Satan, Iblis and the Demons

In the Hebrew Bible the Devil, as later centuries imagined him, does not yet exist. The word satan means “adversary” or “accuser”, and with the article, ha-satan, it names a figure in God’s heavenly court. In the opening chapters of Job he appears among the “sons of God” and suggests that Job is pious only because he is prosperous. God allows him to test Job, but he can act only within the limits God sets. In the Book of Zechariah the satan stands ready to accuse the high priest Joshua and is rebuked.

Other evil powers appear at the edges of the Hebrew Bible: the serpent in Eden, the goat-demon Azazel of the Day of Atonement ritual and various wild spirits of the desert. None of these is identified with Satan in the texts themselves. Historians often suggest that contact with Persian religion, with its struggle between a good and an evil spirit, encouraged later Jewish thinking about a single leader of evil, though the extent of this influence is debated.

The decisive step came in Jewish writings of the third to first centuries BCE. The Book of Watchers, the oldest part of 1 Enoch, retells the brief passage in Genesis 6 about the “sons of God” who took human wives. In its version, a band of angels called Watchers, led by figures named Shemihazah and Asael, descend to earth, father giants and teach humans weapons, sorcery and adornment. After the giants die, their spirits roam the earth as evil spirits. The Dead Sea Scrolls speak of Belial, a prince of darkness opposed to the sons of light.

By the time of Jesus, many Jews believed that Satan led a host of evil spirits. The New Testament calls him the Devil, from the Greek diabolos, “slanderer”. In the Gospels he tempts Jesus in the wilderness, and Jesus casts out demons who torment the sick. When opponents accuse Jesus of driving out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he replies that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. The name echoes Baal-zebub, “lord of the flies”, a god of the Philistine city of Ekron, possibly a mocking distortion of a title meaning “Baal the prince”.

The Book of Revelation brings these threads together. It describes a war in heaven in which Michael and his angels defeat “the great dragon”, called “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan”, and throw him down to earth with his angels. Church Fathers such as Origen linked this to the taunt in Isaiah 14 against a fallen “morning star” and to Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre. From these passages came the story of Lucifer, the brightest angel, who fell through pride. Christian theology came to teach that the Devil and the demons were angels created good who chose to rebel.

Islam tells the story in its own way. When God created Adam from clay, he commanded the angels to bow to him. All bowed except Iblis, who said, “I am better than him: you created me from fire and him from clay.” The Quran adds that Iblis “was one of the jinn”. Cast out, he asked for respite until the Day of Judgement and vowed to lead humans astray, but God declared that he would have no power over God’s sincere servants. Satan’s weapon is suggestion: the Quran’s final sura asks for refuge from “the whisperer who withdraws”, who whispers in human hearts.

Medieval Christianity filled the world with demons. Monks told stories of devils tempting hermits in the desert, as in the life of Saint Antony, and church sculptures showed demons dragging the damned into the mouth of hell at the Last Judgement. Artists gave them horns, claws, tails and bat-like wings, and historians often link the goat-like features to images of the god Pan and to satyrs. Dante’s Inferno pictured Satan not in flames but frozen in a lake of ice at the centre of the earth, with three faces.

Learned demonology grew in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Writers drew up lists of demons with names, ranks and powers, and the fear of a pact between witches and the Devil helped drive the European witch hunts. Not everyone agreed: the physician Johann Weyer, writing in 1563, accepted that demons existed but argued that most accused witches were confused or ill women who should not be executed.

In 1667 John Milton published Paradise Lost, whose Satan is a proud, eloquent rebel who declares that it is “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n”. Many readers since the Romantic period have found him the most compelling character in the poem, an image that has shaped literature ever since. In Jewish tradition, by contrast, rabbinic thought generally treated Satan as an agent of God and placed much of the struggle against evil within each person, in the yetzer ha-ra, the evil inclination.

Belief in Satan and evil spirits remains part of the teaching of Christianity and Islam, though believers interpret it in many ways, from a personal being to a symbol of evil. The Catholic Church keeps a formal rite of exorcism, revised in 1999, which may be performed only by a priest authorised by his bishop, after medical and psychological causes have been considered. Muslims recite verses of the Quran for protection, and many Christians pray for deliverance from evil in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Jewish folklore of the Talmudic and medieval periods was full of shedim, demons who lurked in ruins and privies, and many protective customs grew up around them, though most modern Jewish movements give demons little place in their teaching.

In popular culture the Devil is everywhere, from Goethe’s Mephistopheles to the horror film. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, shaped the modern image of possession more than any theological text. Yet the oldest picture of Satan, the adversary who questions whether human goodness is sincere, remains one of the most thoughtful: the Book of Job still invites readers to ask why the innocent suffer.