What the Hell?!

I’ve been reading Pistolpete’s blog post titled ‘Anyone going to hell?‘, and a few others on the belief of a literal or metaphoric bible, the nature of faith, and the belief in the One True God (as opposed to the same God of the other Abrahamic faiths). It’s interesting to read the concepts some Christians (particularly evangelical Americans) have on these issues.

Some years ago, I asked one of the Elders at the church I grew up in, “when did The Fall take place?”. He looked at me as if I suddenly needed some sort of intervention and replied “at the Garden of Eden of course!”. To me, my question was important because it involved the nature of Evil, of the Devil, and of Heaven and Hell. I wanted to understand the nature of this issue with the hope that I could understand - not just have scriptures or doctrine thrown at me.

The first problem I had was the fact that Satan, or more correctly Ha-satan, is a title or official position of angelic nature, and not a name. Translated from the Hebrew it should be read as the ‘Adversary’ of Man.

21 Balaam got up in the morning, saddled his donkey and went with the princes of Moab. 22 But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him. Balaam was riding on his donkey, and his two servants were with him. 23 When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand, she turned off the road into a field. Balaam beat her to get her back on the road. - Numbers 22:21-23

8 Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” - Job 1:8

In my reading, I discovered that some of the confusion around Satan and The Fall comes from the following passage from Isaiah 14:12:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning”

Here, Lucifer (a Latin word) is a reference to Nebuchadnezzer, king of Babylon, not to an angel (fallen or otherwise).

As Jerome translated the Hebrew bible into Latin on the orders of Pope Damasus in 382 C.E , he translated Heylel to the Latin Lucifer. In modern Jewish theology, Helel in Isaiah 14 is not equated with the Jewish concept of Satan. Instead, the prophet is speaking of the fall of Babylon and along with it the fall of her false gods Helel and Shahar. Lucifer is translated as “light-bearer”.

Inspired by Homer and the fall of Hephaestus (the Greek god of fire) from Olympus in the Iliad I:591ff, and the fall of the Titans described by Hesiod, Jerome drewn upon these stories to embellish the fall of Lucifer and connect Lucifer to Satan. This association is only made stronger by literary works like Paradise Lost, in which Lucifer is Milton’s key protagonist, and in Lucifer and Adam in Ballingschap, a poem by Joost van den Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, who uses Lucifer in lieu of Satan.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.” - Paradise Lost, Book I, 263

So if Satan is only an angel in the Hebrew Bible, and the Lucifer we know is more a work of literary fiction, where is the personification of evil known as the Devil and where is Hell?

While Revelation 12 describes Christ’s triumph over Satan and over evil at the crucifixion rather than describe an historical event, the origins of evil still remain relatively unexplained by the Scriptures. Maybe, in this, this is the whole point of the matter. Just as in Revelation, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series shows children the nature of evil and teaches “the difference between good and evil” [2].

I think, at least for me, the truth is that we don’t need a Satan or Lucifer to recognise evil when we see it. There certainly are men who, in this world, spread evil and chaos. If we can tell stories to remind ourselves of the nature of evil, if we can relate to an historical figure, Jesus of Nasareth and point to his trials against the evils of men and state and institutionalised religion, then we can learn of the nature of good and evil without the need for hiding behind the stories told to our children at Sunday school and presenting them as gospel truth.

M

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[1] Wikipedia. Lucifer. Online at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer>, accessed on 6 April 2007.

[2] BBC World. Harry Potter gets Vatican’s blessing. Online at:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2722077.stm>, accessed on 6 April 2007.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Some Light On Lucifer
• Are Lucifer and Satan the Same Being? « Operation Awakening
• The Source of Evil
• ’Paradise Lost’: Sympathy For The Devil? - Movie News Story