without cause." God is no longer incited. When the New Testament writers used diabolos, the word carried a Hebrew figure along with a translator's adjustments to him.

The language a word comes from does not fix the concept it carries, and the traffic ran both ways. The Mishnah takes over the Greek word for "accuser," qaṭēgôr (from katēgoros), for the prosecutor in the heavenly court, alongside the Greek word for "advocate": whoever performs one commandment gains an advocate, and whoever commits one transgression gains an accuser (Avot 4:11). Revelation, written in Greek, calls the Devil ho katēgōr (12:10), a rare form close to that rabbinic loanword. Aramaic, the language Jesus probably spoke, had a slanderer of its own. In Biblical Aramaic certain Chaldeans "ate the pieces" of the Jews, and Darius's officials those of Daniel, meaning that they denounced them (Daniel 3:8; 6:25). The Syriac New Testament turns the idiom into a noun, ʾākel qarṣā, "eater of pieces," and uses it for diabolos in John 8:44, while it uses sāṭānā in 1 John 3:8. In the Syriac the verbal link between the two Johannine verses disappears; in Greek it is plain. Arguments from the bare language of a word, whether that the Devil is a Greek import or that the Greek fixes a single meaning, prove nothing. A translator's choice shows how he read a figure, and no more than that.

One of the first Jewish texts to connect Genesis with a diabolos was also written in Greek. The Wisdom of Solomon, composed in Alexandria around the turn of the era, says that God created human beings for incorruption, "but through the envy of a diabolos death entered the world" (2:23-24). Most readers take this as the earliest identification of the Eden serpent with the Devil. Jason Zurawski argues that the noun, which lacks the article, means a human opponent, not the Devil (Zurawski 2012), and 1 Clement connects the verse with Cain's envy (3:4-4:7). Josephus, writing in the 90s CE, retells Genesis 3 with an envious serpent and no Satan at all (Antiquities 1.41). A learned Jew of John's generation could tell the story without the Devil.

III. The Persian Question

Contact with Persian religion may have shaped the frame in which the Devil was assembled, but his specific features have closer Jewish sources, and the case for influence is strongest exactly where the Johannine texts are not.

Judeans lived under Persian rule for two centuries after Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE. The Jerusalem temple was rebuilt under Darius I, and a Judean garrison served the empire at Elephantine on the Nile. The question is not whether Jews met Iranian religion, but whether Iranian ideas shaped the figures that became the Devil, and if so which ones, when and how.

The datable evidence is better than is often supposed. Darius's Behistun inscription (about 520 BCE) blames the revolts against him on "the Lie" (drauga), which made the provinces rebel, and instructs future kings to punish the follower of the Lie. An Aramaic copy of the inscription circulated at Elephantine under Darius II (423-404 BCE), in a community that included Judeans. Xerxes' Daiva inscription records the suppression of the worship of daivas and promises that whoever keeps Ahuramazda's law will be blessed after death. Greek authors of the fourth century BCE knew a doctrine of two principles. Aristotle, quoted by Diogenes Laertius (1.8), reports that the Magi teach a good spirit and an evil spirit, Oromasdes and Areimanios. Theopompus, quoted by Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 47), describes alternating world ages of 3,000 years that end with the evil one's defeat, and he and Eudemus both report that the Magi expect the dead to live again (Diogenes Laertius 1.9). Eudemus, as preserved by Damascius, says that a good god and an evil daemon separated out of a single prior principle. How much of these later reports goes back to the fourth-century writers is debated. Together they show an Iranian dualist eschatology in circulation before Daniel, Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The oldest Zoroastrian texts, the Gathas, are archaic in language but survive only in manuscripts from 1323 CE onward; their composition is usually placed around 1000 BCE, with wide disagreement. In Yasna 30 two primal spirits, "twins," choose at the beginning between the better and the bad. The spirit allied with the Lie chooses to do the worst things, and the daevas, deceived as they deliberate, rush to Wrath (30.3-6). Humanity divides into followers of Truth and followers of the Lie. Yet the Gathic evil spirit is named Angra Mainyu only once (45.2), and not yet as a proper name. The daevas descend from Evil Thought rather than from the evil spirit (32.3), and Ahura Mazda is called the father of the beneficent spirit (47.3). Several specialists read the twins as both derived from Ahura Mazda and divided by their choice (Gershevitch 1964; Gnoli 1996). In demonology, Jewish literature preserves one near-certain Iranian borrowing: the demon Asmodeus, who kills Sarah's seven husbands in the book of Tobit, is usually derived from Aēšma, the Iranian demon of wrath (reconstructed as aēšmō.daēva). Archie Wright's recent survey argues that interaction with Zoroastrianism led Jewish and Christian writers to separate God from responsibility for evil, and so produced Satan (Wright 2022).

The objections are as strong as the evidence. The closest narrative parallels to the Johannine Devil are late. Ahriman's killing of Gayōmard, the first man, looks like an Iranian "murderer from the beginning," but it survives only in Pahlavi compilations whose final redaction is ninth-century. The myth of Zurvan as father of the twin spirits is attested only from the late fourth century CE. The chronology also runs against simple borrowing. Zechariah's adversary, from the early Persian period, is a council officer under God, not a rival power, while the strongly dualistic Jewish texts appear in the second and first centuries BCE, under Hellenistic and Hasmonean rule. Jewish sources had their own generators: the evil and lying spirits God sends in Judges, Samuel and Kings, and Isaiah 45:7, though Shaul Shaked notes that its wording recalls the Gathic question of who made light and darkness (Yasna 44.5), so even this precedent may belong to a conversation with Persia (Shaked 2006). And the opposition of truth and lie is an Indo-Iranian inheritance, older than Zarathustra: Vedic ṛtá stands against ánṛta, and the Vedic druh is cognate with the Iranian druj, the Lie. What would be distinctively Zoroastrian is a package: a primordial choice between two spirits, deceived divine beings, humanity divided by allegiance, and a final defeat of evil. James Barr's standard critique asks every claim of influence to name a mechanism and a motive (Barr 1985). Persian administration meets that test better than Persian doctrine does.

Morton Smith's verdict on the Johannine text should be reported accurately, because it is often softened. He grants that in John 8:44 "the devil and falsity look like Angra Mainyu and the Lie," but he finds the structure reversed. In Zoroastrian teaching the Lie exists first and the evil spirit chooses it; in John the lie is the Devil's offspring. John's division of humanity into two parentages contradicts Zoroastrian and Christian teaching alike, since both make every human being a creature of the good God, and the rest of the Zoroastrian system is absent. He judges Zoroastrian influence on the verse unlikely (Smith 1989).

The best case for influence lies at Qumran. The Treatise on the Two Spirits (1QS 3:13-4:26) teaches that God created two spirits, of truth and of injustice, for humanity to walk in until the time of his visitation. A Prince of Lights rules the children of righteousness and an Angel of Darkness the children of injustice (3:20-21). God loves the one and hates the other (3:26-4:1); the ways of the spirit of injustice include lying and deceit (4:9); and God has set an end to injustice (4:18-19). The recent Oxford commentary discusses the influence of Zoroastrian dualism on this doctrine (Collins and Nati 2024). A common objection holds that Qumran keeps both spirits under God, unlike an Iranian evil power competing on equal terms. That contrast fits the late Pahlavi system better than the Gathas, which call Ahura Mazda the father of the beneficent spirit and, on Gershevitch's and Gnoli's reading, derive both spirits from him. The feature usually cited to separate Qumran from Iran may therefore be a point of contact rather than a difference, though Isaiah 45:7 supplies a Jewish precedent and the Treatise's predestination departs from the Gathic emphasis on choice. Specialists remain divided, and at least one changed his mind: Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin judged the parallel probably unconnected (1984), and a decade later returned to his view of 1957, that the Treatise fits the later, Zurvanite form of Iranian dualism better than the Gathic (1994). If influence reached the Johannine writings, it came by this route. Marie-Émile Boismard argued that the "spirit of truth and the spirit of error" of 1 John 4:6, and the letter's division of humanity into children of God and children of the devil (3:10), depend on Qumran's theology, though the letter avoids Qumran's determinism (Boismard 1972). Even then, Iranian ideas would have shaped a Jewish doctrine that a Christian writer later used.

The Aramaic Visions of Amram (4Q543-549, probably second century BCE) may stand closer still to the Gathas, because it keeps a choice. Two angelic rulers contend over Amram, one of darkness whose names include Belial and Melchiresha and one of light, and Amram is asked which shall rule him. The text is fragmentary and the names partly reconstructed.

Later rabbis modeled the relationship themselves. Resh Lakish taught that the names of the angels came up with the exiles from Babylon (Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Hashanah 1:2; Genesis Rabbah 48:9), and when a Magus told the Babylonian sage Ameimar that the upper half of his body belonged to Ohrmazd and the lower half to Ahriman, Ameimar mocked him (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 39a). Contact with resistance is documented for the rabbinic period, and it is a more plausible model than wholesale borrowing for the centuries before.

IV. The Second Temple Laboratory

Between the third century BCE and 70 CE, Jewish writers produced not one doctrine of supernatural evil but several, and among them every component the Johannine Devil would combine.

Thomas Farrar's survey of texts securely dated before 70 CE concludes that there was "no standard Jewish Satanology" in the period; many texts have no leading evil figure at all (Farrar 2019). Others developed one under a range of names: Belial, Mastema, Satan, Shemihazah, Asael, Melchiresha, the Angel of Darkness. In at least two works the components had already begun to combine.

Jubilees, composed around 160-150 BCE, is the clearest case. Its chief evil spirit is Mastema, from a Hebrew word for hostility. After the flood, when Noah prays that the evil spirits be bound, Mastema asks that some be left to him, "for great is the wickedness of the sons of men"; God leaves a tenth, and in R. H. Charles's translation they remain "subject before Satan on the earth" (10:8-11). Charles took the verse to identify Mastema with Satan, and Farrar agrees that it calls him "(the) Satan," though whether as a name or a title is unclear. Mastema then plays parts that Jubilees takes from God. When heavenly voices praise Abraham's faithfulness, Prince Mastema proposes the test of Isaac, on the model of the adversary in Job 1 (17:15-18), and he is put to shame when Isaac is spared (18:12). He tries to kill Moses on the road to Egypt, an attack that Exodus 4:24 attributes to YHWH (48:2-3). He is bound during the exodus so that he cannot accuse Israel (48:15-18), and "all the powers of Mastema" kill the firstborn of Egypt (49:2). A retelling of the binding of Isaac found at Qumran (4Q225) has Prince Mastema lodge a complaint against Abraham while his angels rejoice at Isaac's expected death. Two and a half centuries before John, accuser, would-be murderer and chief of evil spirits are one figure, and the reassignment of divine violence glimpsed in Chronicles has become a method.

The Enochic tradition supplied a rival account of evil's origin. In the Book of the Watchers (third century BCE), angels led by Shemihazah descend, take human wives and teach forbidden arts. Asael teaches the making of weapons, and Raphael is told to "ascribe all sin" to him (1 Enoch 10:8). The spirits of the giants born of these unions become the evil spirits that afflict humanity (15:8-12). Here sin enters the world through rebellious angels, not a serpent. The later Parables of Enoch, of disputed date, add accusing "satans" barred from coming before the Lord of Spirits (40:7), Azazel's hosts "subject to Satan" (54:6) and an angel, Gadreel, who led Eve astray (69:6).

The Dead Sea Scrolls give the leading evil figure a dominion and an army. The Community Rule speaks of the dominion of Belial (1QS 1:18, 23-24). The War Scroll sets the army of Belial against the children of light and says that God made Belial for the pit, an "angel of hostility" (1QM 13:10-12). The Damascus Document warns of the three nets of Belial (CD 4:13-18) and says that Belial raised up Jannes and his brother, the magicians who opposed Moses (5:18-19). Belial appears about ninety times in the Scrolls; śāṭān appears five or six times, probably always as a common noun. Whatever its relation to Iran, the Treatise on the Two Spirits supplies the theory of this dominion: humanity is divided between a spirit of truth and a spirit of injustice until God ends injustice.

The Testament of Job, a Greek retelling, probably Jewish, usually dated between the second century BCE and the second century CE, bridges the two figures this essay began with. Job destroys an idol temple that an angel calls the work of Satan, and he is warned that Satan will make war on him. Satan comes in disguise, as a beggar, as a king of Persia and as a bread-seller; he kills Job's children and strikes his body; and at last he gives up, weeping, and compares himself to a wrestler who has his opponent pinned and still loses, because Job endured. Elihu, in this version, speaks under Satan's inspiration. Job's tester has become an open enemy, provoked by Job's zeal and defeated by his endurance.

Two further strands complete the picture. Ben Sira, around 180 BCE, places the source of sin in the human inclination (yēṣer, 15:14) and observes that when the ungodly curses Satan he curses himself (21:27, Greek): blaming the adversary indicts the one who blames. This is the road to the rabbinic evil inclination. Miryam Brand's study of the period shows its texts locating sin either within human beings or in demonic forces outside them, with prayers and wisdom texts favoring the first and the Enochic writings, Jubilees and the Scrolls the second (Brand 2013). And Wisdom 2:24, discussed above, ties the entry of death to a diabolos.

By the first century CE, then, Jewish texts had produced an accuser turned enemy (Jubilees, and perhaps already the Testament of Job), a chief of spirits with a dominion and an army (Jubilees, the Scrolls), an origin of sin outside humanity (the Watchers), a link between death and a diabolos (Wisdom) and an internal alternative to all of them (Ben Sira). The New Testament writers did not need to invent the Devil, and they did not need Iran directly. They needed to choose among Jewish options and join them.

V. The Merger in the New Testament

The New Testament completes the merger: by the end of the first century, Satan, the Devil, the accuser and the ancient serpent are names for one figure.

The names converge first. Matthew's temptation narrative calls the tempter both the devil and Satan (4:1-11). John says that the devil put the betrayal into Judas's heart (13:2, on the usual reading) and that Satan entered him (13:27). The Johannine Jesus can even call a disciple a devil: "one of you is a diabolos," he says of Judas (6:70).

The kingdom of that figure probably goes back to Jesus. When scribes accuse him of casting out demons by Beelzebul, he answers that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, and that no one can plunder a strong man's house without first binding the strong man (Mark 3:22-27; compare Matthew 12:25-29 and Luke 11:17-22). Critical scholars widely credit the strong-man saying in particular to Jesus. Luke preserves the only vision that Jesus himself reports in the Synoptic Gospels: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (10:18). The charge also ran the other way. In John 8:48 and 52 Jesus' opponents say that he has a demon, and the Beelzebul controversy shows that the charge of demonic power belongs to the oldest layer of the tradition.

The older model of the permitted tester did not disappear. In Luke 22:31 Jesus tells Peter that Satan has asked for the disciples, to sift them like wheat: a request to God on the pattern of Job 1-2, which Farrar treats as literary dependence. Paul hands an offender over to Satan "for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved" (1 Corinthians 5:5), and says that a messenger of Satan was given to him to keep him from pride (2 Corinthians 12:7). The God-permitted agent and the cosmic enemy coexist within the New Testament, as they coexist within Jubilees. The contrast between a Hebrew accuser and a Christian enemy is not a contrast between the two testaments.

Paul also brings the serpent near. He fears that the Corinthians will be led astray "as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning" (2 Corinthians 11:3), and a few verses later he warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (11:14). He promises the Romans that "the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet" (16:20), in language that echoes the curse on the serpent (Genesis 3:15). He calls a power "the god of this age" (2 Corinthians 4:4), usually read as Satan, and asks what agreement Christ has with Beliar (6:15), the Belial of the Scrolls.

Revelation states the merger in full. In its twelfth chapter, usually dated around 95 CE, war breaks out in heaven. Michael and his angels defeat the dragon, "the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world," and he is thrown down with his angels (12:7-9). A voice in heaven proclaims that "the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night," has been thrown down (12:10). The identification recurs at 20:2. On the usual reading the ancient serpent is the serpent of Eden. Some interpreters think instead of Leviathan, "the twisting serpent" of Isaiah 27:1, and Henry Ansgar Kelly dates the first certain identification of Eden's serpent with Satan to Justin Martyr in the second century (Kelly 2006). The dragon itself belongs to the ancient Near Eastern myth of combat with the sea monster, which Neil Forsyth has argued is the deep background of the Christian Satan, more than any Persian doctrine (Forsyth 1987).

Either way, Revelation joins the name, the accuser of Job and Zechariah, the deceiver, the ruler with angels and the primeval serpent in one figure. It also answers the question of how an accuser who once stood before God became God's enemy: he accused in heaven until he was cast out. Jude 9, where the archangel Michael answers the devil with the words of Zechariah 3:2, "The Lord rebuke you," draws the same line from the council adversary to the Devil.

VI. Liar and Murderer from the Beginning

The Johannine Devil takes his character from Genesis, not Job, and what may have joined him to Job's adversary is slander.

The two Johannine passages share more than diabolos. Both use ap' archēs, "from the beginning." Both tie belonging to the Devil to human conduct. And both use a word that occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, anthrōpoktonos, "murderer," literally "man-killer": in John 8:44 the Devil "was a man-killer from the beginning," and in 1 John 3:15 "everyone who hates his brother is a man-killer." The rare word ties the two texts together, and the letter ties them to Genesis.

John 8:44 is less precise than translations make it look. Its opening phrase, ek tou patros tou diabolou, most naturally means "of your father the devil," but it can be read "of the father of the devil." Its closing clause, "he is a liar kai ho patēr autou," can mean "and the father of it," the lie, or "and so is his father." M. David Litwa counts at least four possible readings of the verse, two of which give the devil a father (Litwa 2020). Ancient readers exploited both ambiguities. The Valentinian teacher Heracleon took some hearers to share the devil's substance, and others to be his children by choice, and Manichaeans later argued that the verse gives the devil a father (Augustine, Tractates on John 42.12). Editors also divide over whether the devil "was not standing" (ouk estēken) or "does not stand" (ouch hestēken) in the truth. In the verse, "from the beginning" stands with "man-killer"; the clauses about truth and lying carry no "from the beginning" of their own. Whatever "the beginning" is, the text explicitly dates only the killing.

That beginning is Genesis. Neither passage alludes to the heavenly court. 1 John names its precedent: "not like Cain, who was of the evil one and slaughtered his brother" (3:12). Cain committed the first murder. The letter makes him a child of the evil one, and it calls everyone who hates his brother a man-killer (3:15), the title John 8:44 gives the devil. Nils Dahl argued in 1964 that John 8:44, like Polycarp's phrase "the firstborn of Satan," presupposes a Jewish tradition in which Cain was the devil's own offspring (Dahl 1964). Later Jewish sources make Samael the father of Cain (Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer 21, eighth century; some witnesses to Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 4:1). Polycarp's "firstborn of Satan" is a man who denies resurrection and judgment (To the Philippians 7:1), like the Cain of the Targumic tradition, who denies that there is a judgment or a judge (Targum Neofiti on Genesis 4:8; Dochhorn 2007). For the first century the tradition is plausible but unproven. The other candidate is Genesis 3: death entered the world when the serpent persuaded the woman. Augustine read John 8:44 this way. The devil killed man by persuasion, and he was a murderer from the beginning because there could be no murder before there was a man (Tractates on John 42.11). Wisdom 2:24 had already joined death to a diabolos.

What, then, did the serpent lie about? The question is sharper than it looks, because Genesis confirms part of what the serpent said. He told the woman that she would not die, that her eyes would be opened, and that she would be "like God, knowing good and evil" (3:4-5). Their eyes are opened (3:7), and God himself says that "the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (3:22). They do not die on the day they eat, although God had warned, "on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die" (2:17). Ancient readers noticed. Jubilees solved the problem by counting a day of the Lord as a thousand years: Adam died at 930, within the day (4:29-30). The Hebrew formula matters too. "On the day... you shall surely die" (mot tamut) is the language of a death sentence, not a forecast of the hour; Solomon uses it of Shimei (1 Kings 2:37), who is executed after he returns, not on the day he leaves. On that reading the serpent denied a sentence that was carried out: the humans are barred from the tree of life and return to dust (3:19, 22-24).

A third answer joins the two halves of this history. The serpent's most consequential claim is not a prediction but an imputation: "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened" (3:5). It recasts the prohibition as divine self-interest, a jealous God guarding a privilege. Later tradition makes the charge explicit. In the Apocalypse of Moses, a work of disputed date, the devil speaking through the serpent tells Eve that God begrudged them the fruit (18), and in Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer 13 the serpent says the same. That is slander, diabolē, aimed at God.

Return now to Job. The adversary's charge is also an imputation of hidden motive. "Does Job fear God for nothing?" recasts Job's piety as self-interest, a servant paid for his loyalty. The test refutes the charge: Job holds fast to his integrity, and God turns the adversary's word back on him (1:9; 2:3). The Greek translators' choice of diabolos, slanderer, shows how they read this figure.

I propose that a shared structure made the join natural. The adversary of Job slanders a human being before God; the serpent of Eden slanders God before human beings. Each imputes a hidden, self-interested motive to the other party, and each works through half-truths. The ancient texts that joined the serpent to the devil named a different link: envy. Death entered the world through the envy of a diabolos (Wisdom 2:24), and in the Life of Adam and Eve the devil, cast out of heaven for refusing to honor Adam, deceives Eve because he envies Adam's happiness (12-16). The two accounts fit together. Envy names the motive and slander the method, and the serpent's slander is precisely that God is envious. Revelation pairs the two offices in consecutive verses: the deceiver of the whole world, who works on human beings, and the accuser who stands against them before God (12:9-10). Read this way, "liar" and "murderer from the beginning" are not two charges but one, a slander that brought death. This is an interpretive proposal, not a claim about what any ancient author consciously intended. It suggests, though, that the identification of Job's adversary with Eden's serpent, which history shows was built rather than inherited, was built along a real seam in the texts.

Does "the devil has been sinning from the beginning" mean that the Devil was always evil? The letter's own usage counsels caution. Ap' archēs occurs eight times in 1 John, and only at 3:8 does it concern the devil. Elsewhere it refers to "what was from the beginning" (1:1), to the one who is from the beginning (2:13-14), to the old commandment and what the readers "heard from the beginning" (2:7; twice at 2:24), and to "the message you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another" (3:11). The author sets two beginnings side by side: the beginning of the message, which is love, and the beginning of human history, which is Cain's hatred. The present tense of "sins" describes a persistent practice, and the passage's purpose is ethical: conduct shows whose child a person is, and the Son of God came to undo the works of the one who practices sin. The letter narrates no fall, no rebellion and no origin.

The letter's setting shows that its target is not Jews. 1 John never mentions Jews or Pharisees. It addresses a community from which some "went out from us" (2:19), and it opposes those who will not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (4:2-3). When Polycarp used Johannine devil language a generation later, he aimed it at Christian heretics, and Irenaeus records him calling Marcion "the firstborn of Satan" (Against Heresies 3.3.4). Who wrote these texts is a separate and open question. The Gospel claims an eyewitness author, the disciple Jesus loved (21:24); 1 John is anonymous. Raymond Brown assigned the Gospel and the letters to different writers within one Johannine community (Brown 1979; 1982). Hugo Méndez has argued that the community never existed as reconstructed, and that the Gospel and letters form a chain of pseudepigraphic works, the letters written by three hands whose implied audiences and situations are literary fictions (Méndez 2020; 2025; 2026). Whatever the answer, the shared vocabulary shows a shared tradition. The Johannine Devil is one concept across the corpus, even if not one author's.

VII. "Your Father the Devil": John 8:44 and the Pharisees

Nothing in John 8:44 licenses a verdict on Jews, on rabbinic Judaism or on its literature, but the arguments usually offered for that conclusion are weaker than the conclusion itself.

The question is not academic, because the opposite reading has a long history. John Chrysostom, preaching in Antioch in 386-387, called the synagogue a dwelling of demons. Martin Luther cited John 8:39-44 in On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) to call the Jews the devil's children. A Nazi children's book of 1938, Der Giftpilz, quoted the verse to teach that the Jews descend from the Devil, and in 2018 the gunman in the Pittsburgh synagogue attack cited it on his social media profile. Elaine Pagels has argued that early Christians used Satan to demonize their nearest rivals, Jews first and then pagans and heretics (Pagels 1995). Whatever one makes of that thesis, this verse is where its consequences are clearest.

Begin with the audience. The verse names no group. Outside the story of the woman taken in adultery, a later addition to the Gospel (7:53-8:11), Pharisees appear in John 8 only at verse 13. The rest of the chapter speaks of "the Jews" (8:22, 31, 48, 52, 57), and from 8:31 the dialogue is addressed to "the Jews who had believed him." Chrysostom himself read the hostile speakers as believers who had not continued (Homilies on John 54). Some Catholic exegetes now read the passage as aimed chiefly at Christian communities (Di Luccio and Vetö, writing in Vatican News in 2024), while Adele Reinhartz reads "the Jews" throughout as the Gospel's outgroup (Reinhartz 2018). On the believer reading, John 8:44 does what 1 John does: it aims devil-paternity at people who left. On any reading, the Gospel's language invited generalization. John uses Ioudaios seventy-one times, against five or six in each of the other Gospels, though many of John's uses are neutral or positive (4:22; 11:45).

The historical setting cuts both ways. J. Louis Martyn's influential reading holds that the Gospel's conflicts operate on two levels, the lifetime of Jesus and the evangelist's own day, when believers in Jesus were being expelled from synagogues (9:22; 12:42; 16:2; Martyn 2003). The mechanism Martyn proposed, a synagogue curse on heretics known as the Birkat ha-Minim, has been widely rejected (Kimelman 1981; Boyarin 2001; Langer 2012), and Reinhartz rejects the premise of expulsion itself. Where the two-level reading survives, as in Martinus de Boer's revision, the second-level opponents are local synagogue authorities whom John presents as Pharisees, the milieu that fed into rabbinic Judaism (de Boer 2020). So historical reconstruction alone cannot refute the use of the verse against later Judaism.

The answer to that use must therefore rest on a principle, and it is better stated openly as one: a charge against first-century opponents does not pass to their intellectual heirs. The Pharisees were a movement, not a family. First-century Pharisaism is not the rabbinic tradition, which formed gradually after 70 CE and drew on more than Pharisaic sources, and neither the Talmud nor the Zohar existed for the evangelist to condemn. This is an ethical judgment rather than a finding of historical method, and its force does not depend on any reconstruction of the Gospel's audience.

The reading of the verse as moral rather than biological parentage offers weaker protection than it seems to. It is the patristic mainstream: Augustine and Chrysostom insisted that the hearers were children of the devil by imitation, not by birth (Tractates on John 42.10; Homilies on John 54). But Heracleon read the parentage, at least in part, as shared substance, Reinhartz argues that the evangelist meant it seriously within ancient ideas of generation (Reinhartz 2020), and the Cain tradition that may stand behind 1 John 3:12 is genealogical. Nor did the moral reading prevent collective use. Chrysostom held it and still preached against the Jews of Antioch, to Christians drawn to the synagogue.

The Gospel's account of Jesus' death needs the same care. E. P. Sanders and most historians hold that the Pharisees played no significant part in it: Jesus was arrested at the instigation of the high priest and his circle and executed by Pilate (Sanders 1985). Mark never mentions Pharisees in his passion narrative, and Matthew brings them in only after the crucifixion (27:62). John alone places them in the council's decision and in the arrest party (11:47-57; 18:3), which fits a writer for whom Pharisees were the visible local authority after 70.

Paul, a Pharisee by his own account (Philippians 3:5), addressed his people's standing before God directly, and his answer was not rejection: "Has God rejected his people? By no means!" (Romans 11:1). His full statement is two-sided: "as regards the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their ancestors, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (11:28-29). The Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) drew the consequence for its own teaching: the Jews are not to be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from scripture. Whatever one makes of the verse's theology, exegesis that turns it into a verdict on a people misreads the text and repeats its worst history.

VIII. The Rabbinic Satan: Accuser, Inclination and Angel of Death

Rabbinic sources took Satan in a different direction from the Christians: toward a single figure who accuses, tempts and kills, and who sometimes acts for the sake of Heaven.

Rabbinic Judaism emerged gradually after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, through the compilation of the Mishnah around 200 and of the two Talmuds over the following centuries. It inherited Pharisaic emphases, above all the authority of ancestral tradition beyond the written law (Josephus, Antiquities 13.297), but it was not the Pharisees renamed. Hayim Lapin describes the early rabbis as a provincial movement within the Roman empire (Lapin 2012), and the Babylonian Talmud took shape in the Sasanian Persian empire, in conversation with its culture (Secunda 2013).

The key statement is in the Babylonian Talmud, in a discussion of Job: "Resh Lakish said: Satan, the evil inclination and the angel of death are one" (Bava Batra 16a). His proofs come from Job itself. Satan "went out from the presence of YHWH" to strike Job (Job 2:7). The evil inclination is "only evil" (Genesis 6:5), and Satan is told "only upon him do not lay your hand" (Job 1:12). The angel of death is implied when God says "only spare his life" (Job 2:6), since Job's life was then in Satan's power. On the same page Rabbi Levi says that Satan and Peninnah both acted for the sake of Heaven: Satan feared that God's love for Job would make him forget Abraham, and Peninnah provoked Hannah so that she would pray. When Rav Aha bar Yaakov taught this in Papunya, the Talmud adds, Satan came and kissed his feet.

Two features of this are easy to miss. Resh Lakish's identification is an explicit rabbinic link between Job's adversary and temptation and death, but it is not the first such link; Jubilees and the Testament of Job had made Job's adversary an enemy centuries earlier. And the equation with the evil inclination is not a step toward psychology. Ishay Rosen-Zvi has shown that the rabbinic yēṣer hāraʿ is itself conceived as a cunning, quasi-demonic inciter rather than a bodily drive (Rosen-Zvi 2011). Resh Lakish merges two demonic models; he does not dissolve one into the other. The courtroom survives as well. The Mishnah's paired advocate and accuser (Avot 4:11) keep the prosecutor at work.

Midrash preserves the Job-style accuser in narrative. In the Talmud's version of the binding of Isaac, Satan prompts the test, as Mastema had in Jubilees, and then tries to dissuade Abraham on the road by quoting Job; Abraham dismisses him with the rule that a liar's punishment is not to be believed even when he tells the truth (Sanhedrin 89b; compare Genesis Rabbah 56:4, where the tempter is Samael). In Exodus Rabbah 21:7, as Israel reaches the sea, the angel Samael accuses them of idolatry and asks why the sea should be split for them. God hands Job over to occupy him, as a shepherd crossing a river gives a large he-goat to an attacking wolf so that the flock can pass. In Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:10 Samael is "the head of all the satans." Genesis Rabbah 9:7 supplies the counterweight. When God saw all he had made and called it "very good," the "very" includes the evil inclination, for without it no one would build a house, marry, have children or engage in trade.

The result is a Satan who is dangerous, deceptive and deadly, yet always inside a single divine economy and sometimes serving it. The rabbis also drew back from myths that Christians kept. They marginalized the Enochic story of the fallen angels (Reed 2005), and Babylonian rabbinic demons drifted toward moral neutrality while Christian demons became wholly evil (Ronis 2019). Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity inherited the same Second Temple laboratory and pursued different experiments.

IX. The Zohar: The Serpent Is Satan, and Evil Grows from the Left

The Zohar identifies the serpent with Satan, as Revelation is usually read to do, and it systematizes an explanation of evil that earlier Kabbalists had begun: divine judgment separated from mercy.

The Zohar was composed largely in Castile in the late thirteenth century by Moses de León and his circle, though tradition attributes it to the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. Its treatment of the Eden serpent is a set piece of synthesis (Zohar 1:35b). Rabbi Yitzhak says the serpent is the evil inclination; Rabbi Yehudah says it was an actual serpent. They put the question to Rabbi Shimon, who answers: "Certainly it is all one." It was Samael, who appeared upon the serpent and in its form, "for this serpent is Satan, and it is all one." Samael came down from heaven riding the serpent, and together they brought death into the world.

Little of this is new. Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer, an eighth-century narrative midrash, already has Samael descend from heaven, choose the serpent as the most cunning of creatures and mount it like a rider (chapter 13). The Targum ascribed to Jonathan has Eve see Sammael, the angel of death, as she takes the fruit (Genesis 3:6). Bava Batra 16a had joined Satan, the evil inclination and the angel of death. The Zohar's achievement is to equate them all, accuser, tempter, inclination, Samael, serpent and death, in a single saying. Its identification of the serpent with Satan matches, more than a millennium later and in another tradition, the identification usually read in Revelation 12:9. The equation is neither a peculiarly Christian development nor an Iranian one. Samael has no Iranian pedigree.

Other Zoharic passages rework inherited midrash. On Job, the Zohar sets the scene of Job 1:6 on New Year's Day: God turned "that Satan" toward Job so that he would not accuse Israel, and it gives only the opening of a parable followed by "etc." (2:32b-33a); the reader is expected to know the shepherd, the wolf and the he-goat of Exodus Rabbah 21:7. On human nature, the Tikkunei ha-Zohar, a later stratum printed with it, teaches that people were created with both a good and an evil inclination so that there could be merit and guilt (1:23a), developing Genesis Rabbah's "very good." Most strikingly, it teaches that there is no light except what comes out of darkness and no good except out of evil; when a person turns from the evil path, God is exalted, and the truest worship arises from within darkness (2:184a; Wolfson 1988). The Zohar does not call any particular sin good. It holds that the possibility of evil, and its overcoming, belong to the purpose of creation.

What the Zohar develops is a theory of where evil comes from. Its demonology rests on the Treatise on the Left Emanation of Isaac ha-Kohen, written in Spain a generation before the Zohar, which made Samael and Lilith the rulers of a parallel emanation of evil; Joseph Dan identifies it as the Zohar's main source on the subject (Dan 1980). The Zohar gives several accounts of the Other Side (sitra aḥra) that it never fully reconciles, among them the refuse of the divine life and the husks (qelippot) that surround holiness. One prominent account derives the Other Side from the left side of the divine itself, from the attribute of Judgment (Din, also called Gevurah, "might"), when severity separates from compassion and overflows. Some Kabbalistic texts, above all the Tikkunei ha-Zohar, present the demonic as created to punish the wicked and then rebelling against its subordination (Berman 2018). That is the arc Stokes traced for the biblical adversary, from God's executioner to God's enemy, restated within the Godhead.

This bears on a question the Johannine texts leave open. 1 John says the devil sins "from the beginning" without saying how a being made by God came to oppose him. Christian theology answered: by the free choice of a good creature (section X). One prominent Zoharic answer is: by the separation of judgment from mercy. In the Kabbalistic scheme, severity is holy so long as it remains bound to compassion; severed from it, the same power becomes the Other Side. On this account the serpent is Satan, and Satan is judgment without mercy.

The Zohar remains a medieval synthesis, and its readings say nothing about what the authors of Genesis or Job intended. What it shows is how far an identification could travel once made, and how differently Judaism and Christianity could account for the same figure: Christian theology settled on a creature's fall, while Kabbalah kept Samael's descent from heaven and added, in one prominent account, judgment separated from compassion within the divine life.

X. "From the Beginning" in the History of Theology

The theological reconciliation of Job and John is not a modern harmony. It is the answer the church gave to a dualist reading of the Johannine texts, and the debate in which it was given is where this essay's two questions, the Persian background of the Devil and the meaning of "from the beginning," actually met.

On this account, the standard one in Western theology, the devil was created good and fell by his own will before human history began. Job's adversary is therefore already fallen when he appears in God's court, and he acts there only by permission. Augustine even applies to the devil the Greek Job's description of a creature made to be mocked (Job 40:19), while insisting that the creature's beginning was God's work and only the beginning of his sin his own (City of God 11.15). The reconciliation of Job and 1 John is thus the worked-out mainstream answer, built to refute the reading that the Johannine texts teach a devil evil by nature. Its chronology differs from Revelation 12, where the accuser is cast down at Christ's victory, and theologians reconciled the two by distinguishing an original fall from a final expulsion.

The history holds an irony for the Iranian question. The best-documented case of Persian-world dualism shaping how readers understood the Johannine Devil comes after the text, not before it. Mani, a third-century teacher raised among a Jewish-Christian baptist sect in Parthian, then Sasanian, Mesopotamia, taught two eternal principles of light and darkness, and his followers read John 8:44 as proof that the devil had an evil origin of his own. Augustine, himself a Manichaean for nine years, wrote the standard rebuttal.

A further contrast suggests a thesis worth testing. On the ethical reading of the Gathas, which is contested, the evil spirit of Yasna 30 is evil by a choice made at the beginning: one of the twin spirits chose the worst. That is closer in structure to Augustine's devil, evil by will from the beginning of his sin, than to the Manichaean devil, evil by nature. If the reading holds, the oldest Zoroastrian layer sits nearer to orthodox Christian angelology than to the dualism usually laid at Zarathustra's door, and the church's rejection of Mani converged, in one respect, with the oldest Iranian intuition: that evil begins in a choice.

Conclusion: What History Can Establish

The contradiction between Job's adversary and John's Devil dissolves once the name and the character are traced separately. Job and Zechariah gave the Devil his name, through Greek translators who called the adversary a slanderer. Genesis gave him the core of his character, the serpent's deception and the first murder, and the lying spirit of Micaiah's vision, the angelic rulers of the nations and the Second Temple chiefs of spirits supplied the rest. Jewish writers began to join these strands before Christianity, and Revelation completed the join.

The history of the Devil is also a history of attempts to keep evil under one God, and the traditions examined here answer that problem differently.

These are not one doctrine gone wrong, nor several doctrines borrowed from Persia. They are successive answers to questions that Genesis and Job pose in narrative form: why the righteous suffer, where temptation comes from, and why there is death, under a God who is one and good.

History can establish what the texts say, how they relate to one another, and when and by whom the identifications were made. It can show that the author of Job and the author of 1 John held different concepts, and that the figure Christians call the Devil was assembled from strands that were once separate. It cannot establish whether such a being exists. The development of a belief is one question and the truth of what it claims is another, and an account of where an idea came from does not settle whether it is true. A shared name does not prove a shared identity. A separate origin does not prove that nothing stands behind the name.

Common questions

Is the satan in the Book of Job the Devil?

Not in the book's own terms. In Job 1-2, ha-satan, "the adversary," is a member of God's council who questions Job's piety and tests it only within limits God sets. The book gives him no rebellion, no kingdom and no history. Later readers identified him with the Devil, and Christian theology explained the change as a fall, but the author of Job and the author of 1 John held different concepts.

Where does the phrase "father of lies" come from?

From John 8:44, where Jesus tells his opponents that the devil "was a murderer from the beginning" and "does not stand in the truth," a liar and the father of the lie. The Greek can also be read "and so is his father," an ambiguity that second-century readers exploited.

Is the serpent in Genesis Satan?

Genesis never says so. It calls the serpent a creature, "more cunning than any beast of the field," and curses it as an animal. The Wisdom of Solomon tied the entry of death to the envy of a diabolos, Revelation 12:9 speaks of "the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan," and the Zohar says outright that the serpent is Satan.

Who is Mastema?

The chief of evil spirits in the Book of Jubilees, written around 160-150 BCE. Mastema proposes the test of Isaac and tries to kill Moses, and he is bound during the exodus so that he cannot accuse Israel. Accuser, would-be murderer and ruler of spirits were already one figure about two and a half centuries before John.

Did Zoroastrianism invent Satan?

Probably not. Contact with Persian religion may have shaped the dualistic frame, especially in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the Devil's specific features have Jewish roots, and the closest Iranian parallels to John's Devil are either structural or survive only in much later texts.

Is John 8:44 antisemitic?

Readings of it have fed anti-Jewish polemic, from Martin Luther, who cited it in 1543, to a Nazi children's book of 1938 and the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attacker. The Gospel's own language invited that use: some scholars, such as Adele Reinhartz, find anti-Judaism in the text itself, while others read the verse as aimed at former believers. Nothing in it licenses a verdict on Jews or on rabbinic Judaism, and the Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) rejects presenting the Jews as rejected or accursed by God.

Further reading in the Codex

• What Does Satan Mean in Hebrew?
• Where Did Satan Come From in the Bible?
• Is the Devil in the Old Testament?
• Did God or Satan Incite David?
• What Is the Divine Council in the Bible?
• Did Zoroastrianism Invent Satan?
• What Is the Book of Jubilees?
• Who Are the Watchers?
• What Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Say About Good and Evil?
• What Is the Zohar?
• What Is Gevurah in Kabbalah?
• Is Lucifer in the Bible?

Bibliography

Translations of biblical, rabbinic and Zoharic passages are the author's own unless noted. Jubilees and 1 Enoch follow R. H. Charles, and the Testament of Job follows K. Kohler. The Zohar is cited by the Mantua pagination.

Primary sources

• Hebrew Bible: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
• Greek Old Testament: Septuaginta, edited by A. Rahlfs and R. Hanhart. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006.
• Greek New Testament: Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition.
• Syriac New Testament: the Peshitta.
• R. H. Charles, ed. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913. For Jubilees, 1 Enoch, the Life of Adam and Eve and the Apocalypse of Moses.
• The Testament of Job. Translated by K. Kohler, in Semitic Studies in Memory of Rev. Dr. Alexander Kohut, 264-338. Berlin: S. Calvary, 1897. Online edition, Wesley Center Online.
• Dead Sea Scrolls: 1QS, 1QM, CD, 4Q225, 4Q543-549.
• Wisdom of Solomon; Ben Sira; Tobit; Esther (Greek).
• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities.
• Mishnah Avot; Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra and Sanhedrin; Jerusalem Talmud Rosh Hashanah; Genesis Rabbah; Exodus Rabbah; Deuteronomy Rabbah; Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan; Targum Neofiti.
• Isaac ha-Kohen. Treatise on the Left Emanation. Hebrew text edited by Gershom Scholem in "Kabbalot R. Yaakov ve-R. Yitzhak benei R. Yaakov ha-Kohen," Madda'ei ha-Yahadut 2 (1927): 244-264. English translation in Joseph Dan, ed., The Early Kabbalah, translated by Ronald C. Kiener. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.
• Zohar. Vocalized edition, Israel, 2013.
• Avesta: the Gathas (Yasna 30, 32, 44, 45, 47).
• Old Persian inscriptions: Darius I at Behistun (DB); Xerxes, Daiva inscription (XPh).
• Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 1.8-9; Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 46-47; Damascius, Problems and Solutions concerning First Principles.
• 1 Clement; Polycarp, To the Philippians; Irenaeus, Against Heresies.
• Heracleon, fragments, in Origen, Commentary on John; Origen, On First Principles.
• John Chrysostom, Homilies on John; Against the Jews.
• Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John; City of God.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae; Commentary on the Gospel of John.
• Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543.
• Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz. Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938.
• Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, 1965.

Modern scholarship

• Barr, James. "The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 2 (1985): 201-236.
• Berman, Nathaniel. Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: The "Other Side" of Kabbalah. IJS Studies in Judaica 18. Leiden: Brill, 2018. See also his doctoral thesis, "Improper Twins: The Ambivalent 'Other Side' in the Zohar and Kabbalistic Tradition," University College London, 2014.
• Boismard, Marie-Émile. "The First Epistle of John and the Writings of Qumran." In John and Qumran, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 156-165. London: Chapman, 1972. Reissued in enlarged form as John and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Crossroad, 1990.
• Boyarin, Daniel. "Justin Martyr Invents Judaism." Church History 70, no. 3 (2001): 427-461.
• Brand, Miryam T. Evil Within and Without: The Source of Sin and Its Nature as Portrayed in Second Temple Literature. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
• Brown, Raymond E. The Community of the Beloved Disciple. New York: Paulist, 1979.
• Brown, Raymond E. The Epistles of John. Anchor Bible 30. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982.
• Collins, John J., and James Nati. The Rule of the Association and Related Texts. Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Dahl, Nils A. "Der Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels (Polyk. 7,1 und Joh 8,44)." In Apophoreta: Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen, 70-84. BZNW 30. Berlin, 1964.
• Dan, Joseph. "Samael, Lilith, and the Concept of Evil in Early Kabbalah." AJS Review 5 (1980): 17-40.
• Day, Peggy L. An Adversary in Heaven: Śāṭān in the Hebrew Bible. Harvard Semitic Monographs 43. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
• de Boer, Martinus C. "Expulsion from the Synagogue: J. L. Martyn's History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel Revisited." New Testament Studies 66, no. 3 (2020): 367-391.
• Di Luccio, Pino, and Étienne Vetö. "John 8:44: A Frequently Misunderstood Verse." Vatican News, 4 December 2024.
• Dochhorn, Jan. "Caín, el hijo del diablo: investigación en torno a la historia de la tradición de 1 Jn 3,12." In Filiación II, edited by J. J. Ayán Calvo, P. de Navascués Benlloch and M. Aroztegi Esnaola, 145-164. Madrid: Trotta, 2007.
• Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques. "Ahriman." Encyclopaedia Iranica I/6-7 (1984): 670-673.
• Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques. "Dead Sea Scrolls." Encyclopaedia Iranica VII/2 (1994): 177-179.
• Farrar, Thomas J. "New Testament Satanology and Leading Suprahuman Opponents in Second Temple Jewish Literature: A Religio-Historical Analysis." Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 70, no. 1 (2019): 21-68.
• Forsyth, Neil. The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
• Gershevitch, Ilya. "Zoroaster's Own Contribution." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (1964): 12-38.
• Gnoli, Gherardo. "Dualism." Encyclopaedia Iranica VII/6 (1996): 576-582.
• Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Satan: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Kimelman, Reuven. "Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity." In Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2, edited by E. P. Sanders, A. I. Baumgarten and Alan Mendelson, 226-244. London: SCM, 1981.
• Langer, Ruth. Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Lapin, Hayim. Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100-400 CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Litwa, M. David. "The Father of the Devil (John 8:44): A Christian Exegetical Inspiration for the Evil Creator." Vigiliae Christianae 74, no. 5 (2020): 540-565.
• Martyn, J. Louis. History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003. First published 1968.
• Méndez, Hugo. "Did the Johannine Community Exist?" Journal for the Study of the New Testament 42, no. 3 (2020): 350-374.
• Méndez, Hugo. The Gospel of John: A New History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
• Méndez, Hugo. The Epistles of John: Origins, Authorship, Purpose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.
• Oppenheim, A. Leo. "The Eyes of the Lord." Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 173-180.
• Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House, 1995.
• Reed, Annette Yoshiko. Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Reinhartz, Adele. Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. Lanham: Lexington Books and Fortress Academic, 2018.
• Reinhartz, Adele. "'Children of the Devil': John 8:44 and Its Early Reception." In Confronting Antisemitism from the Perspectives of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, edited by Armin Lange, Kerstin Mayerhofer, Dina Porat and Lawrence H. Schiffman, 43-54. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Online at jcrelations.net.
• Ronis, Sara. "A Seven-Headed Demon in the House of Study: Understanding a Rabbinic Demon in Light of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Babylonian Textual Traditions." AJS Review 43, no. 1 (2019): 125-142.
• Rosen-Zvi, Ishay. Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
• Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.
• Secunda, Shai. The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Shaked, Shaul. "Isaiah, Book of." Encyclopaedia Iranica XIII/6 (2006): 611-612.
• Silverman, Jason M. "Vetting the Priest in Zechariah 3: The Satan between Divine and Achaemenid Administrations." Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 14 (2014), article 6.
• Smith, Morton. "Bible ii. Persian Elements in the Bible." Encyclopaedia Iranica IV/2 (1989): 200-203.
• Stokes, Ryan E. "The Devil Made David Do It . . . or 'Did' He? The Nature, Identity, and Literary Origins of the 'Satan' in 1 Chronicles 21:1." Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 1 (2009): 91-106.
• Stokes, Ryan E. "Satan, YHWH's Executioner." Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014): 251-270.
• Stokes, Ryan E. The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019.
• Wolfson, Elliot R. "Light Through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar." Harvard Theological Review 81 (1988): 73-95.
• Wright, Archie T. Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022.
• Zurawski, Jason M. "Separating the Devil from the Diabolos: A Fresh Reading of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24." Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21, no. 4 (2012): 366-399.