The Origin of Satan (13 page)

the discovery in 1947 of the ruins of their community, including

its sacred library, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus, at the age of

sixteen, was fascinated bv this austere and secretive community:

he says that they “practiced great holiness” within an extraordi-

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 57

narily close-knit group (“they love one another very much”).31

Josephus and Philo both note, with some astonishment, that

these sectarians practiced strict celibacy, probably because they

chose to live according to the biblical rules for holy war, which

prohibit sexual intercourse during wartime. But the war in

which they saw themselves engaged was God’s war against the

power of evil—a cosmic war that they expected would result in

God’s vindication of their fidelity. The Essenes also turned over

all their money and property to their leaders in order to live

“without money,” as Pliny says, in a monastic community.32

These devout and passionate sectarians saw the foreign

occupation of Palestine—and the accommodation of the majority

of Jews to that occupation—as evidence that the forces of evil

had taken over the world and—in the form of Satan, Mastema, or

the Prince of Darkness—infiltrated and taken over God’s own

people, turning most of them into allies of the Evil One.

Arising from controversies over purity and assimilation that

followed the Maccabean war, the Essene movement grew during

the Roman occupation of the first century to include over four

thousand men. Women, never mentioned in the community

rule, apparently were not eligible for admission. Although the

remains of a few women and children have been found among

the hundreds of men buried in the outer cemetery at Qûmran,

they probably were not community members.33 (Since the whole

cemetery has not yet been excavated, these conclusions remain

inconclusive.) Many adjunct members of the sect, apparently

including many who were married, lived in towns all over

Palestine, pursuing ordinary occupations while striving to

devote themselves to God; but the most dedicated withdrew in

protest from ordinary Jewish life to form their own “new Israel,”

the monastic community’ in desert caves overlooking the Dead

Sea.34 There, following the rigorous community rule, they

dressed only in white and regulated every detail of their lives

according to strict interpretations of the law set forth by their

priestly leaders.

In their sacred books, such as the great
Scroll of the War of the

Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness
, the brethren could

read how God had given them the Prince of Light as their super-

58 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

natural ally to help them contend against Satan, and against his

human allies.

The Prince of Light thou has appointed to come to our support:

but Satan, the angel Mastema, thou hast created for the pit; he

rules in darkness, and his purpose is to bring about evil and sin

(1 QM 19:10-12).

The Essenes called themselves the “sons of light” and indicted

the majority as “sons of darkness,” the “congregation of

traitors,” as people who “depart from the way, having

transgressed the law, and violated the precept” (CD 1:13-20).

The Essenes retell the whole history of Israel in terms of this

cosmic war. Even in earliest times, they say, “the Prince of Light

raised up Moses” (CD 5:18), but the Evil One, here called Beliar,

aroused opposition to Moses among his own people. Ever since

then, and especially now, Beliar has set traps in which he intends

to “catch Israel,” for God himself has “unleashed Beliar against

Israel” (CD 4:13). Now the “sons of light” eagerly await the day

of judgment, when they expect God will come with all the

armies of heaven to annihilate the corrupt majority' along with

Israel's foreign enemies.

Had Satan not already existed in Jewish tradition, the Essenes

would have invented him. In the
Book of the Watchers
fallen

angels incite the activities of those who violate God’s covenant,

but the Essenes go much further and place at the center of their

religious understanding the cosmic war between God and his

allies, both angelic and human, against Satan, or Beliar, along

with his demonic and human allies. The Essenes place

themselves at the very center of this battle between heaven and

hell. While they detest Israel’s traditional enemies, whom they

call the
kittim
(probably a coded epithet for the Romans),35 they

struggle far more bitterly against their fellow Israelites, who

belong to the “congregation of Beliar.” David Sperling, scholar of

the ancient Near East, suggests that substitution of Beliar for

earlier Belial may be a pun on beli ‘or, “without light.”36 They

invoke Satan—or Beliar—to characterize the irreconcilable oppo-

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 59

sition between themselves and the “sons of darkness” in the war

taking place simultaneously in heaven and on earth. They expect

that soon God will come in power, with his holy angels, and

finally overthrow the forces of evil and inaugurate the Kingdom

of God.

The Essenes agree with
Jubilees
that being Jewish is no longer

enough to ensure God’s blessing. But they are much more

radical: the sins of the people have virtually canceled God’s

covenant with Abraham, on which Israel’s election depends.

Now, they insist, whoever wants to belong to the true Israel

must join in a new covenant—the covenant of their own

congregation.37 Whoever applies to enter the desert community

must first confess himself guilty of sin—guilty, apparently, of

participating in Israel’s collective apostasy against God. Then the

candidate begins several years of probation, during which he

turns over his property to the community leaders and swears to

practice sexual abstinence, along with ritual purity in everything

he eats, drinks, utters, or touches. During the probationary

period he must not touch the pots, plates, or utensils in which

the members prepare the community's food. Swearing can earn

him instant expulsion, and so can complaining against the

group's leaders; spitting or talking out of turn incurs strict

penalties.

A candidate who finally does gain admission is required, at his

initiation ritual, to join together with the whole community to

bless all who belong to the new covenant and ritually curse all

who are not initiates, who belong to the “men of Beliar.” The

leaders now reveal to the initiate the secrets of angelology, and

according to Josephus, he must solemnly swear to “keep secret

the names of the angels” (
War
2.8). Through practices of purity,

prayer, and worship, the initiate strives to unite himself with the

company of the angels. As the historian Carol Newsome has

shown, Essene community worship—like the Christian liturgy

to this day—reaches its climax as the community on earth joins

with angels in singing the hymn of praise that the angels sing in

heaven (“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts; heaven and earth

are filled with thy glory”).38 Sacred Essene texts like the
Scroll of

the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darknes
s reveal

60 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

secrets of angelology, which the sectarians regarded as valuable

and necessary information, for recognizing and understanding

the interrelationship of supernatural forces, both good and evil,

is essential for their sense of their own identity—and the way

they identify others.39

The Essenes, then, offer the closest parallel to Mark’s account

of Jesus’ followers, as they invoke images of cosmic war to divide

the universe at large—and the Jewish community in particular—

between God’s people and Satan’s. Yet the two movements differ

significantly, especially in relation to outsiders. The Essene

covenant, as we have seen, was extremely exclusive, restricted

not only to Jews, who must be freeborn and male, but to those

devout few who willingly joined the “new covenant.” Although

Mark and Matthew saw the beginning of Jesus’ movement

primarily within the context of the Jewish community, its future

would increasingly involve the Gentile world outside.

Nonetheless, the Essenes, though rigorously exclusive, were

led by their objections to the assimilationist tendencies of their

fellow Jews to move, paradoxically, in the universalist direction

indicated by the
Book of the Watchers
and
Jubilees.
(The Essenes

treasured both of these writings in their monastic library;

Jubilees
, wrote an anonymous Essene, is a book that reveals

divine secrets “to which Israel has turned a blind eye” [CD

16.2].) The Essenes outdid their predecessors in setting ethnic

identity aside, not as wrong, but as inadequate, and emphasized

moral over ethnic identification. When they depict the struggle

of the Prince of Light against the Prince of Darkness, they do not

identify the Prince of Light with the archangel Michael, the

angelic patron of Israel.40 Instead, they envision the Prince of

Light as a universal energy contending against an opposing

cosmic force, the Prince of Darkness. For the Essenes these two

energies represent not only their own conflicts with their

opponents but a conflict within every person, within the human

heart itself:

The spirits of truth and falsehood struggle within the human

heart. . . . According to his share in truth and right, thus a man

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN / 61

hates lies; and according to his share in the lot of deceit, thus

he hates truth (1 QS 4:12-14).

The Essenes, of course, took their own identification with

Israel for granted. Since they required every initiate to their

covenant to be Jewish, male, and freeborn, “every person” meant

in practice only Jews who met these qualifications. But certain

followers of Jesus, especially after 100 C.E., having met with

disappointing responses to their message within the Jewish

communities, would draw upon such universalist themes as they

moved to open their movement to Gentiles.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Jesus’ followers, according

to Mark, also invoke images of cosmic war to divide the universe

at large—and the Jewish community in particular—between

God’s people and Satan’s. Mark, like the Essenes, sees this

struggle essentially in terms of intra-Jewish conflict. So does the

follower of Jesus we call Matthew, who, as we shall see in the

next chapter, took up and revised Mark's gospel some ten to

twenty years later. Taking Mark’s basic framework, Matthew

embellished it and in effect updated it, placing the story of Jesus

in a context more relevant to the Jewish world of Matthew’s own

time, Palestine c. 80-90 C.E. By the time Matthew was writing,

Jesus’ followers were a marginal group opposed by the ruling

party of Pharisees, which had gained ascendancy in Jerusalem in

the decades following the Roman war. In the central part of

Matthew’s version of the gospel, the “intimate enemies” had

become primarily Pharisees.

About the same time, another follower of Jesus, whom

tradition calls Luke, also took up Mark’s account and extended it

to fit his own perspective—apparently that of a Gentile convert.

Yet Luke, as fervently as any Essene, depicts his own sect as

representing Israel at its best; according to Luke, as we shall see,

Jesus’ followers are virtually the only true Israelites left.

Near the end of the century, c. 90-100 C.E., the writer called

John offers a bold interpretation of these events. Many scholars

agree that the gospel of John presents the viewpoint of a

radically sectarian group alienated from the Jewish

community

62 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

because they have been turned out of their home synagogues for

claiming that Jesus is the Messiah. Like the Essenes, John speaks

eloquently of the love among those who belong to God (John

10:14); and yet John’s fierce polemic against those he sometimes

calls simply “the Jews” at times matches in bitterness that of the

Essenes.

Let us investigate, then, how each of these New Testament

gospel writers reshaped Mark’s message as the Christian

movement changed throughout the first century.