Satan
Satan West AsiaBelief in malevolent beings which haunt the air and the secret places of the earth stemmed from early man's instinctive fear of the unknown, the strange and frightening. In West Asia this common superstition expressed itself potently in a variety of ways: the Egyptians struggled against Am-mut, the ‘eater of the dead’, and the serpent Apophis daily threatened the sun god Re; the Babylonians attributed sickness and misfortune to demonic attack, while at night men were endangered by Lilitu, a beautiful, winged succubus; the Hebrews had to cope with a host of fallen angels under the crafty leadership of Satan and Beelzebub; the Arabs fought off the assaults of countless djinn, ‘hidden ones’, inhabitants of the world before man; the Persians, the hardest pressed of all peoples, faced in the dreadful creations of Ahriman nothing less than absolute evil. It was the impact of Persian dualism on the Hebrews, after the Babylonian Exile,...
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