Questions for Zack

[shunyadragon]

Who said otherwise?

Many traditional theists.

Not to be rude, but no asked you.

Unless this is in some way a closed thread, your response is rude.

[ZackMartin]

What's your doubt based on exactly? I may be mistaken, but its not till we get to the intertestamental period that we see Satan taking on the characteristics of a leader of demons (1 Enoch for example), correct?

In Job, "Satan" is a heavenly prosecutor. It's not clear if he is a soltiary figure, or just one random "satan" out of very many, or some kind of Prosecutor-in-Chief. Nothing in the text excludes the final interpretation, in which we see the groundwork for later ideas.

If you believe in spirits - and belief in evil spirits is common to very many cultures - it is not a great leap to imagine these spirits as forming some kind of hierarchy, with a human leader, just as humans even today naturally form hierarchies, with Generals or Presidents or Prime Ministers or Kings or CEOs at the top. So is it unlikely that Jews in the biblical period believed in a "chief of the evil spirits"? Or a "chief of the heavenly prosecutors"? Even in the absence of specific textual evidence - and the textual evidence we do have is certainly not incompatible with the notion - it does not seem in any way implausible that the Jews of the biblical period had such a belief, even if it was not a focus of the biblical text.