How Satan Became Lucifer | DOCUMENTARY

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Satan, or the Devil, is one of the best-known characters in the Western traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Surprisingly, this entity was a late-comer in the ancient world. Satan, as a totally evil being, is nowhere to be found in the Jewish Bible. He evolved during the height of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (beginning c. 550 BCE) and was adopted by Jews living under Persian rule at the time. His formal name, Satan, derives from the Hebrew 'ha-Satan'. 'Ha' means 'the' and 'Satan' means 'opposer' or 'adversary'. The name described his eventual function as the opposer of God’s creation. Greek 'diabolos', English 'devil', meant 'accuser', 'slanderer', again describing his role. The concept of Satan emerged over time and in phases.

As the ancients constructed their religious systems, the existence of evil had to be explained and rationalized. In this capacity, the Gods were responsible for both good and evil. The term to describe this ability is omnipotence (all-powerful). In Deuteronomy 28, God declares that he controls both prosperity and suffering. Many creation myths addressed how and why evil arose.
In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, the gods themselves are responsible for evil. They are capricious and chaotic and created humans simply as slaves to offer them sacrifices. The God of Israel is shown as the opposite; he is never capricious, there is a divine plan, and everything he created is deemed good. The narrative function of the 'fall' in the Garden of Eden, the story of Adam and Eve, was to demonstrate that evil began through the fault of humans, not God. Their disobedience led to man’s struggles to produce food and woman’s pain in childbirth. But the most severe punishment was the loss of their immortality. The sin of Adam and Eve brought on the greatest evil, death. As their descendants, we are all doomed to this fate.

Being human, people projected their own experiences upon the gods. Kings had courts of nobles and advisers. As on earth, so in the heavens. Like any court, there were higher and lower officials. The higher ones were the angels in Judaism. The lower deities, daemons (in Greek), were originally neutral but over time were blamed for evil.

In Genesis, God speaks to his court, "the sons of God", the angels, as he proceeds to create the earth. At the end of creation, we have a strange passage in Genesis 6. We read that "the sons of God" had intercourse with human women, producing the "Nephilim", ancient giants. The purpose of this narrative is to explain why God sent the flood (evil on the earth). Many pantheons had gods who mated with women, particularly Zeus in Greek mythology. Israelite tradition, however, rejected this behavior as this mixing could lead to the great sin of idolatry.
The Book of Job (c. 600 BCE) is the earliest text to address the problem of theodicy, which is a modern term for the problem "If God is good, why does he permit evil and suffering to exist?" The book opens with the angels apparently reporting to God. Among them is the angel ha-Satan, whose function was to travel the world placing 'obstacles' (the meaning of his name) in front of humans, requiring them to make a choice (good or evil). In this role, we can say that he acts as God’s prosecuting attorney. Reporting back to God, he mentioned God’s servant Job, who had prospered.

In one of John’s visions, he referenced Isaiah 14, a polemic against the king of Babylon. Isaiah castigated the king who titled himself "day-star" for his hubris of thinking he was divine. When Jerome translated the Hebrew scriptures into Latin in the 4th century CE, he knew that the Romans named their morning star - the planet Venus - Lucifer and translated the passage as such. Lucifer became the most popular name in the Middle Ages.

At the end of Christ’s 1000-year reign on earth, Satan is released for the final battle. The irony is found in the image of Christ "as a lamb" who nevertheless defeats this monster. He is tossed into the "lake of fire", the Dead Sea (Rev. 20:1-5).

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Contents:
00:00 - Development of Satan in the Bible
02:33 - Serpents in Egyptian Myth
04:00 - Serpents in Medea
05:00 - Set
06:25 - Angra Mainyu
07:52 - Summerians
08:20 - Saturnian Bronze Age
11:00 - Allotments to the Gods
11:54 - Orphism in Revelations and Hellenism
14:10 - Ban of Bacchus Worship, Ammon
17:38 - Hades and Eve
18:34 - Ancient Dionysian Worship
19:47 - Orphic Dionysian Worship, Pan
26:02 - Origins of Lucifer, Rebel Gods
30:55 - Does Isaiah mention the Angelic Fall?
33:35 - Ezekiel and the Weeping of Dead Gods
37:02 - Enoch and Pagans (Satan)
38:30 - Baphomet the Three Head God
39:53 - Paradise Lost
40:50 - Modern Satanism and Gnosis
41:40 - Choose Nature or Apocalypticism

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