[Bêthberry]

Ulmo asked me the following:

Bethberry said
Quote:
an angel, sent to block or obstruct human activity in such a way as to teach people something about their own weaknesses and foibles.

In 'sent to...', do you mean to imply that Satan was sent intentionally by God to do so?

That is how Elaine Pagels describes the meaning of the word in the Hebrew Bible. Because this is a concept quite different from the usual one where Satan is a malevolent character who embodies transcendent forces, perhaps I should provide a full quotation from her book, The Origin of Satan:

In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an 'evil empire', an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike. As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of Numbers and in Job as one of God's obedient servants--a messenger or angel, a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal' ak) into Greek ( angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called "sons of God" (ben e' elohim), and were envisioned as the hierarchical ranks of a great army, or the staff of a royal court.

In biblical sources the Hebrew term satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character. Although Hebrew storytellers as early as the sixth century B.C.E. occasionally introduced a supernatural character whom they called the satan, what they meant was any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity. The root stn means "ones who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary." (The Greek term diabolos, later translated "devil," literally means, "one who throws something across ones path.")

Thesatan's presence in a story could help account for unexpected obstacles or reversals of fortune. Hebrew storytellers often attribute misfortunes to human sin. Some, however, also invoke this supernatural character, the satan, who, by God's own order or permission, blocks or opposes human plans and desires. But this messenger is not necessarily malevolent. God sends him, like the angle of Death, to perform a specific task, although one that human beings may not appreciate; as the literary scholar Neil Forsyth says of the satan, "If the path is bad, an obstruction is good." Thus the satan may simply have been sent by the Lord to protect a person from worse harm. The story of Balaam in the biblical book of Numbers, for example, tells of a man who decided to go where God had ordered him not to go. Balaam saddles his a** and set off, "but God's anger was kindled because he went; and the angle of the Lord took his stand in the road as his satan le-satan-lo that is, as his adversary, or is obstructor . . . . The book of Job, too, describes the satan as a supernatural messenger, a member of God's royal court. But while Balaam's satan protects him from harm, Job's satan takes a more adversarial role. Here the Lord himself admits that the satan incited him to act against Job.

Pagels examines other accounts , such as the one where the satan "is invoked to account for divisions within Israel. " In one such example, the satan takes a role in census-taking during King David's reign. In other accounts, the satan speaks for "a disaffected--and unsuccessful--party against another party." Ultimately, she argues, the satan came to be invoked by dissidents characterising their Jewish opponents and this led, she claims, into the depiction of Satan in the early Christian communities as God's rival and antagonist. Her book is a social history of how the concept of the satan changed over time until it came to be used so thoroughly to characterise the enemies of Christendom.

Sorry this post is so long and actually off topic but I did want to give Ulmo a complete reply. I have not been able to transcrible all the diacritical marks which Pagels uses for her Hebrew terms, nor identify the footnotes she makes.