Satan
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the name applied to the personification of an evil power opposed to the God; the great adversary of man; the devil. Satan is mentioned but three times in the Old Testament, once each in the books of Job, Chronicles, and Zachariah. In fact the doctrine of one who works evil in opposition to the Lord, or the doer of good, is not taught by the Old Testament. The Old Testament Hebrew doctrine of Jehovah as given in the book of Isaiah is as follows: There is none beside me. I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all things. The doctrine of Satan as an evil power contending with the power of good finds its counterpart in the theologies of Babylon, Persia, and other eastern nations, where a plurality of supernatural powers was an article of belief. The Anglo-Saxon race inherited from ancient sources, no doubt, a similar belief in adverse powers,--"For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." The Satan of the New Testament, who tempted Christ, and the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost , who was cast out of heaven, appear to be modern ideas for which little foundation is laid in the Old Testament. High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd To that bad eminence. --Milton, Paradise Lost.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's central claim in 1910 -- that the Old Testament names Satan only in Job, Chronicles and Zechariah, and that the cosmic adversary of the New Testament and of Milton has little foundation there -- is still the mainstream scholarly view, and modern translations reinforce it by rendering the Hebrew as "the accuser" or "the adversary", a title in God's court rather than a proper name. What Aiton could not see was the middle ground: the Dead Sea Scrolls, found from 1947, gave a large body of Jewish writing from the centuries between the Testaments in which Belial or the Prince of Darkness leads the sons of darkness against the sons of light, so the leap he found so abrupt now has documented intermediate stages. Scholars still argue over how much Persian dualism contributed, much as he assumed it did. Outside scholarship the figure has moved into other rooms: Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, the Catholic Church issued a revised rite of exorcism in 1999, and the American "Satanic panic" of the 1980s produced ritual-abuse prosecutions later discredited.
Written for this edition, 2026.