So when someone talks about the satan (literally, in Hebrew, it says, "ha satan," which means "the satan" or "the accuser") in Job and how that is not necessarily Satan himself, I hear this common response:
"But in Revelation, we see the dragon who is the serpent who is the devil who is Satan! So it seems to me that we can definitely make the connection between the serpent in Genesis and Satan."
Yes. But here's the thing. No one was actually arguing against that fact. This is missing the point of the discussion to begin with, and it's really understandable to do so if you're entering into this conversation with just the idea "the satan [in Job] is not the serpent in the Garden." There's a bit of differentiation and clarification needed here.
If you want to understand the point (and NOT just jump to the conclusion you just made), it seems we need to back up a bit. Because guess what...yeah, the serpent and Satan are one in the same. But that's not the message here. We were, after all, looking at the book of Job, right? Not Genesis or Revelation.
The satan in Job is a job description, not an already-rebellious being named Satan.
What I'm saying when I say that the satan in Job is not the serpent in the Garden is that the author of Job doesn't seem to have been thinking about the garden and the fall at all. It doesn't look like he has the Genesis narrative in mind, let alone the idea that this is the arch-nemesis of God. He wasn't thinking, "We all know that this is the serpent and head of the demonic bad guys, but I'll just call him Satan here." The satan in Job acts like someone whose job it is to be a prosecutor of the court. And that fits right in with the scene we see him appear in.
I'll try to be concise here, but I also want to explain a few things for those who aren't aware of some differences in the way we can look at the Bible:
Systematic Theology vs. Biblical Theology
Biblical theology is not just "theology that is biblical." The term "biblical theology" is a technical one that refers to a particular discipline. It is a method of looking at the text that differs from systematic theology. Both are necessary to the Bible student.
Systematic Theology
Systematic theology is what we are used to hearing in church and many Bible studies, generally speaking. This is what we see in catechisms, taught in our Sunday Schools, and preached from the pulpit in "most" churches. (Your mileage may vary.) The systematic theologian takes a broad view of what Scripture says and then spits out an answer that takes all of that into account. This is both useful and essential to some degree. We need to know what the Bible's story is and the conclusions it reaches on things.
Systematic theology will give you a distinct answer to questions like: What is the atonement? Why do we baptize? Who is Satan?
No matter what type of theology you do, you might find answers to questions like that, but systematic theology blends together the Bible's message into a cohesive whole, a single picture that is not reliant on any single book of the Bible...but which gives more weight to later revelation than to earlier revelation (for good reason, certainly). While we need to look at the Bible in this holistic way, it can also cause some misunderstandings. This might make us assume that, for instance, the writer of Genesis and the writer of Job and the writer of Revelation all had the same idea/figure in mind when talking about the serpent, the satan, and the dragon.
Biblical Theology
Biblical theology is not like systematic theology. It is keenly interested in the individual contexts of individual human authors. A biblical theologian considers the idea that the writer of Genesis wouldn't, in fact, have been thinking the same as the writer of Job, or John when he wrote Revelation. Each of these writers had a different audience and a different purpose for writing.
The biblical theologian wants us to consider the book of Genesis on its own before jumping forward to what it meant to a New Testament writer. In the case of John, it's quite clear that the connection is made between the serpent and Satan the devil. So, as we consider the New Testament to be authoritative revelation, we can ourselves look back at Genesis and also see those same things in the same way, even if the author of Genesis didn't grasp the full import of the revelation that God was giving him. (But we still ought to disambiguate in our minds that Genesis doesn't have the same context we do!)
But, here's the big question, what about the writer of Job and the figure of the satan?...surely that's Satan, right? Says so right there!
Not so fast! Just because Job uses the word "satan" doesn't mean that this is the one-and-only head honcho devil bad guy who is named Satan.
We need to take each biblical author on his own terms and look at what he was thinking. This is how we become good faith readers of the text as we work to uncover the original meaning. (Does that mean we only stay there, in that context? No; we do need to move into application of the text. But we do that in a much more faithful way after first understanding the original human author's meaning and situation.)
So was the writer of Job thinking of the serpent in the garden when he wrote about the satan?
There's no solid, text-based reason to think that the author of Job (remember we're thinking about him specifically) had in mind the serpent in the garden. And he wasn't thinking about an arch-nemesis, either, because the idea of a main arch-nemesis probably had not yet developed. What we see in the Old Testament, rather, is a plethora of "bad guys" and no clear "leader" amongst them.
If the author of Job was looking to connect his story with the story in Genesis, he might have included some details to "hyperlink" them--using words or phrases or types of images. Instead, the best we have are conceptual links of this type: the satan and the serpent were both "tempting" an archetypical human; both were potentially connected to the throne room of God (the satan being literally present there and the serpent being a potential throne guardian); and both seem antagonistic towards God. And while that's more than "zero" evidence that they are the same being, it's still only conceptual rather than literary. The Bible has many different spiritual rebels, so these two do not have to be the same one!
If we take away this bit of support concerning the overall description of the serpent/Satan, it doesn't make anything fall apart. It doesn't negate John's connection whatsoever. Some people do think that it does, though, because the serpent doesn't show up a whole lot in the Old Testament (potential places to look are Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14). So...how we "get" to the New Testament idea of the devil if we don't have the devil in Job? The fact is, the development of this figure who ends up being called Satan is quite the murky and convoluted picture.
Why Does John Connect the Serpent and Satan?
John connects the serpent and Satan for several reasons. By the time of the New Testament, many things had developed in the minds of the Jewish people. The idea of a "main" arch-nemesis of God was one of these ideas that doesn't seem to be present in the Old Testament but certainly is in the New Testament. The Hebrew term satan (meaning "accuser") became a proper name along the way. And it makes perfect sense to see the serpent, the "original rebel," as this arch-nemesis, especially considering the serpent's connection to the underworld and death. It's a whole matrix of ideas that coalesced by John's time. And it's not a threat to our Bible reading that we don't see this development of ideas expressed in the Old Testament.
So the satan in Job doesn't fit into John's writing, then??
Well let's examine this with a few things.
The Hebrew term, satan, shows up a few times in the Old Testament, and for sure doesn't always refer to the devil. As I said, the fact that it is prefaced with the word "the" means that it is NOT a name in the book of Job. But....many Bible translations do put the proper name Satan there. Why?
We have translation and interpretation to thank for that.
The textual history of Job includes its translation into Greek, a version we now call the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). The Greek translation translates the Hebrew word satan into the Greek word diabolos, which means slanderer, or one who accuses falsely. Looking at what the satan does in Job, this translation makes complete sense. The accuser in Job is slandering Job. So, speed up to the New Testament and we have authors who were steeped in a context that used Greek heavily. When they read the LXX, they'd read the term "diabolos" in Job. That Greek word is associated with the devil in the New Testament, so boom, connection made!
John is obviously plugged into a wider concept of Satan as the arch-nemesis that has developed through various traditions of non-canonical writing. By John's time, it seems likely that readers were reading Job and inserting that arch-nemesis into the text. But the satan in Job is only an incidental point to the whole picture of the devil that has developed. In other words--it's the broad idea of the arch-nemesis that developed first, and then readers took the interpretation of the satan in Job to be the same being. This is an interpretive development rather than an original meaning in the text. And again, this isn't something that should bother us. Many things were seen more clearly by the time of the New Testament.
Overall, the point is....just because John was making these connections doesn't mean that the author of Job was. And the author of Job, surprise surprise, wrote the book of Job. So as faithful readers of the text, what we need to do is first understand the book of Job itself, on its own terms. When we do that, new avenues of meaning open up to us. If the satan was not already a fallen being and the arch-nemesis of God when he comes on the scene, how do we explain his presence? Why would God have a prosecutor on his "payroll"? Might this have something to do with the way God tests people? (NOTE: I'm also not saying that the satan cannot be a rebellious servant; this is part of our mediation on the passage, to see all the options and examine each one.)
Let me know what you think in the comments!
