Regular Episode
#073 – SPEAK OF THE DEVIL
The episode opens with a dramatic reading — performed by Brian Thompson and Carrie Poppy — of an excerpt from Jennifer Senior‘s 2013 New York Magazine interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in which Scalia matter-of-factly asserts that the devil is a real person who has gotten wilier over the centuries — his modern strategy being to convince people he doesn’t exist.
📖 Ha-Satan: God’s Original Enforcer
Price explains that in the oldest strata of the Hebrew Bible, “Satan” (ha-Satan) is not a proper name at all but a title — “the adversary” or “the accuser” — and the character who holds it is firmly on God’s payroll. He is one of the sons of God whose specific job is to patrol the earth rooting out hypocrites and frauds, essentially a divine prosecutor or intelligence officer. The Book of Job is the clearest example: Satan essentially dares God to let him test Job’s loyalty, and God agrees. In 2 Chronicles, Satan tempts David into taking a census — not as an act of rebellion but as a quality-control test on God’s behalf. In Zechariah, he challenges the fitness of a candidate for high priest. In every canonical Old Testament appearance, Price notes, he is zealous for God’s reputation, not opposed to it.
🏛️ The Zoroastrian Connection
The transformation of Satan into a genuine cosmic enemy of God, Price argues, owes a great deal to the Babylonian exile. When the Persian Empire absorbed Babylon, Jewish priests came into extended contact with Zoroastrianism and its dualistic cosmology: the good god Ahura Mazda locked in eternal struggle with the evil Ahriman (Angra Mainyu). Jewish thinkers — newly committed to strict monotheism but wrestling with the problem of evil — couldn’t adopt a second god outright, so they recast the adversary as a fallen angel who had become God’s enemy. This reimagined Satan appears in intertestamental texts like the Book of Jubilees and 1 Enoch — works that didn’t make the canonical cut but were widely read and deeply influential.
The Quran adds a motive largely absent from standard Christian tellings: when God commanded the angels to bow before the newly created Adam, Iblis (Satan) refused out of contempt for this flesh-and-blood creature — and his campaign against humanity ever since has been an attempt to prove God wrong about the species.
🔀 A Cast of Thousands (Merged Into One)
Price walks through the several originally distinct figures who got folded into the composite Satan familiar today:
– Lucifer / “Helel, son of the dawn” from Isaiah 14 — originally a taunt against the king of Babylon, not a description of a fallen angel.
– The fallen king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 — again, a human political figure in context.
– Beelzebul (Beelzebub) — originally a Phoenician deity, later dubbed “prince of demons” in Mark 3, distinct from the biblical Satan.
– Leviathan, the seven-headed chaos dragon of ancient Near Eastern creation myth, who gets explicitly fused with Satan in the Book of Revelation.
– The Nephilim tradition from Genesis 6 — the sons of God who mated with mortal women — originally a story explaining the tall Canaanite clans (the Rephaim/Anakim), later reframed as a demonic fall when strict monotheism made divine-human interbreeding theologically embarrassing.
Even in the New Testament, Price points out, Satan most often functions as a tester rather than a pure villain: he takes Jesus into the desert to probe whether the Son of God will buckle; at the Last Supper he “demands his right” to sift the disciples like wheat from chaff. It is only when merged with Beelzebul or Leviathan that he reads as unambiguously evil.
🔥 Hell: A Brief Geological Survey
The duo spend time untangling the Bible’s several incompatible understandings of the afterlife. Price notes that the fiery torment most people picture owes more to later synthesis than to any single biblical source:
– Sheol — the Hebrew netherworld, a grey, shadowy place of the dead, with no particular punishment attached.
– Hades — the Greek equivalent used in the Gospels, also often meaning simply “the place of the dead.”
– Gehenna — the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, associated with the fires of Molech and infant sacrifice, and the primary source of “fiery hell” imagery in the New Testament.
– Tartarus — the Greek abyss where monstrous titans were imprisoned, which surfaces in 1–2 Peter as the place where fallen angels are chained.
Paul’s letters, Price observes, say essentially nothing about the wicked going to hell — the unrighteous simply don’t rise. The parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke is one of the few places that actually depicts someone consciously suffering in a post-mortem pit of torment, and even there it doesn’t straightforwardly address the final fate of all sinners. Blake notes that our popular image of Satan’s domain — the pitchfork, the frozen lake, the circles of the damned — owes far more to Dante and Milton than to anything in the biblical text.
😈 Satanic Panic and the Principalities of Power
The conversation turns to the real-world consequences of literal devil-belief. Blake recalls growing up in a fundamentalist environment saturated with apocalyptic literature, satanic conspiracy theories, and the aftermath of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Price names Mike Warnke — who claimed to be a former satanic high priest and was later exposed as a fraud — as a representative figure of that era, alongside the damage done by recovered-memory therapy, which Price likens to a modern replay of the Salem witch trials.
Price offers a more sympathetic reading of the mythological infrastructure: the New Testament concept of “principalities and powers” — demonic forces behind the thrones of nations — is, he suggests, a prescient pre-sociological description of what the 20th century came to call supra-individual institutional forces: governments, corporations, religions, bureaucracies that outlive and outrun any individual human conscience. The myth loses its power, he argues, the moment you literalize it into a search for a specific Antichrist figure.
🤔 Does the Devil Let Us Off the Hook?
Blake raises the question of moral responsibility: does blaming a supernatural adversary for the world’s evil give people an excuse to abdicate their own accountability? Price is more generous to ordinary believers than the premise might suggest. In his experience, serious fundamentalists take human frailty extremely seriously — the devil functions almost as a fifth wheel in their moral calculus, since they’re already quite aware of their own capacity for sin. He invokes the Epistle of James, which pointedly refuses to blame Satan for human strife, attributing it instead to “your own desires.” Price’s more pointed concern is the opposite problem: a literal external Satan distracts from the genuinely human sources of evil. He recounts telling a seminary professor, after Jonestown, that he almost wished there were a single supernatural terrorist responsible — because then we might have a chance of dealing with it. The real horror, he argues, is that no fallen angel is required.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 The Reason Driven Life 💵 by Robert M. Price
– 📚 The Case Against The Case For Christ 💵 by Robert M. Price
– 📚 Deconstructing Jesus 💵 by Robert M. Price
– 📖 Paradise Lost by John Milton
– 🎬 Young Frankenstein 💵 (Mel Brooks, 1974) — discussed as an extended riff on Son of Frankenstein
🔗 Related Links
– Satan in Christianity (Wikipedia)
– Satan in Islam / Iblis (Wikipedia)
– Zoroastrianism (Wikipedia)
– Satanic Panic (Wikipedia)
– Recovered-Memory Therapy (Wikipedia)
– Book of Jubilees (Wikipedia)
– Book of Enoch (Wikipedia)
– Gehenna (Wikipedia)
– Mike Warnke and the Satanic Panic — Skeptical Inquirer
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
MonsterTalk welcomes back Bible scholar Robert M. Price to discuss the biggest and most well known villain in Western culture: Satan. Who is this character and how has he changed over the history of Judeo/Christian religions? From servant of God to dark villain, we track the evolution of the Devil.
This episode contains a dramatic reading of an excerpt from this interview with Antonin Scalia in New York Magazine.
Books
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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