Read Online The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Elaine Pagels
Ads: Link
less anti-Semitic. After all,
virtually everyone who appears in the account is Jewish,
including, of course, the Messiah. Mark does not see himself as
separate from Israel, but depicts Jesus’ followers as what Isaiah
calls God’s “remnant” within Israel (Isaiah 10:22-23). Even the
images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority—images
of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil—paradoxically express the
intimacy of Mark’s relationship with the Jewish community as a
whole, for, as we shall see, the figure of Satan, as it emerged over
the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing
Israel from without, but the source and representation of
conflict within the community.
II
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN:
FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE
TO THE GOSPELS
The conflict between Jesus’ followers and their fellow Jews is
not, of course, the first sectarian movement that divided the
Jewish world, a world whose early history we know primarily
from the Hebrew Bible, a collection of authoritative law,
prophets, psalms, and other writings assembled centuries before
the four gospels and other Christian writings were brought
together in the New Testament. Who assembled this collection
we do not know, but we may infer from its contents that it was
compiled to constitute the religious history of the Jewish people,
and so to create the basis for a unified society.1
Excluded from the Hebrew Bible were writings of Jewish
sectarians, apparently because such authors tended to identify
with one group of Jews against another, rather than with Israel as
a whole. Christians later came to call the writings of such
dissidents from the main group the apocrypha (literally, “hidden
things”) and pseudepigrapha (“false writings”).2
But the writings collected to form the Hebrew Bible encourage
identification with Israel itself. According to the foundation
storv recounted in Genesis 12, Israel first received its identity
through election, when “the Lord” suddenly revealed himself to
Abraham, ordering him to leave his home country, his family,
and his ancestral gods, and promising him, in exchange for
exclusive loyalty, a new national heritage, with a new identitv:
36 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN
"I will make you a great nation, and I will make your name
great . . . and whoever blesses you I will bless; and whoever
curses you I will curse" (Gen. 12:3).
So when God promises to make Abraham the father of a new,
great, and blessed nation, he simultaneously defines and
constitutes its enemies as inferior and potentially accursed.
From the beginning, then, Israelite tradition defines “us” in
ethnic, political, and religious terms as “the people of Israel,” or
“the people of God,” as against “them”—the (other) nations (in
Hebrew, hagoyim ), the alien enemies of Israel, often
characterized as inferior, morally depraved, even potentially
accursed. In Genesis 16:12, an angel predicts that Ishmael,
although he was Abraham's son, the progenitor of the Arab
people, would be a “wild ass of a man, with his hand against
everyone, and everyone's hand against him; and he shall live at
odds with all his kin.” The story implies that his descendants,
too, are hostile, no better than animals. Genesis 19:37-38 adds
that the Moabite and Ammonite nations are descended from
Lot’s daughters, which means that they are the illegitimate
offspring of a drunken and incestuous union. The people of
Sodom, although they are Abraham’s allies, not his enemies, are
said to be criminally depraved, “young and old, down to the last
man,” collectively guilty of attempting to commit homosexual
rape against a party of angels, seen by the townspeople as
defenseless Hebrew travelers (Gen. 19:4). These accounts do not
idealize Abraham or his progeny— in fact, the biblical narrator
twice tells how the self-serving lies of Abraham and Isaac
endangered their allies (Gen. 20:1-18;
virtually everyone who appears in the account is Jewish,
including, of course, the Messiah. Mark does not see himself as
separate from Israel, but depicts Jesus’ followers as what Isaiah
calls God’s “remnant” within Israel (Isaiah 10:22-23). Even the
images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority—images
of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil—paradoxically express the
intimacy of Mark’s relationship with the Jewish community as a
whole, for, as we shall see, the figure of Satan, as it emerged over
the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing
Israel from without, but the source and representation of
conflict within the community.
II
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN:
FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE
TO THE GOSPELS
The conflict between Jesus’ followers and their fellow Jews is
not, of course, the first sectarian movement that divided the
Jewish world, a world whose early history we know primarily
from the Hebrew Bible, a collection of authoritative law,
prophets, psalms, and other writings assembled centuries before
the four gospels and other Christian writings were brought
together in the New Testament. Who assembled this collection
we do not know, but we may infer from its contents that it was
compiled to constitute the religious history of the Jewish people,
and so to create the basis for a unified society.1
Excluded from the Hebrew Bible were writings of Jewish
sectarians, apparently because such authors tended to identify
with one group of Jews against another, rather than with Israel as
a whole. Christians later came to call the writings of such
dissidents from the main group the apocrypha (literally, “hidden
things”) and pseudepigrapha (“false writings”).2
But the writings collected to form the Hebrew Bible encourage
identification with Israel itself. According to the foundation
storv recounted in Genesis 12, Israel first received its identity
through election, when “the Lord” suddenly revealed himself to
Abraham, ordering him to leave his home country, his family,
and his ancestral gods, and promising him, in exchange for
exclusive loyalty, a new national heritage, with a new identitv:
36 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN
"I will make you a great nation, and I will make your name
great . . . and whoever blesses you I will bless; and whoever
curses you I will curse" (Gen. 12:3).
So when God promises to make Abraham the father of a new,
great, and blessed nation, he simultaneously defines and
constitutes its enemies as inferior and potentially accursed.
From the beginning, then, Israelite tradition defines “us” in
ethnic, political, and religious terms as “the people of Israel,” or
“the people of God,” as against “them”—the (other) nations (in
Hebrew, hagoyim ), the alien enemies of Israel, often
characterized as inferior, morally depraved, even potentially
accursed. In Genesis 16:12, an angel predicts that Ishmael,
although he was Abraham's son, the progenitor of the Arab
people, would be a “wild ass of a man, with his hand against
everyone, and everyone's hand against him; and he shall live at
odds with all his kin.” The story implies that his descendants,
too, are hostile, no better than animals. Genesis 19:37-38 adds
that the Moabite and Ammonite nations are descended from
Lot’s daughters, which means that they are the illegitimate
offspring of a drunken and incestuous union. The people of
Sodom, although they are Abraham’s allies, not his enemies, are
said to be criminally depraved, “young and old, down to the last
man,” collectively guilty of attempting to commit homosexual
rape against a party of angels, seen by the townspeople as
defenseless Hebrew travelers (Gen. 19:4). These accounts do not
idealize Abraham or his progeny— in fact, the biblical narrator
twice tells how the self-serving lies of Abraham and Isaac
endangered their allies (Gen. 20:1-18;
Similar Books
