Old Square Toes: Sympathy for the Devil

It looks like studio executives at Fox have decided to give the devil his due, at least for one more year.

Now in its second season, the TV show “Lucifer” builds its premise around an idea originally presented in “The Sandman,” an award-winning comic book by Neil Gaiman. In the TV show, as in the comic, the devil has grown tired of overseeing the torments of the damned. He has abandoned the war with heaven, moved to California, and opened a nightclub. In order to hang a weekly series around this concept with Lucifer as the main character,  20th Century Fox made it a police show.

I first heard of the show mid-season last year, when I read that the American Family Association and its affiliated web site One Million Moms had objected. I object too, but not that the show has sown “spiritual confusion,” as the association claims. My concern is that the show has been squandering a great idea. I mean, a police procedural? Really?

In “The Sandman,” Lucifer marked his abdication by throwing the damned out of hell along with their tormentors. The next time we see him, he is lounging on a beach in Perth, Australia, admiring the sunset. Later, in the penultimate story arc to the comic, we find him running his nightclub and playing Cole Porter tunes on the piano.

Try and tell me that you don't find that idea at least a little amusing.

When we first read “Seasons of Mist,” my best friend and I spent days imagining other career paths the devil could have opted for. Plenty of possibilities suggested themselves. Studio engineer or record producer for a major record label. President of a fantasy roleplaying game company.

For a while we even pictured him as the managing editor of a local newspaper who would enjoy playing folk music on his acoustic guitar during open mike nights at the local coffee house. As a bonus, he would be oblivious to the bar fights that unfailingly would break out during his set.

It wouldn't matter whether he sang “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance,” or “Oh My Darling Clementine”; conflict was inevitable. The devil might be tired of running hell, but we were less optimistic than Gaiman about his ability to quit being who he is, no matter how hard he tried.

One thing we were sure of, though: Lucifer Morningstar would never seek political office. There are some depths even the devil won't sink to.

Amusing as all of this may be, and as fascinating a story as it can be in the hands of a talented writer, none of this exactly matches the traditional story of the devil as understood in popular culture. And that is without doubt the source of some of the opprobrium the American Family Association has directed at the show.

In traditional understanding, Lucifer was first in the order of creation. Of all beings, he was second only to God in power and majesty. He was captain of the other angels, the light-bearer and leader of worship in heaven. He was proud, and he was beautiful. There was none like him.

When Lucifer discovered that God intended to create humanity, and to elevate humans to a place of honor higher than the angels themselves, it was too much to take. He disagreed with God so sharply that he actually rebelled, intending to depose the Almighty and take the throne from him. Such was his beauty and magnificence that fully a third of the other angels joined him.

The rebellion went the only way it could. A match would have had greater success extinguishing a hurricane than Lucifer had against God. The angel was cast into hell, and all his followers fell with him.

Since then, Lucifer has been Satan, the Adversary. The very avatar of evil, he has continued to war with heaven, determined to mar Creation as thoroughly as possible. Christians see him as the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to disobedience in the Garden of Eden, and often perceive his hand in the slaughter of Hebrew infants in the time of Moses, and in the Massacre of the Innocents in the gospel of Matthew.

In the devil's war with heaven, earth is the battleground and the souls of mortals are the prize. Every soul that finds itself in hell is a victory in his campaign against God Almighty. But in the end, of course, the final victory goes to God, along with all the glory. The story ends in the book of Revelation when the devil is thrown into the lake of fire, and God makes his dwelling with humans, as he had planned all along.

As stories go, this is one of the best. Obvious themes include the majesty, sovereignty and glory of God; the dangers of arrogance and pride in one's position; and the folly of resisting God's purposes and will. By incarnating sin and evil in the person of the devil, the story presents us with a moral lesson about sin and rebellion so that his story serves as a warning to us.

Add a motivation – some people say Satan rebelled because he was jealous that God intended humanity to be higher than the angels, though I've also heard suggestions that he disagreed with God's notions of justice – and you have a character in an eternal drama who serves as a potential rebuke to our own sense of entitlement and moral absolutism.

The “Lucifer” writers have turned this into a weekly police procedural where the devil is a funny but likeable social misfit who, instead of marring Creation, helps the cops solve drive-by killings and kidnappings. Rather than opposing the will of the Almighty, his chief concern is that the officer he works with keeps rejecting his advances. It should surprise no one that a petition on the American Family Association web site to stop the show garnered a reported 134,331 signatures before the first season pilot even had aired.

There's just one problem with outrage over “Lucifer.” The story about Satan's rebellion and subsquent fall from heaven is found nowhere in Scripture. It's all told in a poem by John Milton called “Paradise Lost.”

Once we understand that, we stand to gain a lot more spiritual clarity than we ever would have lost from a simple TV show.



Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Blogging through the Bible: So what's up with that?

In the short time since I posted my most recent post, I've had one essential reaction: Who the heck cares?

My post says nothing original, offers no meaningful insights, and really doesn't reflect any great amount of reflection on my part. For the most part, it's stuff I've heard or said previously, repackaged. Like I said in the post, the creation passages in Genesis are among those passages that have been read, studied and talked about so many times, it's hard to find anything new to say.

But let me ask this about Genesis 1, since I've never heard a satisfactory explanation. Why does God refer to himself in the plural?

I know Christians see this as Trinitarian thinking, since a being who is at once three distinct people and yet cohesively one distinct being, could conceivably refer to himself in the plural. But that's a latecomer to the passage, applied hundreds of years after the text was written, and it's not something the rabbis ever entertained, and the Jewish people owned this story long before Jesus ever the focus of Augustine's meditations.

Elohim is a noun both singular and plural in Hebrew, and so elohim can be translated as Capital God, or as lowercase gods. Without knowing the Hebrew text at hand, it looks like the translators are trying to have it both ways, saying singular God when the text grammatically says plural gods. And as I understand, this story appears to have literary roots in Babylonian creation myths, where there were plenty of lowercase gods running around and helping to create the heavens and the earth.

So what's up with that?

Secondly, what's up with the snake in the garden, in Chapter 3? Yeah, I know that Christians traditionally believe that the snake is Satan, and we've developed a whole extrabiblical mythology found in the works of John Milton, about a war in heaven where Lucifer rebelled and became Satan, the Adversary, and in Genesis 3 is working to mar God's creation.

The difficulty is that the war in heaven and Satan's rebellion is just that, mythology found in the works of John Milton. It's not in Scripture, and if sola Scriptura is our standard, I want this passage to make sense on its own merits.

I'll accept that the world was marred by Adam's disobedience, given that we have the testimony of YHWH to that effect in the Genesis 3 poetry, about women suffering in childbirth and men now facing toil and drudgery instead of pleasure in their work, and about the two sexes fighting for dominion over one another, but what's up with the snake?

Clearly from this passage, Adam did not bring evil into the world, because the snake already was there and working to undermine Adam's obedience to the command he had been given about what fruit to eat, so where did the snake's evil come from? And if Adam had no evil within him, what caused his evil choice?

I read once that in the Hebrew scheme of things, choice never entered into the argument of why there is evil in the world and why we suffer. I think the story is suggesting that our capacity for evil is something innate to us, part of our very design, and not just something that happened. I'm curious to hear the thoughts of others who have given this thought beyond "Adam sinned and paradise was lost." What is the nature of evil in this story, and from whence does it come?

Facing temptation in the wilderness

To me the most interesting part of Matthew 3-4 isn't the story of Jesus' baptism. It's the temptation in the wilderness, when Satan appears to Jesus and challenges him to find out whether he's really the son of God.

Let's back the scene up a bit. Jesus goes down to the Jordan River to be baptized. That's not particularly surprising; everyone was being baptized. Dress an Essene up like Elijah, preaching repentance out in the wilderness like a crazed prophet – the first truly crazed prophet since Malachi and the others – and it's pretty reasonable for religious fervor to sweep the countryside.

People are hungry to know more of God, to hear about him, to fill the void in their lives. Jesus, who at the age of 12 had felt such a strong desire to connect with God that he actually ditched his parents and stayed at the Temple in Jerusalem to ask questions, is surely going to go down to be baptized as well.

Jesus probably didn't think of himself as the Son of God at this point. I think he saw himself as a person who believed strongly in God, perhaps even as someone with a unique understanding of God, but I don't think he had any notions of his own divinity at this point.

When he went to be baptized, I think he was trying to draw closer to God and to understand the Voice that he had heard calling him for years. And when he came out of the water and heard that selfsame Voice say "This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased," he got more confused than ever and went into the wilderness to sort it all out.

Matthew writes that Jesus was in the wilderness, fasting, for 40 days and 40 nights. The whole reason for this fast was for Jesus to set aside his earthly physical needs and understand the deep stirrings in his soul that had intensified since his baptism.

The longest I've ever gone without food was for six days; if Matthew is to be believed, Jesus did it for nearly six weeks. During that time he would have stopped having bowel movements, though for a while he would have felt the urge just from out of habit; he would have felt a little irritable from the lack of gustatory stimulation he was accustomed to; and he would have started getting weaker after the third week or so.

Matthew says that after 40 days, Jesus was hungry. A better word is "starving." When you've gone that long without food, your body has used up its stores of fat and even excess muscle. By this point, it's starting to digest itself.

And then, Matthew says, Satan appeared and tempted him.

I should state right here that I'm not wholly on board with the popular evangelical view of Satan  as the embodiment of evil. In the book of Job, we saw ha-Satan in an adversarial role, challenging God's position on Job's righteousness and leading to Job being sifted like wheat, so that Job and everyone else could see what he really was made of, and where his faith truly came from.

I see the same thing happening here. I imagine Jesus walking through a desert place, alone, hungry, hot and weary beyond belief, when he comes across an old man. The stranger is courteous to a fault, probably even giving Jesus a drink of water. If he makes Jesus think of anyone, it's not the mythic figure of Samael but of his own father or one of his father's old friends.

They fall to talking, and after discussion has gone this way and that, the old man cuts to the very heart of the struggle that has definied Jesus' every waking moment for the last six weeks.

"If you are the son of God," the friendly old man says, "turn these stones to bread." Find the answer to your question, and get something to eat. Resolve your hunger, both spiritually and physically. Don't put yourself through this any longer, you can settle the issue once and for all.

In "The Brothers Karamazov," the Russian author Fyodr Dostoevsky suggested the issue here was that by turning stones to bread, Jesus would offer the people physical proof and a physical reason to put their faith in him. "Believe in me," he would say, "and I'll fill your bellies!"

Proof means no doubt, and no doubt means no faith. If our eyes can see clearly, what need have we for faith, which hopes for things not seen?

Dostoevsky had the right idea, but he had the wrong audience in mind. Satan is asking Jesus to prove to no one but himself what he's been wondering at least since his baptism: Is he the Son of God? It seems preposterous; all Israel is the son of God. It's the pagans whose deities run around having children with mortal women, or the "sons of God" from the early chapters of Genesis who do this.

And yet the Voice at his baptism called him a son, and that corresponds with a yearning Jesus has felt his whole life. It would be so nice to have proof, one way or the other. If he is, then he has bread and can eat; if not, then he can laugh at the silliness of the whole affair, go home and get something to eat.

Jesus rejects the offer. He wants to know, but he wants to know God's way, and God works with faith, not evidence.

The second temptation is similar to the first: Throw yourself off the Temple, and let the angels save you. Again, it's proof positive, since Psalm 91 promises all sorts of rescue to the man who puts his faith in God.

And what's more, it broadens the scope. It's not just Jesus who would know, but the Sadducees who teach the people, and the people as well – everyone gathered near the Temple would see him start to plunge, and then witness him being caught by angels, and know him to be someone special. If the angels don't save him, then the nagging emptiness is gone, once and for all; but if they do save him, Jesus will have an instant audience for his message.

And that, I think, starts Jesus wondering: message? What message? Up to this point, perhaps, he's been preoccupied principally with questions about his own identity and his own relationship with the Almighty.

He's schooled in the teachings of Hillel, though, and he knows that no one exists as an island to himself. We are all one vast archipelago, connected by stretches of earth, rock, and sand that are only superficially obscured by the sea. When the tides pull back, we remember our interconnectedness once more.

If Jesus is the Son of God, then surely he has a message to share with the people, a message that comes straight from the heart of God, a message that will transform not only people but their society as a whole. Perhaps he imagines that message as a mighty wave itself, rising over the islands, drawing the water down to reveal the vast and unseen mass of land that joins all lands together, revealing the connections that we have willed or allowed ourselves to forget so that we can view one another with hostility. Not only Judea, but all the world could be swept up in this new understanding.

And then, from atop a high mountain, Jesus sees all the kingdoms of the world, stretched out in all their glory and finery. He is in the position of Caesar himself, able to bring calamity or peace to the Celts in Britain, to the Gauls in France, to the desert-dwellers in Assyria, and to those who live along the Nile.

All he would have to do is make his voice a trumpet, and the entire world will hear his message, from Spain to India. He's not even asked to prove whether he is the Son of God; it's assumed as a given. Instead, the temptation comes as an offer: "Worship me, and all this will be yours."

This one's a no-brainer, really, but it also sets the tone for the ministry Jesus will work at for the rest of his life. When he performs miracles, they are never self-serving like the miracle of bread would have been; and invariably he will tell people to keep quiet about them, lest the crowds come to him for the wrong reasons.

He teaches people where they are, even in crowded cities or temple courts, but often he withdraws to lonely places in an attempt to escape the crowds. And Jesus never, never seeks political power.

When Peter, thinking of the conquering Messiah, rebukes Jesus for prophesying his death, Jesus returns with a withering "Get thee behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but rather the things of men."

Jesus' entire life from this point is a repudiation of the third temptation. In rejecting earthly power, although he probably didn't realize it until late in his ministry, Jesus accepted a lonely end on a cross, tortured to death by the very political power he had spurned.

This is all well and good, but it ultimately means nothing if it doesn't speak a truth into our lives. The best applications come when we find something within each character to identify with, both the noble and the ignoble.

It's safe to look at Jesus and see how he resisted the temptations when they came his way – far too many people point out that he relies on Scripture, as though this were a new insight – but there's no real application there, nothing that speaks to me as a person who struggles with sin, no insight into what snares may lay me low -- and no warning of the danger I may pose to someone else when I point them to a road other than God's.

First, I suppose, is the value of uncertainty. His response to the temptations reveal that Jesus consistently rejected things that would prove his divinity, either to himself or to other people, and he also rejected the position where he could enforce his will upon the people will they or no, even when it was for their own good.

For my part, I'm also content not to argue over or to seek proof for areas of faith, not even to hold God to the test. I reached the point some years ago where I could join Puddleglum in saying that I would be on Aslan's side, even if there was no Aslan to be on the side of, even acknowledging that there may very well be no Aslan at all, beyond our own imagining.

And in that vein, I don't feel very tempted to power, not often at any rate. I get disturbed regularly by the push and pull of Christians who have whored the church to one political party or another, and who think that we can make the world a more righteous, more godly place if only we can pass the right laws and elect the right people.

Which leaves me to identify with Satan.

A lot of commentators have noticed that the temptations Satan hits Jesus with ultimately point the way toward the Cross, and more than a few have noted the irony that he may have caused Jesus to realize the part he would play in God's plan of redemption. They go straight to the heart of Jesus' identity and his mission, particularly when Satan offers Jesus the ownership of the Roman Empire.

I can't help but wonder if that might have been ha-Satan's intent; i.e., if he's a member of God's court rather than wholly in rebellion to the Divine Plan, was his appointed role in this case to steer Jesus to a greater understanding of his role? (Of course, that could be the ironic intent that Satan was unaware of, given God's omniscient ability to play both sides of a poker game.)

I don't think I've encouraged people to put God to the test, not in a long time; nor have I encouraged stuff like using God to satisfy earthly wants and needs. I get turned off by teaching like that fairly quickly.

But I do like to take opposing views and encourage people to sift through the wheat to remove the chaff, and I wonder if I've ever destroyed or hurt someone in the process by encouraging them to ask questions they weren't ready for. How often, I wonder, have I filled the role of an adversary and unintentionally caused someone to stumble?

The ancient Hebrews believed the Satan to be an office in the heavenly court that an angel was appointed to.

I wonder if the angel felt any grief over the misery that came to Uz all because of what he said to God concerning Job. I wonder if he felt remorse over suggesting to David that he take a census of the fighting men in Israel, when David did, and famine broke out as a result. If angels have souls, does that angel feel his own soul is soiled by what he did?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Inconstant faith

My experience with evangelicals is that there is a game of Pretend afoot, that the faith has been largely consistent from the time of Abraham down to the present.

Clearly there is some truth to this, but let's not kid ourselves. Our interpretation of Scripture, our concepts of morality and justice, and many of our doctrines have changed, sometimes drastically over the past two millennia. Not only do we like to believe that extrabiblical concepts like capitalism and democracy were important to ancient Jews and ancient Christians, but we also have changed our understanding the Bible itself.

Honest faith must also admit honest doubt, and honest doubts need to be acknowledged and explored. God is big enough to handle tough questions, and it's not as though he's surprised when we ask them. Refusing to voice them leaves us with unresolved questions and a lingering, festering suspicion that we've been sold a bill of goods.

Satan's one example. Popular Christian culture has a lot to say about the rebellion in heaven, the way the highest of all the angels led a rebellion that ended with a third of the angels cast into hell and becoming demons. This is a great story, and I love it as much as the nice guy, but it's not exactly in the Bible. It's older than John Milton and "Paradise Lost," but as far as I can tell, the story first gained traction a few centuries after the canon was complete.

The gospel presentation has changed too. These dates we share the gospel by describing how all have sinned against God, putting us under sentence of death because God is holy and cannot abide the presence of sin or sinful people. The good news is that Christ stepped in and took that punishment in our place, satisfying God's need for justice, so that we can be spared the pains of hell as long as we accept Jesus as our personal savior.

That's quite a bit different from the older doctrine of Christus Victor, and also differs quite significantly from the first recorded creed "If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. For it is with the heart that you believe and are justified, and with the mouth that you confess and are saved" (1 Corinthians 10:9-10).

Unlike our modern gospel presentation, which requires personal confession of sin, there's nothing in that creed about confessing sin. It's all about confessing Jesus' sovereignty and resurrection. See the difference?

There's also the matter of sexual mores and morality. For centuries, the Christian concept of marriage looked radically different from our Western norm of getting married in church before having sex. In older times, couples would cohabitate and have children before getting their union blessed by the a priest, sometimes years later. The church in some parts of Christian Europe even recognized trial marriages that aren't that different from today's practice of premarital cohabitation.

Nowadays it's heterosexual married families ûber alles. The insistence on marriage-vows-first very well may be closer to what God desires, but I don't think we're kidding anyone but ourselves when we claim that the way we do things now in the West is how they've always been done or properly should be done always.

And so it is with hell. When Jesus talks about hell, he's describing the city dump outside Jerusalem. When we talk about hell with its picturesque and exquisitely grotesque torments for the dammed that go on day and night without stop, we're influenced by the Dante's hauntingly beautiful poetry in "The Divine Comedy."

We owe it to ourselves to do better than supporting a folk version of Christianity. It's essential to chase down the original meaning and intent of the Scriptures. Scrape away the barnacles and see what the hull of the ship is like underneath.

What does the Bible really say about hell, about heaven, about demons, about Jesus, and about even itself?

One quick example of how hell has been developed, away from the biblical teaching. Matthew 25 shows the exalted Son of Man judging the nations, and separating them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. To the goats, the wicked, he says, "Depart from me into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."

The funny thing is, the audience to that particular speech was a group of people who clearly believed in him. They recognized the Lord when they saw him, and asked in bewilderment, "But did we not heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons in your name?" If the term Christian has any meaning in the context of that parable, this group was in like Flynn.

Or there's the servant -- not an enemy, but a servant -- whose talent of gold is taken away and given to another; the servant whose debt was forgiven and then was beaten and thrown into prison. I've never heard these understood as anything but metaphors for hell, and yet the people being thrown there are all servants of the king/master/lord, thereby marking them as people whom today we would identity as Christians. So who is hell for?

Quite often, the Bible does not say what we have been taught to think it does, and though the investigation often leaves me with more questions than answers, I find that I prefer the uncertainty of faith to the cold hard certainty of what I was once taught to settle for.

We've been playing this game of Let's Pretend for far too long. Isn't it time to rediscover for ourselves what the Bible really says, and let that shape our faith?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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old square toes

I have a question for readers of this blog, both casual and committed. Where do you stand on this whole Satan thing?

Many, if not most, Christians in America regard Satan as chief among the fallen; that is, they believe that Lucifer was created as the highest of all angels, second in power and authority only to God. His status led to pride, and Lucifer led a third of the heavenly host in rebellion against God. They failed, were cast out of heaven, and while they await final judgment, they do what they can to mar God's creation. In short, Lucifer became Satan, the devil; and the angels who rebelled with him became demons.

The difficult thing about this is that it's largely extrabiblical if not unbiblical. The story I just summarized is found in the book "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, and not any of the 66 biblical books Protestant Christians consider to be canon.

The ancient Hebrews considered the Satan to be an agent of God, rather than an evil creature bent on the ruin of God's plans. His job was to take a contrary view so that the truth could be determined through thorough cross-examination, a role much like the "Devil's advocate" we use in argument today.

We see this principally in the book of Job, where ha-Satan comes before the Presence. There is no remonstration or hostility expressed, just the question, "Have you considered my servant Job?" and the response, "Does Job love you for nothing? Look at all you've given him." The result of this challenge is the process just described: God removes all that Job has, and Job continues to worship him.

The role also surfaces in the parallel accounts of the census David took in the latter days of his reign, in 2 Samuel and in 1 Chronicles. In 2 Samuel 24, God incites David to take the census and then smites him; in 1 Chronicles 21, it is Satan who makes the suggestion. You also can see this notion of a heavenly court with advisers in 1 Kings 22, when the prophet Micaiah describes an angel that suggests putting a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab's prophets so that Ahab will go to battle and be slain.

That view of ha-Satan is not entirely what we see in the New Testament, but that that is largely because we read the New Testament with preconceptions about who Satan is. The tempting in the wilderness is similar in nature to the testing of Job, to see what Jesus is made of.

Even when the Bible tells us about Jesus casting demons out of people, the term is better rendered as "unclean spirits," as the footnotes in the New International Version indicate. The afflictions described in the gospels -- epileptic fits, self-inflicted injury, aphasia -- can be seen as coming from a medical or psychological condition, which also would qualify as an "unclean spirit" in a poetic sense.

As a matter of religious history, the view of Satan as subservient to God did shift to the more familiar dualistic one during the intertestamental "silent period." During this period, Judaism acquired the noton of a devil from Zoroastrianism, another Eastern religion practiced near Judea. It lost the concept shortly after the destruction after the Second Temple, and resumed its previous view, namely that ha-Satan was an officer of the heavenly court, subservient to God.

Precisely because it is late in coming, I think we need to view such a dualist God/Satan view of the world with some suspicion. Don't we say that older revelation is the standard by which we gauge newer revelation?

If it weren't for passages of Scripture like Isaiah 49, which speak of God's desire to bring the Gentiles into his kingdom, or for places like Zechariah 12, which Christians believe foretell the Crucifixion, it would be harder to see a connection between the Tanakh and Christianity as we know it and practice it today.

So tell me, whether you're a regular guest here or a new visitor, what you think. Does the Bible actually teach about a devil, or that somethng we misunderstood and have all wrong?


Copyright 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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war in heaven

Just out of curiosity: Can anyone give me the basis for the story about the war in heaven?

From what I've been able to tell, the story about Satan leading a third of the angels in rebellion in an attempt to supplant God makes a great Christian myth about hubris, but it is thoroughly extrabiblical. The notion of Satan being an adversary of God and not his underling doesn't even appear until some time after the Babylonian exile, when Jews came into contact with Zoroastrianism and its dualistic view of the world.

The actual passages describing the revolt appear to be taken grossly out of conquest. It wasn't until Jerome (I think) that Isaiah 14 was ever construed as referring to a fallen angel; prior to that, it generally was understood as referring to the actual king of Babylon. The passage incorporates elements of a well-known Babylonian myth about the morningstar Venus, and uses this myth to taunt the king of Babylon.

Similarly, when I read the passage about the "war in heaven" in the book of Revelation, I understand it refers to the spiritual events that took place at the Cross. I'm not aware of any sound reason for interpreting it as a pre-Creation event.

But of course, I may be wrong. I've read a lot, but I've never formally attended seminary, nor even Bible college.

And actually, now that I'm on a roll, there's the whole matter of all the angels that supposedly rebelled and fell at the same time. Again, it makes a terrific story, but there's nothing but tradition and supposition to identify the unclean spirits of the New Testament with fallen angels. Other interpretations I'm aware of claim that the unclean spirits were the souls of a pre-Adamic race of men (Gen. 1:2, "Now the earth became formless and void"), and that the term simply refers to a medical condition like epilepsy or a mental condition like schizophrenia.

For those who want to equate ha-Satan with the serpent and the Devil, though, there's still the interesting question of when Satan "fell from heaven like lightning" and why. Scripture places ha-Satan in the roll of a prosecutor or accuser, telling God that Job's piety isnt' all it's cracked up to be, and claiming that David relies more on the military might of Israel than on God's favor (or least that's how I'd interpret the parallel accounts of David's census in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles).

So did Satan get overzealous in his accusations and become more adversarial, did he fall for some other reason, or did something else happen?