Appendix

 

Of Satan and the Afterlife in the Bible and the Qur’an

In the opening chapters of this book, I repeatedly noted two theographical differences between the anonymous biblical narrator’s presentation of Yahweh Elohim in the Book of Genesis and Allah’s self-presentation in the Qur’an. In so doing, I unavoidably implied that these differences apply to the entire Bible. In historical fact, they do not.

The two differences are: first, the prominent presence in the Qur’an of references to the Devil (Satan or Iblis) versus the absence of such references in the Bible; and second, the prominent presence in the Qur’an of references to the afterlife versus the absence of such references in the Bible.

These two differences do matter to the characterization of God because God is, after all, differently characterized if He is understood to be opposed by or unopposed by a hostile and powerful being like Satan. Similarly, He is differently characterized if He is understood to grant reward or inflict punishment only in this life and in this world or to do also or even primarily in the afterlife and in a world to come.

So long as we confine our attention to just the Books of Genesis and Exodus, on the one hand, as against the Qur’an, on the other, these differences are undeniably there. Historically, however, it matters that Genesis is one of the earlier books in the biblical canon, though all but certainly not the first. Were we to look at the latest books in the canon, especially the Alexandrian canon1 that became the canon of the Christian Old Testament, we would find Satan and the afterlife playing a gradually larger role.

A closer look may bring this historical observation into better focus.

SATAN IN AND AFTER THE BOOK OF GENESIS

Is it true that the God of the Bible is unopposed by any opposing power such as Satan? A historian would answer with careful circumspection: It is true that the God of Genesis, as originally composed and even as later edited, is unopposed by any Satan, but as for the rest of the Bible, the answer to your question depends on what book you are asking about. The Bible as a whole shows a historical evolution of beliefs about Satan.

The Book of Genesis, a relatively early book of the Bible, understands God in one way. Other, later books of the Bible understand Him in somewhat different ways, and we need to remember that the Bible contains about four dozen different books of greatly varying length. Historically, belief in Satan, though absent at the start, did develop over time among the Israelites—later living on as the Jews. By the first century CE, Jews were clearly identifying the Serpent that opposes Yahweh in the Garden of Eden with Satan as a supernatural being in conflict with Yahweh, though these evidently were not the Jews who would found Rabbinic Judaism. In any case, the Satan-idea had by then been in a period of gradual growth for several centuries, beginning probably in the late sixth century BCE when Judaea became part of the Persian Empire.

Persian Zoroastrianism (named for Zoroaster, its great prophet) was not strictly speaking dualistic or ditheistic; it did not recognize two equal gods or two matched primal principles, one standing for good, the other for evil. But alongside Ahura Mazda, its supreme deity, it did recognize a powerful, Satan-like figure called Angra Mainyu. This understanding of a supreme being facing, however, significant and pervasive opposition does seem to have influenced the evolving thought of Jews under Persian rule. The Book of Job—in which Satan makes a bold early appearance, tempting and temporarily confounding Yahweh Elohim and then brutally tormenting the title character—may reflect a stage in this Persian influence. Or consider this scene from the prophet Zechariah, also writing under Persian rule:

He [Yahweh] then showed me the high priest Joshua, standing before the angel of Yahweh, with Satan standing on his right to accuse him. The angel of Yahweh said to Satan, “May Yahweh rebuke you, Satan! May Yahweh rebuke you, since he has made Jerusalem his choice. Is not this man [the high priest] a brand snatched from the fire?” (Zechariah 3:1–2)

One cannot infer from this brief scene the presence of an evil power comparable to what Satan would be later in, for example, the Book of Revelation. Satan is present in this scene “to accuse”; this makes him a kind of heavenly prosecutor but not necessarily anything more than that. Nonetheless, the scene represents an early moment in an evolution with an enormous future, not excluding an incipient association of Satan with fire and hellish punishment. Satan is ready to take Joshua into custody, but Yahweh, with his good angel at his side, has snatched his high priest from Satan’s clutches like a brand snatched from the fire.

Many historians are prepared to see the striking presence of Satan in later Israelite and early Jewish religion as well as in Christianity and Islam as the continuing assimilation and progressive transformation of Zoroastrian influence. Certainly, the felt presence of Satan was already powerfully alive among the Jews to whom Jesus preached in the first century CE. In the Gospels, this belief surfaces dramatically whenever Jesus expels devils from the demonically possessed. Moreover, in one of the most protracted and cunningly constructed dialogues in the Gospel, Satan tempts Jesus himself for forty days in the Judaean desert.

In short, if you take the Bible, including both Old Testament and New Testament, as a historically developing collection and ask about the prominence of Satan in it at a point late enough in its development, you find Satan quite prominent indeed, and his prominence then becomes a point of similarity rather than a point of difference as between the Bible and the Qur’an.

THE AFTERLIFE IN AND AFTER THE BOOK OF GENESIS

What is true about Satan in the two scriptures is similarly true about the afterlife. If we ask whether in the Bible God rewards or punishes exclusively in this life, our imagined, circumspect historian might answer much as he did when asked about Satan: It is true that in the Book of Genesis, as originally composed and even as later edited, God promises no one any reward or punishment in an afterlife, but in later books of the Bible, such promises become steadily more prominent.

Some of the earlier books of the Old Testament show clear evidence of belief in a faint, ghostly afterlife in Sheol, a realm of neither reward nor punishment. Within these earlier books, significant reward comes always and only within normal human lifetimes. God’s favor takes the form of longevity, security from enemies, and fertility in its various forms: abundant offspring, bounteous fields, and burgeoning livestock. Punishment comes, correspondingly, either as early death or as personal, agricultural, or pastoral sterility or blight. Most often, however, and most spectacularly, punishment comes as actual or threatened defeat by Israel’s enemies acting, however unwittingly, as agents of Israel’s God.

Such an agent is Babylon, the “distant nation,” in the passage from the prophet Isaiah that follows. Yahweh rages against Israel “for having rejected the law of Yahweh Sabaoth, for having despised the word of the Holy One of Israel”:

This is why Yahweh’s anger has blazed out against his people;

and he has raised his hand against them to strike them;

why the mountains have shuddered

and why corpses are lying like dung in the streets.

After all this, his anger is not spent.

No, his hand is still raised!

He hoists a signal for a distant nation,

he whistles them up from the ends of the earth;

and see how swift, how fleet they come!

Their arrows are sharpened,

their bows are strung,

their horses’ hoofs you would think were flint

and their wheels, a whirlwind!

Their roar is like that of a lioness,

like fierce young lions they roar,

growling they seize their prey

and carry it off, with no one to prevent it,

growling at it, that day,

like the growling of the sea.

Only look at the country: darkness and distress,

and the light turned to darkness by the clouds. (Isaiah 5:25−26, 28−30)

Though sent to summon sinful Israel to repent, Isaiah proclaims Yahweh’s threatened punishment with obvious gusto. In the earlier books of the Old Testament, Yahweh and Yahweh’s people never lose. The case of unmerited suffering, bad things happening to good people, simply does not arise.

Later parts of the Old Testament, however, begin to lament that Yahweh is savagely abusing Israel despite her constant obedience and fidelity. This is the sorrowful sentiment heard in Psalm 44:

You hand us over like sheep for slaughter,

you scatter us among the nations,

you sell your people for a trifle

and make no profit on the sale.

You make us the butt of our neighbours,

the mockery and scorn of those around us,

you make us a by-word among nations,

other peoples shake their heads over us.

All day long I brood on my disgrace,

the shame written clear on my face,

from the sound of insult and abuse,

from the sight of hatred and vengefulness.

All this has befallen us though we had not forgotten you,

nor been disloyal to your covenant,

our hearts never turning away,

our feet never straying from your path.

(44:11–18, emphasis added)

Over time, steadfast faith in Yahweh amid continuing foreign oppression—“tears their food, threefold tears their drink,” as Psalm 80:5 puts it—gave rise to the thought that perhaps He who had created the heavens and the earth and even time itself did not mete out reward and punishment in this life alone. Perhaps the arena of victory and defeat was larger than human beings could know this side of the grave. And just as the enlargement of the role of Satan in the Old Testament seems to owe much to the influence of Persia, so belief in the existence of an immortal soul, surviving after the death of the body, owes much to the later-arriving influence of Greek rule and Greek influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and well beyond.

A Greek-speaking Jew writing in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century BCE wrote in the biblical Book of Wisdom that the godless:

do not know the hidden things of God,

they do not hope for the reward of holiness,

they do not believe in a reward for blameless souls.

For God created human beings to be immortal,

he made them as an image of his own nature;

Death came into the world only through the Devil’s envy,

as those who belong to him find to their cost.

But the souls of the upright are in the hands of God,

and no torment can touch them.

To the unenlightened, they appeared to die,

their departure was regarded as disaster,

their leaving us like annihilation;

but they are at peace.

If, as it seemed to us, they suffered punishment,

their hope was rich with immortality;

slight was their correction, great will their blessings be. (2:22–3:5)

The Book of Wisdom, included in the Alexandrian canon of the Jewish Bible, does not use the word heaven, at least not in this passage, but obviously it does assert the existence of an afterlife of reward and punishment. Note, too, that the passage quoted reflects the later-developing belief that the Serpent that seduced Adam and Eve into sin was indeed the Devil and that only then did death enter the world. The consoling message of the Book of Wisdom—against the lament of Psalm 44—is that God has the power to reverse the curse of death that he pronounced on his disobedient first human creatures and to bestow a blessed immortality upon those who serve him courageously to the end.

A century or less after the Book of Wisdom, Jesus mentions both heaven and hell in a short speech that he speaks to comfort and reassure those of his disciples who fear lethal persecution at the hands of the Messiah’s enemies:

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell. Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

“So if anyone declares himself for me in the presence of human beings, I will declare myself for him in the presence of my Father in heaven. But the one who disowns me in the presence of human beings, I will disown in the presence of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 10:28–33)

Implied in this passage is not just that forthright, public support for Jesus will be rewarded in the afterlife, but that reward and punishment alike will be meted out at a heavenly judgment scene where Jesus will testify before the judge, God the Father, on behalf of his followers.

For centuries, Israel had dreamed in poetically inflamed language of a great and final Judgment Day—the “Day of Yahweh,” often enough referred to simply as “That Day.” For centuries, too, the assumption had been that this Day would inaugurate the imposition of God’s rule on earth, His sovereignty, and a blessed peace within which the wolf would lie down with the lamb. The inauguration Day itself, however, would be one of enormous violence. Thus, in the seventh century BCE, the prophet Zephaniah wrote:

The great Day of Yahweh is near,

near, and coming with great speed.

How bitter the sound of the Day of Yahweh,

the Day when the warrior shouts his cry of war.

That Day is a day of retribution,

a day of distress and tribulation,

a day of ruin and devastation,

a day of darkness and gloom,

a day of cloud and thick fog,

a day of trumpet blast and battle cry

against fortified town

and high corner-tower.

I shall bring such distress on humanity

that they will grope their way like the blind

for having sinned against Yahweh.

Their blood will be poured out like mud,

yes, their corpses like dung;

nor will their silver or gold

be able to save them.

On the Day of Yahweh’s anger,

by the fire of his jealousy,

the whole earth will be consumed.

For he will destroy, yes, annihilate

everyone living on earth. (1:14–18)

The Day of Yahweh was the day when Yahweh, tarrying no longer, would at last reveal himself in all his explosive and definitive power. We call passages like the one just quoted “apocalyptic” because apocalypsis in Greek means “revelation,” and such passages “reveal” what the great and terrible Day will be like.

The more grandiose such visions of Yahweh’s triumph became, however, the more they seemed to entail the absolute end of the world as we know it. A further, distinctive feature of apocalyptic writing came to be its coded revelation of when the both dreaded and hoped for Day would come. But as predictions came and went, as hopes for a transformation of this world arose and were repeatedly shattered, the infinite postponement of God’s definitive intervention was displaced spatially to a place beyond time altogether. God’s intervention came then to coincide with the onset of a new creation or heavenly afterlife bringing permanent—in effect, eternal—gratification for the long-suffering just and, of course, eternal confinement and punishment for the once cruel, once proud, but now humbled unjust.

This cosmic vision, firmly in place in the latest books of the Bible, coincides very closely with the cosmic vision of the Qur’an. We might say, speaking loosely, that the Qur’an was there already, while the Bible had to get there. But in the foreword to this book, I made a historical observation that bears repeating at this point:

The Bible, five times longer than the Qur’an, is a vast anthology, the work of many different authors, who wrote over one thousand years’ time between about 900 BCE and about 100 CE. The Qur’an as historians know it came into being during an intense twenty years’ time, late in the life of just one man: the prophet Muhammad, who received it in the early seventh century CE as a revelation from Allah.

For the writing of the thousand-year history of belief in the God of the Bible, well-attested historical methods come readily enough to hand. In broad or schematic terms, the matter is one of

1) rearranging and contextualizing the Bible’s component books into some hypothesized chronological order,

2) considering how God appears in each successive book or period,

3) noting continuities and discontinuities from one book to the next as well as revisions, revivals, and so forth, then

4) attributing all these presentations of God to those who successively wrote the respective books, and

5) at last assembling a chronologically arranged account of their evolving beliefs.

When this is done, the evolution within so long a history is quite considerable. But within the twenty-year history of the Qur’an’s composition, no comparable evolution takes place at all. Learned exegetes (interpreters) do distinguish the earlier Mecca period from the later Medina period in the reception of the Qur’an. The year 622 divides the two periods—the year of the hijra when Muhammad and a group of his earlier followers fled from Mecca, his birthplace, to Medina, a town slightly to the north of Mecca. The Meccan and the Medinan suras have somewhat different emphases, but in all essential regards Allah’s message—and certainly the character of Allah Himself—does not change from the earlier period to the later.

As for the congruence of the mythic cosmologies and chronologies of the later Bible and the Qur’an, this is rather what historians would expect since Jews and Christians had been well established in Muhammad’s native region for centuries by the time he received the Qur’an and since his claim was that the Qur’an was no more than a purified version of the Book earlier given to them.

But having strayed thus far into history, let me now pull back and stress, in conclusion, that this historical interlude is only an interlude. For our purposes in this book, and for all those who would seek an aesthetically rewarding encounter with sacred scripture, history can occasionally make a wonderful servant but is on the whole a very bad master. We have by no means taken either the Bible or the Qur’an as raw material for a mere history of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim beliefs about God. Our method has been, as I promised in the foreword that it would be, theographical rather than historical, using the descriptive, sometimes quasi-biographical tools of literary analysis rather than those of history. It is this approach that has enabled us to suspend disbelief in either Yahweh or Allah and do just as we so readily do when reading a novel or watching an art film. It has enabled us to engage Yahweh and Allah directly as a single real character operating under two different names in two different scriptures.