Page:The Natural History of the Christian Devil.pdf/3

 Originally a God of the desert, of blood, and of fire, he possessed all the terrific attributes of the Devil, was worshipped with slaughtered animals and human sacrifices, and slew every male among his chosen people who was not ransomed by a bloody and indecent rite (Gen. xvii., 14). Jeue was the author of all evil: "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things" (Is. xlv., 6, 7). "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" (Amos iii., 6).

With such a God, a Devil was eminently superfluous, and we accordingly find that the Hebrew Satan was an "angel of the Lord", executing God's judgments on the wicked, and testing the worth of the pious.

In the "Fragments" appended to Calmet's "Dictionary of the Bible", p. 130, we find the suggestion that Satan is "the angel of punishment, the agent of retributive justice, whose office it is to distribute 'battle, murder, and sudden death' among the sons of men". He asks "Whether in early ages or under the Hebrew republic, the word Satan signified much, if anything, more than simply an adversary, an accuser, a remonstrant; one who takes to task, as our familiar expression is" (p. 134).

The fact that Satan was thus an angel of judgment and of testing, explains the apparent contradiction between 2 Sam. xxiv., 1, and 1 Chron. xxi., 1. According to Samuel "the Lord" moved David, according to Chronicles "Satan stood up" and provoked David, to number Israel. If Satan is God's angel, not his foe, and acts merely as an intermediary, the tempting of David was equally God's act whether done by himself directly or by means of the angel whose special duty it was to test and try men. Again, in the case of Job, it is obvious that Satan and "the Lord" are on perfectly friendly and familiar terms. Satan appears among the "sons of God", and is met with no rebuke; on the contrary he is greeted as a man might greet a friend coming into his house after an absence: "Whence comest thou?" Satan's answer is easy and straightforward: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it". And then the conversation goes on, God asking Satan what he thinks of Job, and Satan explaining that he regards Job's religion as merely a very prudent investment. Finally God bids Satan test Job as effectually as he can without injuring him personally, and Satan goes out on his errand and afflicts poor Job. (Job i.) A very