I started Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan.
In what I
have read so far, Pagels chronicles the development of Satan within the
Hebrew Bible. In Numbers 22:22, the angel who stands in the way of
Balaam and his donkey is called Balaam's Satan, or adversary. Here, a
Satan is an instrument of God, not an adversary against God. In the
Book of Job, the Satan is a kind of "roving intelligence agent" (Pagels'
words) spying on people on God's behalf; while the Satan in Job takes
on more of an adversarial role (i.e., he incites God against Job), he
still works for God. According to Pagels, it was during Israel's
post-exilic period that Satan became more adversarial, one who was
believed to cause division and destruction, apparently without a
redemptive purpose. In Zechariah 3, Satan is one who seeks to obstruct
God's agenda in post-exilic Israel. For Pagels, Satan comes to serve a
sociological purpose within the factionalism of Israel----to affirm one
side (the returning exiles) and to stigmatize the other (the Jews who
remained in Israel during the exile and did not care for the returning
exiles' restoration project).
Pagels' focus is on the sociological
function of Satan within the context of factionalism----between
post-exilic Jews, and also between Jews and Christians. On pages 48-49,
Pagels refers to three stories about the origins of Satan. The first
story is the one that many of us heard: that Satan was an angel who
rebelled against God. The second story is based on Genesis 6 and
highlights the angels who left heaven, mated with human women, and
produced demonic giants who polluted the earth. The third story appears
in the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve (14:3), and it presents Satan as
refusing to worship Adam because Satan thought that he was more
glorious than the newly-created man. Pagels contends that these three
stories have something in common: they depict Satan, not as an outsider,
but rather as an intimate enemy----one who came from God's ranks. For
Pagels, this would fit Satan playing a role within Jewish factionalism,
in which people from the same people-group were hostile to one another,
as intimate enemies.
I've only read fifty pages of this book so
far, so my criticism may be nullified as I read on. But I wish that
Pagels cited the primary sources for the story that Satan was an angel
who rebelled against God. She says that such a story was based on
Isaiah 14, but there's no evidence that the rebelling being there was
considered to be Satan, per se. There were ancient Near Eastern stories
about a deity trying to elevate himself within the pantheon, and Isaiah
14 could be referring to that sort of thing, not so much the sort of
story that we encounter in John Milton's Paradise Lost.