The Tale of Helel ben Shacar

I have edited the title and intro to this post,  as the event it flagged up has passed, but the question is still an interesting one  -

Who is this chap 'Satan' , as mentioned in Scripture?

He isn't actually mentioned by name in Genesis. Oh , we get a talking snake appear, but no mention is made of a fallen angel leading a revolt or being set the task of looking after Adam and Eve and trying to Tempt them instead. I know we get that from Milton , but Paradise Lost was not in the Canon when last I looked.
So, where does Milton get the story of the fallen rebel angel who leads Adam and Eve into sin ?

To answer that, let us go back to the first mention of Satan  by name in the Bible. This would be the Book of Job. Now, when the book opens, the narrator tells us who Job is, where he lives, what he is like, for the first 5 verses. But when Satan appears  as well,  in Job 1 :6 we don't have anything to go on  from the previous books. Who is Satan , and what is he like ? Now, Job is not behind Esther chronologically speaking , but in the order they were traditionally thought to be written, we do not have any info. So what has happened?

One possible answer is to be got from a clue in Genesis. Remember how God puts 2 Cherubs to guard the gates of Paradise to stop Adam and Eve returning ? Well, what is a Cherub? Genesis chapters 1 - 3 do not tell us. God made the heavens and the Earth , the Moon and stars, but no mention of Seraphim or Cherubim is found here. So, whence this Cherub , and whence Satan , I ask ?

We must not suppose that the Scriptures were written in media vacuum. Jews of the day had doubtless had dealings with foreigners - people like Uriah the Hittite lived in Jerusalem, and there is therefore a strong possibility that Hebrew people would have heard of pagan myths and legends well before they went and wrote the Torah . They may have borrowed pagan ideas and concepts and my contention is that they almost certainly did.

I don't know if anyone else reading this has read and studied Funk and Wagnell's Encyclopaedia of Myth and Folklore, or read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough , or perhaps Joseph Campbell's 'The Masks of God' - but I have. And it transpires that, Just as the Romans took all the Greek gods and gave them Roman names, the Canaanites, the Babylonians and Assyrians all took the old Sumerian gods , together with the associated myths and legends and put them in their own pantheons and theological theories. So did a few others, I know, but lets be brief here. the question is how much these ideas influenced Hebrew writers.

Now, the Sun god had two sons, Dawn and Dusk - and the Dawn god had a son of his own - Helel, if I recall correctly. His full name is "Helel ben Shachar', if I recall correctly, and there is a story about him known throughout the Levant.  Every time the sun rose up in the morning , the other stars deferred to his greater glory and went out - but Helel not only rose just before the sun , but arrogantly continued to shine in the morning sky even after sunrise. And this went on day after day , until  finally Samash , the Sun god , seized hold of the presumptuous Helel and hurled him down from  heaven.

Ok, anyone who knows  about ' just so ' stories and has a smattering of Astronomical  savvy will say " It sounds like they invented this myth to explain the movements of the Planet Venus - it rises in the morning until it gets so close to the Sun that it passes behind the sun and reappears on the other side, becoming the Evening Star instead."

Oh , yes indeed!  the Hebrews knew the myth , but did not write it down . they knew the story, we may surmise, because the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel both reference it,  ( Isa 14 ;12 translates 'shining one' as the Latin -  ' Lucifer', and it puzzled me even then why a Hebrew Archangel should have a Latin name ) and  in both cases, they liken  the rulers of Babylon and Tyre to Helel. the presumptuous star - rather in the same way as cartoonists liken politicians like Tony Blair and David Cameron to Pinnocio, the storybook character whose nose grows another inch when he tells a lie.

So, Ok, Satan has an origin in Pagan Myth. He is useful though , for explaining why bad stuff happens to good people. so he finds an unlikely home in the Jewish and Christian world-view as the Opposer, the Adversary or Resister - that is what Satan actually means. The Hebrews started with just having God, then needed some angels , so they borrowed them from the Babylonians. however, that was not enough. Satan then got promoted to the prosecuting counsel in the heavenly court, and from there , they turned him into a baddie - a bit like Goldstein in  Orwell's book, 1984.
Once we have that sorted, we can go on to say  more about him, and indeed I will. But not on this post.