this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
1396 points (98.7% liked)
Memes
44124 readers
1978 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I love how early in the bible, Satan's role is actually to be the contrarian to God's designs. Doesn't actually commit any evil unless given permission by God to do so. Is kinda treated like one of the angels rather than the fallen one.
In the original Hebrew, Satan as he appears in Job is "the Accuser", and fills the role of a prosecutor. He isn't "the Devil", as he is generally thought of in Western culture today.
In Hinduism Yama is the God of death and a punisher. The lord of hell who punishes sinners.
Yeah and Christians always put him and Hades in the evil corner when they're writing stories based on myths. Even Anubis gets the villain treatment by people who really can't be trusted with other cultural mythos.
It really makes me wonder if the Germanic/Norse Hel was actually villainous, given how spotty our actual knowledge of their myth cycle was. It's certainly a convenient name for her to have, but it's also more than possible "Hell" came before "Hel" entirely organically instead of being evidence of Christian revisionism.
Yama is the god of justice, who also collects the dead. He is only a 'punisher' in the sense that he is a judge. He is usually shown as being happy to cancel or reduce punishments if the dead person can give some legal justification for their actions.
If you have read Discworld, Death is very similar to Yama, (except that Death leaves the judgement to the dead person).
Eh, it's all reused pagan deities anyway.
That's like, post-Justinian Christianity, Book of Job predates Christianity entirely
It's reused pagan deities through the whole history of abrahamism.
At some point the abrahamic god is a pagan deity
Exactly.
No I mean you're drawing a distinction between "pagan deities" and the Abrahamic God as if there is any difference, as if "pagan" beliefs were somehow more original or pure
I mean, paganism is a christian concept.
Is Satan even in the Bible, I know they took like 5 different entities and made it into 1 guy over the years, but if I remember right the whole story of his rebellion and fall is not even in the Bible, it's just fanfic.
It's all confusing cause it's derived from Judaism which originally had many gods, with Yahweh being Dionysus essentially
Yahweh is not Dionysus. No clue how you thought of that.
There's not multiple devil characters so much as there is one character that changes over time as people's beliefs evolved.
Satan as portrayed in the Tanakh/OT is basically the prosecutor of Yahweh's court, as explained by other dudes here. By the time the NT was written, Zoroastrian influence resulted in him becoming an independent and malicious figure.
The Book of Revelationns is the youngest canonical book in the Bible. By the time it was written, stuff like the War in Heaven started being believed, and Satan really took on the role as the prince of evil.
Identification with the snake of Eden didn't begin until much later.
Pre Yahweh centric Judaism was part of a greater whole in which Yahweh was the god of vineyards and merriment
Sorry bro, but you're straight up wrong. https://books.google.com/books?id=8LtGDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA37
They also both seem to have appeared somewhere around 1300 BC (according to when Wikipedia says the first known signs of their worship are from). As such one could not derive from the other.
No, YHWH goes back to El (probably). Or at least partially. There's multiple inflluences for the more central characters
I remember somewhere on Wiki about a deity sitting with his wife on a mountaintop providing water to the area, long before the local people split into israeli and others. Someone knows where?