For most people raised in the United States, the story of the Devil is learned from a very young age. Even children raised in secular households learn about him through fairy tales or due to friends whose family happen to be Christian (Geggel, 2016). The story is almost always the same: The Devil tempted Eve in the garden of Eden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The Devil then went on to torment Job, and later to tempt Jesus during his time in the desert. The Devil is the one who tempts people to do evil and stray from good. But what if people knew that the Devil as he’s known today not only didn’t exist in the Bible, but comes from the 14th century (Kohler, 1923, p. 139)? What if people knew that all the references to the Devil (or Satan) in the Bible weren’t originally referencing a specific being, but were later changed or shoehorned to fit through reinterpretation and transliteration?
The Devil is supposedly referenced many times throughout the Bible, yet it is only within the New Testament that one reads of a specific being who later becomes Satan or the Devil. The ancient Hebrews had no concept of the Devil or of Satan in their mythologies or in their scripture (Rudwin, 1931, p. 1, 17) meaning that the Old Testament examples of the Devil only exist due to people going back and changing text or stating that a portion of the text refers to the Devil and not whoever it originally…
