It's entirely possible that the "Satan" in Job is a different entity than the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and that neither is meant to also be Lucifer, the Devil.
If you go by what the Genesis account says, the serpent in the Garden of Eden is just a snake that can talk.
God and Satan weren't punching each other in Job bur their conflict was the premise of the whole story. Even if you think the serpent was a proxy of Satan and not Satan himself, does it matter?
Maybe you were making a narrower claim that God and Satan never physically punched each other. That is certainly true but narrow enough to be uninteresting.
As pointed out above, the serpent isn't necessarily named "Satan"
Are we talking about the bible or Milton? I agree it's not clear in the bible, but feel Milton makes it quite clear.
It might have been harmful to humanity to have been kicked out of the garden
I'm not even really sure that's the point. 'Humanity' is a third party in that fight. God had built this new, fragile creature, the 'best' thing he'd ever made. He realized they where fragile and put them in the garden to protect them. Satan is pissed off at God for casting him out and decided to fuck with God by breaking his new toy that he knows God is very proud of. None of them seem to care too much about the long term fate of humanity.
If a child destroys a poorly-built house by kicking it, do we blame the child?
If a child destroys an extremely fragile work of art, do we blame the artist for not making his art more robust.
But Revelation 12 says (the) Satan is one and the same as the devil and “that old serpent” (presumably the serpent in the garden). It’s possible of course that various beings had taken on the role, and the devil was just one of them
> I'm not super familiar with Christian canon but what specific evil did Satan commit?
In the canon and even much conventional theology, it's not clear, and not even clear that Satan is a moral agent capable of doing good or evil. Plus, he doesn't show up much in the canon; there's the bet with God over Job, the test/temptation of Christ, some stuff in Revelation, and the fact that the snake in the Garden of Eden is popularly (though not canonically) identified with Satan.
Milton's work is an artistic take on a popular old non-canonical story that both is influential on shaping images of Satan in Christianity and hard to reconcile some mainstream theology (Christian theology and Christian popular mythology often have a problematic relationship.)
As pointed out above, the serpent isn't necessarily named "Satan". However, it isn't really objective to call the act you describe, "evil". It might have been harmful to humanity to have been kicked out of the garden. (Although, if that hadn't happened, would we have iPhones now? One can see both sides of this question!) The fact we are sinful enough to disobey instructions about eating fruit is more about who we are than about anything the serpent did. If a child destroys a poorly-built house by kicking it, do we blame the child? Why would God want such fragile creatures in his garden in the first place?
Yes. Satan originates from pre-Islamic Arabia, they were spirits that led one astray or blocked ones path. I think the interpretation doesn’t always need to be nefarious, either.
It's super obvious. But for those unfamiliar... there is a famous story about two people and a snake. You have probably heard it.
"Gnostics consider that the biblical myth of creation can be explained as follows: the creator satan of the world trapped Adam and Eve in his miserable world, and Lucifer, in the form of a serpent, offered them the forbidden fruit of saving Gnosis, and showed them that the creator was deceiving them. In other words, the creator said to man "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." On the other hand, the Serpent said "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." The bible continued: "And the eyes of both of them were opened". It doesn't say "they both died", it says "the eyes of both of them were opened", like the Serpent had said. Later, the creator says "And now man has become as one of us, to know good and evil". The creator lied. He said that man would die if he ate the fruit, but man did not die. The Serpent was telling the truth. The creator himself ended up agreeing that the Serpent was right. More precisely, Gnostics called the demiurge a liar as well as a plagiarizer. For them, the entire creation is a failed attempt by the demiurge to imitate the unknowable world. In this way, they think that the bible itself is a complete plagiarism, based principally on pre-biblical Babylonian and Egyptian texts."
"Gnostics believe that this Serpent Lucifer is the liberator of man and the world. It is wisdom, the liberating Gnosis that wakes man up and saves him. Of course, this Messenger of the Unknowable God, Lucifer, is an opponent and an enemy of the creator of the world."
Thanks. In the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, there were 10 locations with the word "Satan". Six of those refered to humans. The other four instances were for other servants of God. My point is that the word Satan is not what people today, after translations and various interpretations, take it to mean.
It doesn’t. The narrative of Satan as a fallen angel is much older than Milton. In the gospel of Luke Jesus says “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”.
Actually that’s the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 14:12) but it doesn’t say Satan, it says Lucifer. That’s the only reference to Lucifer in the Bible (old or New Testament), and that’s been interpreted as Lucifer = Satan = fallen angel who led a rebellion in heaven, but there’s not much else to this, at least not in the Bible.
The serpent is the embodiment of the devil and talks humans into their first sin.
> Job? Everything done to him is with God's will.
God mostly pulls back and lets the devil have his way to prove the devil wrong. The devil had some philosophical argument about man's love for God being purely utilitarian... that Job loves God like a cat with a full food dish loves its master. The story was about evil putting good to an empirical test. So, in that sense, it's certainly about good vs. evil.
You're mostly arguing with the text's perception of good, which is common, but if the text is granted its own moral perspective, it's clearly about good vs. evil.
> More to the point, where are the bad guys?
In both cases the bad guy is literally Satan, which is why I chose those. There are plenty of other Biblical stories where the are evil characters and evil people groups, but I was responding to a question about the devil.
And the temptation of Christ is as literally God vs the devil as you can get.
Not quite true, or at least not so baldly. Job describes the "satan", or accuser, in a manner that clearly anticipates his later depiction as "the accuser of the brethren" in Revelation. And while not providing a name, the descriptions of the mythical falls of the kings of Babylon and Tyre in Isaiah and Ezekiel seem to draw on legends similar to the later Christian elaboration of the story of demonic rebellion and exile.
The identification of Satan with the serpent is a Christian and Islamic thing.
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