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The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy is unavailable, but you can change that!

Many people today think of Satan as a little red demon with a pointy tail and a pitchfork—but this vision of the devil developed over many centuries and would be foreign to the writers of the Old Testament, where this figure makes his first appearances. The earliest texts that mention the Satan—it is always “the Satan” in the Old Testament—portray him as an agent of Yahweh, serving as an...

The closest analogue, perhaps, is the figure to which Revelation refers as the dragon. In many ancient Near Eastern cultures, the process of creation is thought to have involved a battle between the creator god and a sea monster—Tiamat in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Yamm (Sea) in the Canaanite Baal myth known from texts found at Ugarit in northern Syria. We find allusions to similar creation stories in the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible. So Job 26:12: “By his power he stilled the Sea; by his understanding
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