ANCIENT ECHOES BLOG: WHAT YOUR PASTOR WON’T TELL YOU

When God Does the Killing: How Satan Became Christianity’s Villain—and Hell Entered the Story

Most Christians are handed a complete biography of Satan before they are old enough to question it. Satan was supposedly a perfect angel named Lucifer. Pride made him rebel against God. He was thrown out of heaven, entered Eden as the serpent, caused humanity’s fall, fought God throughout history, and became the ruler of a fiery hell.

There is one major problem: no biblical author tells that story from beginning to end.

The familiar Christian devil is a theological collage—different characters, poems, symbols, and traditions joined together over many centuries. Read the Bible historically instead of forcing its final Christian theology back into every earlier passage, and a very different story appears. In much of the Hebrew Bible, God causes both blessing and disaster, kills enormous numbers of people, and commands wars of annihilation. “The satan” is usually an adversary or heavenly accuser working under God’s authority, not an independent embodiment of evil. Sheol is death or the realm of the dead, not a torture chamber ruled by the devil.

By the New Testament period, however, Satan has become the chief supernatural enemy, and postmortem punishment has become much more developed. That change did not happen overnight. It emerged through centuries of Jewish apocalyptic thought and later Christian interpretation.

First, an important correction about the numbers

Internet graphics sometimes claim that God killed millions in the Bible while Satan killed only ten. The comparison points toward a real imbalance in the stories, but neither number is an honest biblical total.

The Bible never gives a grand total of everyone killed by God. Four numbered episodes alone report 14,700 deaths in one plague (Numbers 16:49), 24,000 in another (Numbers 25:9), 70,000 after David’s census (2 Samuel 24), and 185,000 Assyrians struck by an angel of the Lord (2 Kings 19:35). Added as literary figures, those four passages total 293,700 deaths.

That does not include the unnumbered populations in the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Egypt’s firstborn, or the conquest stories. A literalist can invent a population estimate for the flood and reach millions, but that number comes from modern assumptions—not from the text or a verified historical census.

The claim that Satan killed exactly ten is also incomplete. In Job, seven sons and three daughters die, but several groups of unnamed servants are killed as well (Job 1). The story’s death toll is therefore more than ten, but its exact number is unknown.

The defensible conclusion is sharper than the meme: the biblical writers explicitly credit God, God’s commands, or God’s agents with vastly more death than they credit to the satan, but no reliable total exists for either.

The God of the Hebrew Bible does not hide from violence

The Hebrew Bible does not consistently blame a devil whenever catastrophe occurs. It repeatedly places destructive power in God’s own hands.

In the flood narrative, God wipes out nearly every land-dwelling human and animal (Genesis 7:21–23). In Egypt, the Lord strikes every firstborn, from the royal household to the prisoner in the dungeon (Exodus 12:29–30). Deuteronomy orders Israel to leave alive nothing that breathes in designated Canaanite towns (Deuteronomy 20:16–18). In 1 Samuel, God’s command against Amalek explicitly includes men, women, children, and infants (1 Samuel 15:2–3).

These are claims made by ancient religious narratives, not independently verified casualty reports. Historians cannot turn them into a factual body count simply by adding the verses. Yet the moral problem exists inside the literature whether or not every event happened as narrated: biblical authors portrayed mass death and collective punishment as divinely authorized.

Did God “sin” in these stories? The Bible itself says no, because its authors normally treat God’s justice as a starting assumption. In that theological system, sin means rebellion against God; God cannot rebel against himself. But that is a definition, not a moral defense of every action attributed to him.

If a human king killed infants for the actions of their ancestors, punished a population for its ruler’s refusal, or destroyed a family to test one person’s loyalty, Christians would ordinarily call those acts evil. Saying “God did it” exempts the actor by definition; it does not make the ethical contradiction disappear. Calling these acts sinful is therefore a moral judgment made about the text, not a verdict the biblical narrators pronounce on God.

In the oldest layers, “satan” was a role—not the name of God’s enemy

The Hebrew word śāṭān means something like adversary, opponent, or accuser. It can describe human enemies. In Numbers 22:22, even the angel of the Lord stands in Balaam’s path as a satan—an adversary. In Job and Zechariah, the Hebrew normally says the satan, which sounds more like a title than a personal name. The figure resembles a hostile prosecutor in a heavenly court. A scholarly overview in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology traces exactly this movement from ordinary adversary to celestial accuser and, later, a proper name (Will Kynes, “Satan”).

That does not make Job’s accuser kind or harmless. He is suspicious, destructive, and eager to test human loyalty. But he is not yet the horned rebel commanding an evil kingdom. He enters God’s court, challenges Job’s motives, receives permission to attack, and obeys the limits God imposes.

God even brings Job to the accuser’s attention. After Job’s children and servants die, the text ultimately refuses to absolve God: Job asks whether people should receive good from God but not evil, and the narrator says he did not sin with his lips (Job 2:10). At the end, Job’s relatives comfort him for the calamity that the Lord had brought upon him (Job 42:11).

The satan acts, but only by permission. God retains ultimate authority and, in the story’s own language, ultimate responsibility.

One disaster, two culprits: the Bible’s change is visible on the page

The New Testament unquestionably contains stronger ideas of punishment after death. Jesus traditions warn about Gehenna and unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43–48); Matthew speaks of eternal punishment; Luke’s rich man suffers in Hades; Revelation presents the lake of fire. But these passages do not form one neat map. Some emphasize torment, others destruction, exclusion, resurrection, judgment, or “the second death.” That diversity helps explain why Christians have defended eternal conscious torment, annihilation, and universal restoration from different biblical passages.

Hell was not invented from absolutely nothing in the New Testament, but neither was the later Christian doctrine sitting fully formed in Genesis. It grew from distinct Jewish and Greco-Roman images that New Testament and post-biblical Christian writers combined and systematized. Historical research traces a continuing movement from Sheol, through diverse Second Temple afterlife beliefs, to increasingly detailed Christian depictions of punishment (Mark T. Finney, “The Development of Hell in Its Jewish and Christian Contexts”).

How Lucifer, Eden’s serpent, and Satan became one character

Genesis never calls its serpent Satan. In its original story, the serpent is introduced as one of the animals God made. The explicit fusion comes much later, especially when Revelation calls its dragon “the ancient serpent,” the devil, and Satan. Biblical scholar John Day summarizes the historical distinction between Genesis’s serpent and the later Satan tradition (“The Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background”).

Isaiah 14 is a taunt against the king of Babylon. Its image of a fallen morning star became lucifer—“light-bringer” or morning star—in Latin. Ezekiel 28 addresses the ruler of Tyre using Eden-like imagery. Later Christian interpreters, including influential church fathers, read both poems as fragments of Satan’s prehistoric fall. They then joined those texts to Genesis, the Gospels, and Revelation to create a continuous biography: a glorious angel became proud, fell from heaven, deceived Eve, and became God’s enemy.

That story became enormously influential, but it is a later synthesis rather than the original meaning of any one passage. Medieval art, Dante, and Milton made the character still more vivid. Popular culture eventually gave Christians a devil who seemed to have been standing fully formed on page three of Genesis—even though he was not.

Why the villain changed

The Bible is not one book written by one mind at one moment. It is a library produced, edited, and collected across centuries. Its ideas about God, evil, Satan, death, resurrection, and punishment developed as communities faced new empires, new suffering, and new questions.

Earlier Israelite texts could attribute well-being and catastrophe to one sovereign God. Later Jewish and Christian writers increasingly gave evil a face and a name. Satan helped explain undeserved suffering without abandoning belief in a good God. Final judgment and hell supplied justice beyond death when justice did not arrive during life. The New Testament gathered these developments into a dramatic conflict between Christ and a cosmic enemy, and later Christians stitched the remaining pieces into the biography many churches now teach as though it had always existed.

This history does not prove that God exists or that God does not exist. It proves something more limited but still unsettling: the doctrines changed.

The Old Testament’s satan was not originally the independent ruler of evil. Its Sheol was not the later Christian hell. Genesis’s serpent was not introduced as the devil. And the God portrayed as ordering floods, plagues, collective punishment, and annihilation cannot be morally cleared simply by moving every disturbing act onto Satan.

Before calling Satan the Bible’s greatest killer, Christians should read who actually gives the orders, who grants permission, who sends the plague—and who later interpreters needed the villain to become.

Historical sources and further reading

● Will Kynes, “Satan,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology

● Ryan E. Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy

● Meghan Henning, “No Heaven or Hell, Only Sheol”

● John Day, “The Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background”

● Louis C. Jonker, “‘Satan Made Me Do It!’ The Development of a Satan Figure”

● Mark T. Finney, “The Development of Hell in Its Jewish and Christian Contexts”