this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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No no no, you just don't understand it.
God moves in mysterious ways.
Just ask job.
Was he the one who was raped by his own daughters?
I think that was Lot, former husband of world's most humanoid salt-lick.
Job basically gets royally fucked over by God due to God getting goaded into doing so by Satan.
Job is God's most devout follower so God wants to prove to Satan that Job will still love God even if he is reduced to misery.
So then basically God makes him poor, kills a bunch of his livestock, kills a bunch of his family, and gives him a horrendously painful plague, which ostracizes him from his whole community who only drop by to mock how pitiful and wretched he is and to gaslight him into thinking he must have sinned horribly.
Job basically goes "Why God, Why?" and God shows up and spends a chapter or two boasting about how awesome he is, and tells Job he should be thankful for what he still has.
This whole ordeal for Job lasts I think nearly a decade, ending only when Satan concedes that Job is truly faithful.
Then God restores Job's health, some of his wealth and ... either resurrects some of his family or gives him a new wife and he has more kids.
The moral of the story is apparently supposed to be that you should always have faith in God even when everything sucks, but the more obvious take away is that God is immensely petty, cruel and vain.
I always wondered if Satan was actually defeated by this, or if he spent the whole ordeal just thinking, "Oh, whoa, he actually took the bait. Holy shit, he's actually doing it. This is hilarious. I can't believe it was this easy. Unreal."
So, IIRC, Job was written during the time where 'Satan' was not really a kind of ... evil lord of this world, the way he was later interpreted by Christians and some later Jews.
'Satan' is actually a kind of descriptive, formal title meaning something like: the accuser/the prosecutor. Its more literally translated as The Satan.
Basically, his job was to second guess God as a kind of ... opposite of a yes man. Basically his role was to ... what we would now say 'play devil's advocate'.
This makes more sense when you realize that Judaism emerged from a polytheistic/henotheistic Canaanite religion.
El or El Elyon (God Most High or God the Greatest) is the sort of Zeus-like master or most powerful of all the gods, the sect that eventually developed into Judaism began referring to him as Yahweh, Ashera is his consort and Goddess of fertility, Elohim is actually plural and means the gods, Ba'al was part of this pantheon, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwism
'The Satan' was basically a kind of minor, subordinate god within an originally large pantheon of Canaanite deities, he did not really become associated with some kind of nearly equally powerful evil opposition to Yahweh until after many of the Judahites were held in captivity in Babylonia, and exposed to the Zoroastrian idea of one great good deity and another great evil deity by Cyrus the Great and the Persians, who conquered Babylonia and allowed the Judahites to return to Judah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan
Edit: That last bit is also why Cyrus is portrayed fairly positively and even directly praised by some Old Testament writings, compared to... basically every other foreign or occupying regent or emperor being portrayed quite negatively.