Who Is the Satan? —

Christian theologian and Old Testament scholar Michael S. Heiser is brilliant and refreshing. His work on expounding and popularizing rabbinical scholar Alan F. Segal’s “Two Powers of Heaven” has done a great deal of good for the Kingdom. He demonstrates how ancient orthodox Judaism held to, what he calls, a “binitarian” view of God prior to the advent of Christianity. Worship was for God alone, but the Angel of the Lord in human form also accepted worship, which blurred the lines between the two quite a bit (cf. Joshua 5:13-15). This was a natural doorway for Israelites to accept Jesus as the Christ and worship the Christ as God, given that Jesus identified himself in Mark 14:61-62 as this second power or ‘cloud rider’ of heaven from Daniel 7:13 (cf. Acts 1:9; Revelation 1:9; Exodus 23:20-23). It was a special status reserved for Yahweh alone (Deuteronomy 33:26; Psalm 68:32-33,104:1-4; Isaiah 19:1). A progressive revelation of God would later reveal the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who is identified in the New Testament. Kudos.

That being said, sometimes he doubles down to die on very small hills, for reasons I don’t quite understand. One of those hills is the identity of “the satan” mentioned in Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3. In his wildly popular and thought-provoking book, The Unseen Realm, he argues that this Satan cannot be the same Satan mentioned in the NT by rule of Hebrew grammar: It is not a personal pronoun.[1] If this was truly the Satan (or the Devil) of the NT, which is his proper name grammatically in Greek, why then does the Hebrew text use the definite article “ha” before his name so that it reads “the satan”. He attempts to argue that we do not call people “the Mike” or “the Michael”, so why would the text do so? It is not a proper name, it is a title. Therefore, the Satan cannot be Satan. In fact, Satan of the NT is not even mentioned in the OT, it is a later intertestamental development, which is why the NT authors refer to the serpent of Genesis 3 as Satan but not the OT authors.[2] And because of this interpretation, he also adamantly rejects the plausibility of the traditional view that Lucifer was Satan’s original name prior to his fall. But I think this is a gross inflation of hermeneutical power and too cavalierly dismisses the classical understanding of how a fallen angel, who many theologians identify with Lucifer, became Satan.

Unlike humans who name their children after things that sound nice, or perhaps after a family member, culture, or heritage, and can have personal meaning as well, that is not quite God’s prerogative when He creates or changes a name. The meaning of a Godgiven name indicates something about who you are as a person or your role in the greater context of God’s plan, it is an expression of one’s identity in relation to God. The significance of name meaning cannot be understated. God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter, Saul to Paul, He named Hosea’s children as a prophetic judgment against Israel and then renamed them to show His mercy, and He chose the Messiah’s name to be Jesus, to name a few examples. The meaning of a name is important to God.[3]

Heiser rightly points out that Satan is not a proper name but a designation, title, label, or epithet that means “adversary,” “challenger” or “accuser”, which he suggests means “prosecutor”. This adversarial designation is likened, in his words, to a job description, it “speaks of an official legal function within a ruling body—in this case, Yahweh’s council.”[4] Notice also that the word devil in Greek means virtually the same, “accuser,” “slanderer,” attacker,” or literally “to throw across” (cf. Ephesians 6:16). The symbolic connotation with both labels is in a legal sense, where the Devil or Satan is throwing accusations against humanity in a proverbial court of law. But this doesn’t support his case. If Satan fell, which Heiser believes he did in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:14-15), and as do I, then his previous name that bore his identity and the true meaning of who he was, given to him by God at birth, would be meaningless from that point onward. Whether his name was “Lucifer”, which means “shining one”, or was another name altogether is beside the point right now. The point is that Satan’s original name meant something else before his fall and would need to change. So, he would be given a new title: The Adversary.[5] His name would be forever changed. Heiser even acknowledges that the label Satan was slapped on him after the fact, but he does not take in account how a title can become a proper name.

Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.”

Job 2:4-5

Here’s a contemporary example. You may know the name Ted Kaczynski, but most people know him as the Unabomber. His original identity has been stripped in the greater contextual culture for an iconic media epithet that better suited his trademark identity as a domestic terrorist: A lone bomber who planted fear across the United States for nearly 20 years, killing and injuring many. Despite who he was, he became the Unabomber. His former self, whom his parents raised and loved, had proverbially died when the first bomb was detonated. Even as a title, everyone still knows the Unabomber is not his actual name from birth. Theologian and New Testament scholar Kenneth Berding also acknowledges this, as well. “Even if we grant that ha satan in Job is a title rather than a name, this does not necessarily entail that the being referred to is a different being from Satan. In Germany in the 1940s, someone who spoke of the Führer (German title for “Leader”) would have been employing a title rather than a name to designate Adolf Hitler, but that doesn’t necessitate that the speaker was referring to two different entities.”[6] As a rule of thumb: The story determines the grammar, the grammar does not determine the story.

Perhaps a better way to explain this identity phenomenon, rather than comparing angelic identities to the way we casually employ names grammatically, is to utilize examples that rest outside the scope of everyday life. It seems to me that mythical archetypes may better suit the scope of the problem. Consider this example from modern mythmaking: The Joker. Of unknown origin, or rather veiled by a plethora of fabricated origin stories, the Joker is void of a normal identity and a personal pronoun, and his deranged cocktail of madness and cruelty has stripped away any opportunity of gaining it back. Like Satan, he is not the man he once was even if he did go by his birth name, or even if he did retain some resemblance of his former self, as Satan, too, disguises himself as a “shining one”, a messenger of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). No one knows the Joker’s name or who he was prior to wreaking havoc, causing chaos, and corrupting the good. He is evil incarnate, an agent of chaos and corruption. This is manifest by his perverted self-referential sense of humour that is isolated to himself alone, an iconic visual balance to Batman’s fear tactics to protect the goodness, justice, law, and order. Like Satan again, the Joker is also a designation with the definite article, it is the title given to him, and rightfully so. He now embodies this new archetype, it is truer to his character, it is meaningful. He is the Joker. And because he is this new persona, having lost his old identity, over time he would become known and referred to as, simply, Joker. Joker is a personal pronoun.

Furthermore, in Numbers 22 the word satan is also used to describe the Angel of the Lord’s opposition to the pagan prophet Balaam. Here, the angel of the Lord is described “as an adversary” (le satan) (vv.22,32). The term le satan seems to suggest that the definite article ha was needed to distance the special bearer of the word Satan from the ordinary usage of the word itself. Just as ‘a joker’ is certainly a term or figure of speech, ‘the Joker’ is identity specific. The title, then, serves as an identity marker, especially in the absence of a proper name.

Can this same principle of progressive identity not apply to Satan, as well? What exactly is the problem with Satan having then losing the definite article? We may even see this progression in Hebrew, too. Notice that the definite article ha is missing from 1 Chronicles 21:1, a text written much later than Job. Satan is a proper name, here. It is a personal pronoun.[7] The classical doctrine of Satan need not be criticized, especially so drastically as to declare it false.