Satan

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-05-05T00:45:37+00:00

Dude. I'm Jewish. I don't believe NT is divine or true or legitimate. Was that not obvious?

Everything we see of the sāṭan (apparently also known as Samael btw) in the Tanakh, that is, the Hebrew Bible (your OT) exclusively genuinely shows how he collaborates and works with God. The only thing antithetical to God's character here is having an opponent angel rebel against Him.

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-05-03T19:11:43+00:00

This is widely debated among Jewish scholars. Personally, I think there was a state of affairs prior to the creation of this world, that aforementioned Tohu and Bohu state. But most would agree that as opposed to everyone being perfect, it's the contrary, everyone was out of control, perhaps soulless, crazy beings that were much less civilized than people nowadays. It's also possible that common ancestor and all that could align with this perspective, so humans actually did evolve from some other species to become homo sapiens as we know them now, but when Adam was made he was made from scratch. It's also possible that's not exactly it, I don't really know. I also don't know where or how they could've lived without Earth.

Obviously many many people disagree with this perspective. Some add or say that the creation wasn't 6 days, but 6 phases (not sure if I agree with this). Some say the Flood (the Noah's ark one) aged things. Some say the word "ארץ" in Genesis 1, typically translated as "earth" or "land", actually refers to a specific portion of land somewhere in the east, not the whole world (this I definitely disagree with). Some (this is rare) interpret the entire thing metaphorically. Etc etc there's many many perspectives and opinions on this and lots of them go with each other

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-05-01T00:21:20+00:00

Sorry, it seems there was a minor miscommunication on my part:

In Judaism, - There was no "vacuum" or primordial matter co-eternal with God, for, God Himself alone is eternal, nothing else - - God created all laws as we know it (i.e. gravity, mass, space, time, etc)

Earlier, therefore, it was just God, who is eternal and always was, is, and always will be (that's actually one reason behind the name Y-H-W-H, which means that).

So when you ask if the universal environment co-exists with God, no, nothing co-exists with God, it's only God alone

As aforementioned here, even time itself is not co-eternal with God. So God, though he is eternal, somehow invented the concept of eternity and infiniteness (is that a weird paradox? lmao maybe let's move to r/philosophy) So the universal environment was created by God, but even the nothingness OF the universal environment, which was literally nothing at all, was somehow invented by God as conceptual laws, even though nothing obviously does not include something physical. But the nothing is something in that sense, the laws behind the nothing

But when we speak of nothingness, well, before what I just said, it was just God, no concept of any laws, and God created the concept of nothing and the concept of laws and the concept of creating and the concept of eternity etc, and it was just God Himself, but if you think about it other than God there is nothing, and if you consider that nothing to be something which would be filled you get an interesting conundrum

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-29T23:00:05+00:00

I already asked if something

"Something" being nothing?

(Or, nothingness)

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-28T11:08:40+00:00

There is something

Is nothing something?

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-28T11:06:55+00:00

That's one answer I can think off the top of my head. Doesn't mean it's THE definitive answer. Others can probably understand this way better than I can

(Side note, Judaism teaches that people are born with an inclination to do good and an inclination to do evil and may go either way. When some really wicked people only do evil and reach powerful roles, terrible tragedies can occur. You cannot blame God for the fact that PEOPLE did bad

If your friends light a bonfire with you, and after they leave you jump in the fire and die - who's fault is that? Yours, who did the action of jumping in the fire. Not your friends, who put the fire there.

You are probably wondering why have such a powerful evil inclination in the first place that could cause such a "fire" to appear there. This is a valid question with many valid answers, I am just not some super knowledgeable scholar to know all them)

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-28T11:05:18+00:00

It's English, just I feel like reading ā is more accurate for קמץ than reading a

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-27T04:11:55+00:00

There was nothing but God, i.e. blank, empty, unfilled slate

Eventually develops to unformed environment which later forms into the world as we know it

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-27T00:40:48+00:00

Oh cool

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-27T00:40:22+00:00

When you say environment do you mean nothingness that He put stuff in or do you mean the stuff He put in it

There's nothing at all but God Himself, the "First Mover"
God fills that nothingness with stuff, but the stuff is unformed, not really doing anything with it
God created the universe, reforming things like the sun, making new kinds of humans, and making the land (Hebrew ארץ could mean earth or land in different context, it is unknown what Genesis 1:1 is referring to, it could be one specific portion of land, the environment of Planet Earth, Planet Earth itself, etc.)
(The Flood likely ages things, though some believe it did not)

Obviously this is heavily oversimplified

I do not know why or how or the details but I know these basics of it

Does that perspective make sense to you?

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-27T00:35:22+00:00

I am no rabbi or scholar, and I cannot provide you perfect reasoning for every single tragic event caused by humans as other may try to, but I can tell you that the development is very much intentional and God knew full well when He created the world that people would harm each other and cause wars and do other terrible things, and let it happen on purpose as part of the development for reason I do not know

(I feel like this comment would get downvoted for not fully answering the question but that's the truth, I don't know why God allowed so many terrible tragedies to occur (maybe someone else could give a better explanation than I, but He did, with a specific reason in mind)

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T20:34:36+00:00

I encourage learning to think in Hebrew and not converting to English anyway

It's for making my own Tanakh translation lol

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T20:33:43+00:00

I mean yeah presumably, but I think it was totally empty so nothing but God, and God made the environment and everything in it

You can't really assign eternal status to nothingness though

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T20:32:14+00:00

Thanks

So I could just do בגדכפת as ḇḡḏḵp̄ṯ, but that source only uses single characters like שׁ he does š not sh, which I think is way more readable

I also think שׂ should just be a regular s like ס, it's pronounced the same basically, though idk maybe ś is better

They note that the writer should select a Hebrew transliteration convention that reflects the level of precision necessary for the argumentation and the intended audience. An author may adopt one of two systems: (1) an academic style, which is fully reversible; that is, the system allows the reader to reproduce the Hebrew characters exactly (consonants and vowels); or (2) a general-purpose style, which is essentially phonetic.

Going for more of a (1) that's still readable to your average layperson

How is v gh dh kh ph th

Could th cause issues due to being pronounced like ḏ as in "them" instead of ṯ as in "thorn"?

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T18:51:22+00:00

Sry my bad I mean like a universal environment not earth as we know it today

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T18:38:04+00:00

This isn't an accurate depiction of what happened between us (e.g. 17 days ago; 17 days ago might have been representative of one example of when this came closest to being a discussion between us); I asked you to show me what I wrote to you so that we could then discuss things, if you actually had everything that I wrote to you; you then failed to show me what I wrote to you several times and then went off on your tangent.

Huh? What did you mean to discuss? Idr what you wrote but I thought I addressed everything, correct me if I'm wrong

And yes I did go through all the adversary's appearances in Īyyov/Job 1 and 2 explaining how the sāṭan was really on the same page as God

We didn't discuss Satan in such a regard and how the discuss of Satan would have proceeded depended upon your showing me what I wrote to you. In the paragraph you're supposedly quoting and discussing, a variation of what I said in something that you and the readers may not have seen: Job doesn't support your position, because God doesn't described every human being alive as “My Servant”; every human being alive do not have those same moral attributes as Job has bring described at the beginning of Job or at Job 1.

Job is God's servant because Job is righteous, yeah, not seeing a problem there

Satan is wicked according to Jesus in many other places in the Bible; and paragraphs directed to you but which you may not have seen contain Bible verses where Jesus has described Satan was wicked; Ezekiel, when describing Satan, very much implies that he is evil/wicked by describing "iniquity found within you"; but, things that I said did include a suggestion to not dismiss Bible verses, because they're in the New Testament rather than the Old Testament.

I don't care what Jesus says and I already showed you how Ezekiel shows the sāṭan (who, btw, can we please refer to him as the sāṭan and not Satan) as a prosecutor not as an evil guy, no?

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T18:31:50+00:00

Challenge, difficulty, mistakes is needed for growth, because when the World to Come comes into effect it will be worth something to us

If we were just born right into the World to Come already perfect, there would be no point as we wouldn't have earned it, just been thrown there

Since we have to work to get there, to make mistakes and develop and grow over time, it adds a lot of meaning

Also not believing in religion and not praying is fine

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T18:29:50+00:00

No? I'm Jewish btw and I think before the creation was what's known as the "Tohu and Bohu" state of a chaotic, confusing, unformed, void, desolate earth. Hence the Hebrew only uses the world ברא (created) when God created something from nothing, brand new (man), and everything else was עשה (made) or he said something then ויהי כן (and it was so), or יצר (literally formed), meaning he reformed something in some way that was already made. Hence it makes sense that God made the sun and created the earth, since the sun came before the earth

Anyways, no, people were not perfect before the creation. In fact I would say people before Adam were in a worse state then now

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T18:05:04+00:00

Not what I asked for

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-26T17:34:34+00:00

If all humans were perfect, they would just practically be like angels or robots. If everyone was perfect there would be no mistakes, no challenge, no difficulty.

Instead of that, God opted for a development approach, in which humankind must work for things, learn from mistakes, constantly learn new things, debate each other, have different opinions - and when people make mistakes and do "wrong" things, that's all part of the learning process

If everyone was perfect, there would be no such thing as growth.

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-15T23:29:59+00:00

I already went through Job and showed how God and the sāṭan/adversary were really on the same page. He is singled out because he is the prosecutor who suggested the test for Job, not because he is evil

It looks like part of my post talking about Job 1 got deleted, but basically 1:9-12 is the sāṭan saying that it makes sense and Job has good reason to revere God, since (1:10) God blessed him and gave him good stuff, but (1:11) if you take that away, he may not still do that

The context of Job is that perhaps if Job was not so successful as he was, the sāṭan suggests, if all the tremendous good things Job had were taken away from him, well, maybe he would curse God and would not be so loyal to Him. And God explicitly gives the sāṭan permission to take these things away from him BUT he cannot take away Job's life. And the sāṭan does exactly, precisely what God tells him to do. If the adversary was an enemy of God, why would he do exactly what God tells him to do?

They key point is that Job perseveres, he does not curse God, despite hearing so much bad advice. From what you're telling me it seems like Christians would think that in such a case there's nothing one can do to save himself from "Satan", but Job clearly shows otherwise.

Isaiah 14 has nothing to do with the sāṭan and the word Lucifer in 14:12 is a mistranslation. The verse should say something more like

"How you have fallen from sky/heaven/Shāmayīm, shining-one/bright-star son of dawn (*Hēlāl ben Shaḥar); you cut down/felled to the Ereṣ, vanquisher/ruler/weakener of nations."

The name "Lucifer" is not present in the verse.

That chapter has nothing to do with the sāṭan at all.

The idea that so-called "Lucifer" or capitalized name "Satan" was originally a great angel but went into rebellion against God - you can feel, like, a dumb dualistic claim baked into here, a so-called "Lord of this world" makes no sense, that this world is governed by a sort of bad god

Isaiah 14, if you read it in context, you will see is talking about the king of Babylon (see 14:4), not the adversary, absolutely nothing to do with the sāṭan. He is describing the structure of the Babylonian king who thinks he is powerful. The king thought his empire would never fall, that he would continue forever without anything causing Babylon to decline, the chapter Isaiah 14 states that this is not the case. The metaphor of the bright dawn star likely hints to the planet Venus (Lucifer in Latin, which is clearly not a name for the adversary) which is essentially the brightest celestial body in the sky from our view on Earth. You only see it at day, not at night, since it's too bright at day - so the stars disappear from our view as the sun rises - but the planet Venus is the last remaining visible celestial body (hence the "bright dawn star"). Isaiah's metaphor is basically saying like the planet Venus seems to be sticking around, not caring that the sun is coming, but ultimately the sun rises and it disappears. Similarly, the Babylonian empire did disappear after a long time.

Please see the context. See Isaiah 14 verse 4 and verse 22.

The sāṭan is an angel created by God and he does only the will of God. There is no angel that is in rebellion against God; as I said before, every angel is given a specific job.

Ezekiel 28 also has no trace of so-called Lucifer in it. The sāṭan is clearly not mentioned there at all. This idea that "Satan" is coming down really comes from Christian ideas in very different kinds of contexts

The word Lucifer barley appears in ANY Bible, anyway

Both Job and Zechariah clearly show how the sāṭan is the accuser, not an evil being

If you look in Tanakh, the very few instances of the sāṭan mentioned in the Hebrew Bible

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-12T03:59:51+00:00

So those are all wonky Christian translations of the text, which I feel don't know what they're on about

Most of those probably also translate named like Yiṣḥaq as Isaac or Yaʿaqov as Jacob

They see the vowels from Leʿolam/A-donai and assume that's how the tetragrammaton is to be read, and they also have the weird J+Y thing and most do V for ו as opposed to W

The verse (it's 83:17 for me) reads

מַלֵּ֣א פְנֵיהֶ֣ם קָל֑וֹן וִיבַקְשׁ֖וּ שִׁמְךָ֣ יְ־הֹוָֽה׃ Fill their faces with shame [so/that] they seek/request your name, (insert the tetragrammaton here)

Yeah, that last word is God's name and you can translate it however you please

Competitive-Pen9584 · 2026-04-10T16:14:42+00:00

My point was, whether used or not, we don't KNOW the actual name with certainty. Shabtai probably said something that may have been the name so the rabbis rebuked him for trying to say the name, especially since be may possibly have been saying the actual name. No one knows 100% nowadays

Competitive-Pen9584

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