Hello, friend, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ. This will be the most intensive free-form Gospel study ever written. Each time we meet, we digest a tiny part of the Gospel of Christ in succession - no more than three verses. Our focus is to perceive the truest, most intellectually honest Jesus Christ that we can, and to try discern from that perception the actual moral positions and teachings of The Man. If you'd like to start from the beginning, click here.
Today, we continue a multi-part study designed to help us understand how the concept of a "capital-S" Satan evolved from being non-existent in the Biblical Hebrew tradition to being a cartoonish super-villain that balances the power of the Almighty here on earth in the modern day.
After that, we'll study Matthew 4:7 through 4:9, wherein we will find Jesus Saying Number 3, as he continues to interact with Satan in the desert.
Please don't forget that we at The Moral Vision are of the opinion that Jesus is not interacting with a literal devil, but rather that he is experiencing a kind of vision or hallucination brought on by forty days of deliberate fasting. Also, please don't forget that we are compiling a separate page containing a running list of Jesus' sayings as they appear to us during the course of our study. That page can be found here.
Alright, let's get going.
Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity
Part III
The Book of Enoch and the Intertestamental Period
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When last we met, we excluded The Old Testament as the source of the modern conception of Satan by looking at the various uses of the Hebrew word "satan" found therein. We discovered that "satan," in The Old Testament, is not used as a name but a term meaning, generally, "adversary." Knowing that Satan is used as the capitalized name for The Devil in The New Testament, we have been left wondering: when did satan become Satan? The answer is "during the Intertestamental Period."
We may have defined "Intertestamental Period" before, but in case we missed it, the "Intertestamental Period" is that period of time between the closing of The Old Testament Canon around 420 BC and the first-century-AD writing of The New Testament works. Another phrasing used for this period is "deuterocanonical." Here we will use both words, in order to increase familiarity with the terms.
Some might think by merely reading the modern Bible that, during the Intertestamental Period, all significant writing and prophesying stopped within the Jewish tradition. This would be short-sighted. The period of time in question, rather than being a period of silence as some have termed it, was actually a period of great clamor for Judaism. All the major divisions and sects of Judaism we've discussed to date had foundational roots in the Intertestamental Period. The Essenes, The Sadducees and The Pharisees all came to exist as divisions of Judaism during the Intertestamental Period.
The unique literature found at the Qumran caves in The Dead Sea Scrolls represent a portion of what we call "intertestamental apocrypha," that is, religious texts written during the Intertestamental Period that are not accepted as canon. Other intertestamental apocrypha include The Book of Tobit and The Book of Judith (both excluded from Jewish Canon but later accepted into Roman Catholic Canon). We introduce these terms and examples to give context to a particular piece of intertestamental apocrypha, a fragment of which was indeed found among The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch is a multi-part text that was likely written over a period of some lifetimes by several different authors. The book claims to be authored by Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. Jews reading Enoch when it was first widely in circulation - the second and first centuries BC - would have believed this authorship claim and thus understood Enoch as being far more ancient than modern scholarship tells us it is. Modern scholarship points to Enoch's authorship between 300 and 100 BC, roughly.
The book was likely excluded from The Tanakh* and The Septuagint** because concepts in Enoch were thought to be blasphemous at the time of the formation of these canons. Particularly blasphemous, it seems, may have been the idea, presented in Enoch, that a group of God's heavenly angels had staged a rebellion against him. This idea is not in keeping with Jewish tradition, which holds that God is in total control of all things in Heaven as well as on earth. Dividing the power of God by writing that his own minions had rebelled against him would have been blasphemous, indeed.
The Book of Enoch was widely known, read, and circulated during the early years of Christianity, and there are examples of ancient Church Fathers having quoted from or otherwise having availed themselves of the text, despite the fact that it was not accepted into what would eventually become official Christian canon. We see Augustine of Hippo, living between the fourth and fifth centuries, speaking out against the cosmology of The Book of Enoch, which indicates it was still being widely read at that time. We must also note that The Book of Enoch was and is accepted as canon in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
So, why do we go to such lengths to introduce this "Book of Enoch" in the context of a study of Satan? Well, as it turns out, The Book of Enoch may be the origin of a huge portion of the "cosmology" of Satan.
(We will undoubtedly need to return to The Book of Enoch at a later date for in-depth study outside of our current context, so do not fret today when we cherry-pick through the text for data pertaining to our devilish topic.)
Broadly, The Book of Enoch presents us with five distinct texts. The first part of the Book of Enoch is known as The Book of Watchers. The Book of Watchers describes, among other things, a "fall of angels" from Heaven, a hellish crucible designed to hold the fallen angels, and a particularly evil chief of these fallen angels, "Azazel." The Book of Watchers is where we will focus all of our energy today. For good measure, however: the second part of Enoch is The Book of Parables of Enoch, which we will find interesting later for its eschatological qualities. The third part is The Astronomical Book, which describes the movement of celestial bodies and lays out a 364 day calendar. The fourth part is The Book of Dream Visions, traditionally understood to be a dream-prophecy of Jewish history from a pre-Flood vantage point. The fifth and last portion is The Epistle of Enoch, containing exhortations and fragmentary history.
The Book of Watchers is our primary focus because The Book of Watchers is the first place in Jewish literature or scripture that we find a character that could be roughly equivalent to the modern Satan. The Book of Watchers tells the story of 200 angels in heaven who are watching humanity as it multiplies in its early days. The angels (apparently all male) begin to talk amongst one another about how sexually appealing the human women had become over the generations. They resolve to each go down to earth, pick out a woman, and impregnate her. Before they go, there is discussion among them acknowledging the sinfulness of their desire. They decide to do it anyway.
In 1 Enoch*** Chapter 7, the text refers to the women in question:
"And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells..."
So the result of the unholy union between these sinful, fallen angels and the human women is that the women become pregnant with a race of giants that would be, depending on how you convert from the ancient unit of measurement "ells," nearly a mile in height! The narrative continues:
"...Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind."
Life on earth descends into chaos as the giants spread sin everywhere and consume mankind. Then, in 1 Enoch Chapter 8, the fallen angel chief Azazel teaches humanity the ways of war and materialism****:
"And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways."
Chapter 9 shows the top echelon of the loyal angels of Heaven, including Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, and Raphael, asking God why he has allowed Azazel and the other fallen angels to wreak havoc on earth. It is a classic framing of the "question of evil." To paraphrase, they ask God: "if you are all good, and you know all things, and are thus privy to the sin unleashed on earth, how is it that you allow that sin to occur?"
God responds by telling the angels to warn Noah that there would be a flood which would destroy the world. He then tells the heavenly angels to cast the 200 fallen angels into what can be interpreted to be "hell." From Chapter 10, the Lord is quoted:
"Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there for ever, and cover his face that he may not see light. And on the day of the great judgement he shall be cast into the fire."
Resolutely, regarding the origin of sin, God says to his angels:
"And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin."
It will be immediately clear to anyone familiar with modern Christian cosmology that Azazel and his comrades are the direct pre-cursors to the capital-S Satan that arrives in The New Testament. For the first time, we see Jewish literature reflecting the rough outline of the "Satan" story. A prideful angel(s) has fallen from the grace of the heavenly court and thus made earth its realm. That angel has taken his opportunity of power on earth to corrupt humanity and to teach it all the wicked, lustful ways of the world. The angel is then condemned to a special realm of punishment which is filled with fire. These concepts are simply never spelled out in the canonical Jewish scriptures the way they are here in the non-canonical Book of Enoch.
The Deuterocanonical Period, as one familiar with The Old and New Testaments would be bound to expect, proves to be absolutely transformational in terms of Jewish cosmology. The shift that occurs during the Deuterocanonical Period is so important to our understanding of Jesus, going forward. The shift was away from the thinking that God was personally responsible for all things, good and evil. The shift was to the thinking that God never acted wrongly, but was balanced by an evil force that sat cosmologically external to him and begat all sin and suffering in the world. The Book of Enoch articulates this shift very well.
The need to split the powers of the cosmos into a dualistic "good/evil" scheme probably arose during the Deuterocanonical Period because this was also the period during which Israel lived as a (grateful) subject of the Persian Empire. As the cultures intermingled, The Jews would have been exposed to the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, and likely found the dualistic nature of that religion intriguing. (You'll recall from a couple installments back that Zoroastrianism featured an omnibenevolent God, Ahura Mazda, balanced by a powerful, lizard-like force of pure evil, Angra Mainyu.)
In addition to Zoroastrian influences from the east, Jews later in this era would have been introduced to Hellenistic philosophical concepts such as the "immortality of the soul," which led to increased speculation about the nature of some kind of final judgment, and the existence of a divided afterlife. Wordly horizons, in many ways, very rapidly opened up to the Jewish community in Palestine during the Intertestamental Period, and this goes a long way in explaining a) where the dualistic cosmology of The New Testament comes from and b) why we suddenly see apocalypticism and cults of extremism abound during the late portion of that period.
Somewhere between The Book of Enoch and The Gospel, Satan was born. Within context, his birth at that time makes perfect sense.
Next time, we will look at how Satan or "The Devil" is portrayed in The Gospel, and the rest of The New Testament.
For now, let's get back to our regularly scheduled Gospel reading.
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Matthew 4:7 through Matthew 4:9
7 Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”
8 Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence,
9 and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”
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Recall that, last time, Satan preposterously challenged Jesus to jump off a high edge, because he thought that if Jesus was the Son of God (which he hasn't claimed to be), angels would swoop out and save Jesus before impact. Today, in Matt 4:7, we get Jesus' snappy retort. He says that scripture says "not to test God," so he's not going to test the "angels-protecting-him-from-a-fall" theory just on a whim, as it could be sinful.
In response to this, The Devil takes Jesus to a spot from which they can see all the kingdoms of the world. He indicates the world and says to Jesus "worship me, and I will give you all of this."
Matthew 4:9 reflects perfectly the dualism that we've just been learning about. Matthew 4:9 implies that all of the kingdoms of earth are under the influence and possession of The Devil because, after all, he could not offer these things to Jesus unless they were already his to give. The cosmology reflected here is distinctly outside that of Biblical Judaism. In The Tanakh, the world would never be anyone's to give aside from God's.
Do you think Jesus is going to prostrate himself and worship Satan in exchange for dominion over the world?
You'll have to tune in next time to find out, as Jesus' mystical experience in the desert continues.
Thank you for reading. Please share this writing. Until next time...
Love.
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* The Tanakh, remember, is the Hebrew Bible.
** The Septuagint is the earliest extant translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, created between the third and second centuries BC.
*** We call Enoch "1 Enoch" because there was another text written later, in the first century AD, which was called The Book of Enoch. We call the second one 2 Enoch.
**** Azazel: The First American?
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For the index of Christ's words, click here.
