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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The satan of Job
The accuser in Job, a job title in God's court rather than a personal name.
Job 1:6-12, in every translation this tool compares.
Ask for the duty manager and you are asking for whoever is on shift, not for a man called Duty. The Hebrew in Job puts the word the in front: the accuser. It is a post in God's court. He reports in, asks permission before he acts, and stays inside the limits he is given.
Carries the definite article in Job and Zechariah, ha-satan, "the adversary," a role in the court rather than a personal name. In Numbers 22 the word describes the Angel of Yahweh himself doing the job. DDD's Day, working through all four celestial passages, argues that the article makes a proper-name reading grammatically very unlikely and that "the Accuser" as a fixed office in the divine council has no convincing legal parallel in Israel or the wider ancient Near East; the nearest analogues are Akkadian bel dababi and bel dini, "legal opponent," which describe a function and not a title. Her alternative is that the article marks a temporary status, as in Genesis 14:13's "the fugitive," so that any of several council members could act as a satan on a given occasion. On that reading the satan of Numbers 22, Yahweh's own messenger sent to stop Balaam, and the satan of Zechariah 3, arguing against Joshua and opposed by Yahweh's messenger, need not be the same figure at all. Heiser makes the same point from the count: most of the 27 occurrences carry the article, and neither Hebrew nor English puts a definite article on a personal name.
H7854 (שָׂטָן), 27 occ in 23 verses. DDD's count of nine is a count of passages, not words: the noun turns up in nine contexts, five where the satan is human and four where it is celestial (Numbers 22, Job 1-2, Zechariah 3, 1 Chronicles 21). Job 1-2 alone accounts for fourteen of the 27 tokens.
Whether 1 Chronicles 21:1, which drops the article, is the first use of satan as a name is argued both ways. The only other place an anarthrous satan names a divine figure is Numbers 22:22, where the Angel of Yahweh is called "a satan," and since God and the Angel are repeatedly identified elsewhere, one resolution reads 1 Chronicles 21:1 as the Angel acting as adversary, Yahweh in Angel-form, which would mean Chronicles and 2 Samuel 24:1 were never in tension. Heiser argues exactly this: Numbers 22:22 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 are the only two places an anarthrous satan names a divine rather than a human adversary, and since Numbers identifies its satan as the Angel of Yahweh, and God and the Angel are repeatedly identified with each other, the Chronicler's satan is the Angel dispensing God's judgment rather than a cosmic enemy. On his count ten of the 27 occurrences lack the article, and even those need not name a personalized figure, since the phrase can simply mean "an adversary." Day reads the Chronicler's swap of satan for Yahweh's anger (2 Samuel 24:1) as a narrower concern than distancing Yahweh from evil in general, since that motive can't explain 2 Chronicles 18:18-22, where Yahweh sanctions a lying spirit outright. The Chronicler needed to protect David's reputation in a census story he couldn't delete, because it explains the founding of the temple's altar site. Even if satan works as a name by 1 Chronicles 21:1, it sits three centuries short of the developed New Testament devil; the earliest certain uses of Satan as a proper name are Second Temple (Assumption of Moses 10:1; Jubilees 23:29; possibly Sirach 21:27).
Reading Job's adversary as the fully formed devil of later Christian theology imports three centuries of development into chapter 1.
- Job 1:6-12
- Job 2:1-7
- Zechariah 3:1-2
- 1 Chronicles 21:1
- Numbers 22:22,32
- 2 Samuel 24:1
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/genesis-26-20-22\/","n":"Genesis 26:20-22","s":"He called the name of the well Sitnah. The same root behind the word Satan.","r":"Genesis 26:20-22"}
- C. Breytenbach and P. L. Day, "Satan," DDD, 726-731
- Heiser, *Unseen Realm*, ch. 8, 128-131
- Heiser, *Demons*, 78-79
- Heiser, "Weird But Important: BC 1003 Census, Who Authorized It, God or Satan?" *Bible Study Magazine*, July-August 2010, 34
