A Brief History of Satan and Demons

Could it be... Satan? A look at how we got from a talking snake to God’s arch-nemesis—and from zero demons to a world crawling with them.

Could it be…Satan?

If you grew up evangelical, you probably pictured Satan and his demons as fully-formed characters from page one of human thought. Like they were lurking in the Garden of Eden, tempting Adam and Eve with red eyes and a master plan.

But that version of the story didn’t really exist until centuries later.

As with many things in the Bible, the Satan we think we know didn’t show up all at once. And the demons? They came way later.

This is the story of how they evolved—slowly, strangely, and over time.

South Park Satan is the best Satan.

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In the Beginning: Ancient Hebrew Thought

Early Hebrew scriptures have almost no developed concept of Satan, and definitely no organized demon army.

The Hebrew Bible emphasizes God as sovereign over everything—the good and the bad.

“I form light and create darkness,
I make peace and create calamity;
I, the LORD, do all these things.”
—Isaiah 45:7

In that worldview, if something went wrong—plague, drought, mental illness—it wasn’t blamed on demons. It was either God, or a mystery.

There were no cosmic villains yet.
No red guy with horns.
No hell.

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The Serpent Was Just a Snake (Seriously)

Let’s start with one of the biggest assumptions we inherited:

The idea that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was Satan.

It wasn’t.

The Hebrew word in Genesis 3 is nachash—which simply means “serpent” or “snake.”
There’s no mention of Satan. No fall from heaven. No demon army. No horns or pitchforks.

(Actually, try this. Let that belief go and reread the story in Genesis. The snake actually comes off a little more grounded than God in some ways. God gets mad at him. But I think he’s just a friendly four-legged talking snake trying to make sense of the world. )

He is just a clever, talking animal in a creation myth. A symbol of chaos, maybe. But that’s it.

So why do so many people assume it’s Satan?

Because of one verse—Revelation 12:9, which refers to:

“that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.”

But Revelation was written at least 600 years later. It’s apocalyptic poetry, full of symbolism and mash-ups.

What the author of Revelation is doing here is retroactively connecting dots. It’s a theological interpretation—not a historical statement about Genesis.

At the time Genesis was written, no reader would have understood the serpent as Satan. That connection only came much later—when Jewish and Christian writers began reimagining old stories through the lens of cosmic good vs. evil.

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The Divine Council

Here’s something most modern readers never get told:

The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) assume the existence of other supernatural beings.

Not just angels. Not demons. Something more complex.

After Adam and Eve eat from the tree, God says:

“Behold, the man has become like one of us…” (Genesis 3:22)

One of us?

That “us” isn’t the Trinity. That concept doesn’t exist yet.
It likely refers to what scholars call the divine council—a heavenly assembly of spiritual beings that shows up throughout the Hebrew Bible.

• Psalm 82 describes God standing in the midst of the divine assembly, judging among the “gods.”

• Job 1 describes “the sons of God” presenting themselves before YHWH.

• 1 Kings 22 shows God consulting with spirits about how to influence events on earth.

These beings aren’t demons.
They aren’t evil.
They’re part of the spiritual order—loyal or neutral divine entities with various roles.

It wouldn’t be totally unfair to call them lesser gods.

This worldview is also at the heart of the Tower of Babel story.

When humans build a tower to reach the heavens, God says:

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language…” (Genesis 11:7)

Again—us.
Same divine council language.

Then in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (in the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls), we read:

“When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
when he divided all mankind,
he set up boundaries for the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.”

In other words, after Babel, God divides the nations and assigns other divine beings to govern them.
Israel remains YHWH’s portion.
But the rest of the world is handed off to other spiritual authorities.

They’re not framed as evil. Just… other.

Over time, that changes. But in early Hebrew thought, the spiritual world was populated and political—not black and white. (And yes…mythic AF.)

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Monotheism Evolves, Too

The Bible doesn’t start out with modern monotheism.

Early on, Israel’s scriptures don’t claim no other gods exist—they claim YHWH is the one worth worshiping.

It’s not “there is only one God.”
It’s “our God is the highest, the strongest, the one who rescued us.”

That’s why you constantly see phrases like:

• “Who is like you among the gods, O LORD?” (Exodus 15:11)

• “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” (Psalm 95:3)

Other gods aren’t denied.
They’re acknowledged—and ranked lower.

This is often called monolatry—the worship of one god without denying the existence of others. And it’s all over the Hebrew Bible.

Even the most famous loyalty statement in Israel’s scriptures reflects this mindset.
Deuteronomy 6:4—known as the Shema—says:

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

It sounds like a statement of pure monotheism. But in Hebrew, the word translated as “one” (echad) can also mean alone, unique, or unified.

It’s perhaps better understood as:

“YHWH is our God—YHWH alone.”

It’s not a philosophical denial of other gods.
It’s a declaration of allegiance.

You don’t get something closer to modern monotheism until much later—especially after the Babylonian exile, when Israel starts clinging tightly to its identity and redefining its theology.

But even then? It’s still a slow shift.

So—were there other gods, spiritual beings, and divine council members in the biblical imagination? Yes.

An evil devil waging war against God from the beginning? Not so much. Not yet.

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Satan Before He Was Satan

So if there’s no devil in Genesis…
Where does Satan first show up?

Answer: in the book of Job.
And he’s not who you think.

In Job 1, we meet “the satan”—but in Hebrew, it's not a name. It’s a title.
Ha-satan means “the accuser” or “the adversary.”

He’s part of the divine council.
He walks into the heavenly court, reports to God, and plays the role of prosecuting attorney—testing human righteousness on God's behalf.

He doesn’t oppose God.
He works for God.

Same goes for Zechariah 3, where “the satan” shows up again—this time accusing the high priest. Once again, it’s not a fallen angel or a cosmic villain.
It’s an official role in the spiritual bureaucracy.

There’s no fiery pit.
No war in heaven.
No backstory of rebellion.

Satan starts out as God’s nameless employee.

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The Exile Changes Everything

So when does Satan start becoming something more sinister?

Short answer: after the exile.

When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE and took many Israelites into captivity, everything changed—religiously, politically, and theologically.

During and after the exile, Jewish thought came into contact with Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion of the Persian Empire.

Zoroastrianism introduced something radically different: cosmic dualism.
A battle between a good god (Ahura Mazda) and an evil god (Angra Mainyu), locked in eternal conflict.

That worldview deeply influenced post-exilic Jewish imagination.

• God vs. Satan

• Light vs. Darkness

• Heaven vs. Hell

• Angels vs. Demons

It wasn’t an instant shift—but you start to see Satan evolve from divine accuser to cosmic opponent. Not just a prosecutor anymore. Now a rebel. A deceiver. A corrupting force.

And once the idea of spiritual evil takes on a life of its own, demonology begins to develop, too.

The ancient world was trying to make sense of suffering, injustice, and evil—and now, for the first time, there’s someone other than God to blame.

And if you're wondering, “But what about Satan’s fall? The war in heaven? All that dramatic stuff?”
Hang tight—we’re getting there.

The Satan story most people know today?
It comes long after most of the Hebrew scriptures were written.

But first—we need to talk about demons.

Enter Second Temple Demonology

By the time we reach the Second Temple period (roughly 500 BCE to 70 CE), something big has shifted:

Demons are everywhere.

Not just in fringe beliefs or oral folklore—but in mainstream religious imagination.

This is the era when books like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and Tobit (popular among many Jews at the time, though not included in later Protestant Bibles) start painting a detailed picture of spiritual evil.

One of the most influential ideas?
That the strange story in Genesis 6—where “the sons of God” sleep with human women—was actually the origin of demons.

In these texts:

• Those “sons of God” are reinterpreted as fallen angels.

• Their children—the Nephilim—are destroyed in the flood.

• But their disembodied spirits become roaming demons, corrupting and tormenting humans ever since.

Books like 1 Enoch even name specific fallen angels (like Azazel and Shemihaza) and describe their punishment.

Suddenly, the world is teeming with unclean spirits:

• Causing disease

• Inciting sin

• Possessing bodies

• Tormenting the faithful

So if you’ve ever read the Bible and wondered,
“Why are there basically no demons in the Old Testament—but they’re everywhere when Jesus shows up?”
This is why.

It’s not because demons suddenly decided to get active.
It’s because the culture created them—in the centuries between the testaments.

Jesus entered a world full of demons.
Not because they had always been there.
But because by his time, everyone believed they were.

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Jesus and the World Full of Demons

By the time Jesus begins his ministry, demon possession is everywhere—in the stories, in the expectations, and in the cultural imagination.

People believed that unclean spirits were the cause of:

• Disease

• Mental illness

• Epilepsy

• Sudden fits of violence or isolation

• Even storms and natural disasters

And Jesus meets them in that world.

He doesn’t dismiss their beliefs or try to rewire their cosmology.
He doesn’t explain demonology.
He casts them out.

Story after story, Jesus liberates people from what’s tormenting them.
He names it. Speaks to it. Rebukes it.

Sometimes the language is symbolic.
Sometimes it’s interpersonal.
Sometimes it’s clearly framed as literal demonic possession.

But in every case, the point isn’t to create a theology of demons.
It’s to restore the person standing in front of him.

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So What’s Really Going On?

That’s the question, right?

Were these real demons?
Was this just the language people used for things they didn’t understand?

Here are a few ways to think about it:

• These stories could be folklore—fantastical accounts remembered and retold a generation later, shaped by the cultural imagination of the time.

• Or maybe they’re more historically grounded—not because demons are real, but because we know people’s beliefs can manifest physically. When a culture expects possession, people can actually display the symptoms.

• Or... I suppose there could really have been actual demons—real spiritual beings—that just hadn’t shown up much until right before Jesus.

That last one is where my skepticism kicks in.

But still.
I leave room for mystery.
Because whatever was happening—people were suffering.

And Jesus—whatever else you believe about him—met people in that suffering.
He didn’t ignore it.
He didn’t shame them.
He did something.

And it appears likely the historical Jesus believed in literal demons. It would’ve been hard for anyone in his time not to.

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Paul and the Powers

Paul doesn’t spend much time talking about demons.
At least, not in the way the Gospels do.

You won’t find many stories of exorcism or language about possession in his letters.

Instead, Paul talks about something broader—something heavier.

He uses phrases like:

• “principalities and powers”

• “rulers of this dark world”

• “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12)

For Paul, the real enemy isn’t a red figure with horns.
It’s systems.
It’s structures.
It’s forces of oppression, deception, and death—both spiritual and political.

It’s not always clear if Paul meant literal beings or metaphorical ones.
But what is clear: he believed the world was caught in something bigger than any one person.

A kind of invisible gravity—pulling humanity away from truth, freedom, and love.

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The Patchwork Satan: How the Devil We Know Got Made

By now you might be wondering:

“Okay—but where’s the part about Satan falling from heaven? The dragon. The war. The whole cosmic rebellion thing?”

Here’s the thing:

That story doesn’t exist. At least not in one place.

It’s a patchwork—stitched together from a handful of verses, written centuries apart, none of which originally referred to Satan:

• Isaiah 14 talks about the fall of “Lucifer,” but it’s actually referring to the king of Babylon—a human ruler whose arrogance leads to his downfall. “Lucifer” is just the Latin translation of helel ben shachar (morning star, son of dawn), a poetic insult.

• Ezekiel 28 describes the king of Tyre as a being in Eden, adorned like a god, who is cast down in disgrace. Again—a human king, not a fallen angel.

• Revelation 12, written in the late 1st century CE, finally gives us the dramatic war-in-heaven imagery. A dragon. Angels. A cosmic battle. And yes—now the dragon is called “that ancient serpent, the devil, or Satan.”

By that point, all the ingredients had already been gathered—from apocalyptic books like 1 Enoch, which expanded the fallen-angel storyline, to prophetic texts about arrogant kings, to poetic courtroom dramas like Job.

What Revelation does is stitch the mythology together into one sweeping narrative.

And that’s the version many of us were raised with:

• The serpent in Eden? Satan.

• The accuser in Job? Also Satan.

• The fallen kings in Isaiah and Ezekiel? Secretly Satan.

• The dragon in Revelation? Definitely Satan.

It’s a compelling story.
But it didn’t start that way.

It evolved.

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The Last 2,000 Years

Once Satan became a fully-formed character in early Christian thought, the mythology didn’t stop evolving—it accelerated.

The early church accepted Satan as a real being.
By the second and third centuries, writers like Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian were linking him to the serpent, to the fallen angels, and to basically any opposition to the gospel.

Then came Augustine, who helped cement the idea of original sin—which only gave Satan more power in the theological imagination.

But it was during the Middle Ages that the devil got his visual brand.

• The red skin

• The horns

• The cloven hooves

• The pitchfork

• The goat legs

• The smirk

That imagery didn’t come from the Bible—it came from medieval art, pagan deities like Pan, and eventually Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which fully dramatized Satan as a tragic antihero, a rebel, a monstrous king of hell.

By the time the printing press was rolling, the devil wasn’t just a mythic creature—he was real entertainment. And a hell of a motivator to go to church and tithe.

And by the time most of us were born?

He was basically God’s evil twin.

All-powerful.
Everywhere at once.
Running around whispering lies, tempting teenagers to have sex, smoke weed, listen to Marilyn Manson, and think for themselves.

In many evangelical traditions, Satan became almost a second god—not equal in goodness, but equal in power, always one step behind you, trying to ruin your life.

And when that’s the story you grow up with, it’s no wonder so many of us were scared to death of him... and sometimes still are.

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Final Thought

If you believe in Satan and demons, I understand.
But I also don’t think you have to believe it to take evil seriously.

But here’s what’s clear:

The Satan story evolved.
It wasn’t there in Genesis.
It wasn’t fixed in Job.
It wasn’t clarified by Paul.
And it wasn’t fully formed until centuries after most of the Hebrew scriptures were written.

That doesn’t make it meaningless.
It just makes it human.

People were trying to make sense of evil, injustice, trauma, and suffering—just like we are now. And over time, that search for meaning took the shape of a story. A name. A character. A system.

Call it Satan. Call it the Devil.

Call it empire.

Call it fear, shame, or separation.

But don’t be afraid to question the mythology.

Sometimes naming your demons is the first step toward being free from them.

And yes—some of us have experienced things we can’t explain.

Moments that felt dark.
Spiritual energy that felt oppressive or terrifying.
We’ve seen things. Heard things. Felt something real.

I don’t dismiss that.
I just don’t pretend to know exactly what it was.

What I do know is that fear loves a name.

And over the centuries, we gave it one.