Satan

Satan is a character from the Book of Job, where he was the “accuser” & “enemy” of Job, because the name šṭn Satan is actually the word for “accuser” & “enemy”. In that story though, he was neither a weird critter nor particularly evil. He was simply one of God’s assistants, and everything he did was agreed upon with God in advance. I assume that the Bible authors didn’t invent such characters anyway, but rather took them from existing folk mythology, where a Satan was probably a name for some “enemy spirit”. The role in Job came from the fact that the same word means “accuser”, i.e. the opponent in a trial.

However, the Satan character was then reused in the New Testament, and that seems to have caught on with audiences. In later times, particularly in Christianity, Satan was expanded into a full-fledged main character of his own, with all sorts of weird details and attributes, very often conflicting ones. The strangest contradiction is that while Satan was supposed to be the darkest incarnation of all evil, he was also a funny figure, with laughing devil’s masks worn at carnival events.

What is the explanation for Satan’s evolution? If you guessed it’s a pun, you’re only partly right: Satan is really a legion of puns, a character that was cobbled together from arbitrary attributes & features, as long as they were written & pronounced roughly like “Satan” in the Semitic languages. That’s also proof that the spookish “inventors” of religious scarecrow characters like Satan never believed in their own creations. Consult the list below! It was all just a literary exercise for them.

Satan is a very big pile of puns, because his letters are so easy to pun around with:

• His last letter N is a common suffix in the Semitic languages, for characteristics and other forms of nominalization.
• Depending on the Semitic dialect, the letters s / š / ṣ / z were all pronounced similar (S-like sibilants).
• The letters t / ṭ / d were also pronounced similar (T-like fricatives).
• For the spook authors, that meant whenever they encountered a word that was written roughly like S-T, they could slap on a grammar N, and have a new attribute for their Satan character. (Often the N form is even listed as such in the dictionaries.)

This makes for very easy pun creation, as long as consistency is not a requirement. Which apparently it isn’t. Below, I listed the Satan puns that I found, but I suppose there are many, many more.

The main pun & main reason for Satan’s popularity among the ruling elites is hardly a secret: In their eyes their subjects always need an enemy to fear. Satan was perfect to be that enemy, because his name simply means “enemy”. So he became the archetype of all made-up enemies, which are distracting us from the only real enemy we ever had: our rulers themselves.

An important secondary aspect is that Satan also means accuser, the “enemy” in a trial: If things are bad, it’s always said to be “our own fault” somehow, because we common humans are eeevil. The big bad fake terrorists attacked because we little guys didn’t accept the goodly surveillance police state. The bankster-triggered finance crisis hit because we were too greedy. Satan rules because we were bad. Bah. Now it’s true that all humans have potential for evil. But the only ones who can always be accused of constantly living up to it are again our rulers themselves! Pretty much all of humanity’s problems (wars, poverty, hatred) would’ve been long solved, if the rulers hadn’t actively kept them alive, or even created them.

These are the puns that Satan was created on:

1. Satan is called the enemy, and was originally the accuser & enemy of Job, simply because šṭn / sṭn means “accuser” & “enemy”.
2. Satan was later reinvented as a demon, because there is another word šd / šdn which means “demon spirit”. (Since “demon” isn’t a real observable thing, that’s probably derived from some other term.)
3. Satan is the fallen one, because šdy means “falling down” & “being cast out”.
4. Satan became hated, because hštnˀ means “made himself hated” (reflexive Hitpa‘el form from šnˀ).
5. Satan mocks humans (and was likely invented by our leaders to mock us), because ṣd / mṣdn means “mockery”. (The ˁṭlp “bat” wings and ṭlp “hooves” also pun with tlˁb “mockery”.)
6. Satan fools people, and is often fooled himself, because šṭyn means “fool”.
7. Satan is associated with adultery, because šṭy also means “adultery” & “sexual misbehavior”.
8. Satan rebelled against God, because šṭy also means “rebellion”.
9. Satan is a master of disguise, because hštnh means “disguising oneself” (reflexive Hitpa‘el form of šnh).
10. Satan is evil, because zdn means “malice”.
11. Satan plots, because ˁšt / ˁštn means “plotting”.
12. Satan stinks, because štn means “urine”.
13. Satan seduces & leads astray, because sṭ / sṭn means “seduction” & “leading astray”.
14. Satan seeds discord, because ˀsṭsyn means “discord”.
15. Satan is associated with fire, because šyṭ / swṭ means “burning” & “scorching”.
16. Satan lives underground, because ysd / sdn means “bottom” & “foundation”.
17. Satan is a jailer of punished souls, because zdynqn means “jailer” (a Persian loanword).
18. Satan tortures the punished souls, because šnd means “torture” (a second-rate anagram pun).
19. Satan is associated with the number 6 & number 666, because št means “six”, and štyn “sixty” (Aramaic spelling).
20. Satan has big hooves, because šˁṭ / šˁṭny means “stomping with the hooves”.
21. Satan specifically has cloven hooves, because sdq means “splitting” & “cloven hooves”.
22. Satan may have bat’s wings, perhaps because Akkadian stn / štn means “bat”. (That’s old though. Perhaps its’s rather a synonym pun, see below.)

There may also be some indirect puns based on synonyms to S-T-N words:

1. Satan is called Beelzebub or Lord of Flies, because another word for “accuser” & “enemy” is bˁl-dbb, which puns with bˁl-dbb / bˁl-zbb “lord of flies”.
2. Satan may have horns, because yet another word for “accuser” is qrṣ, which puns with qrs for “hooked” & “bent”, and with Greek keras for “horn”.
3. Satan offers pacts to people all the time, because yet another word for “accuser” is qbl, and qbl also means “contract” & “agreement”.
4. Satan may have bat’s wings, because Latin vespertilio for “bat” puns with vis perduellio for “enemy power”, which is a synonym for Satan in the meaning of “enemy”. (It also puns with vas perdolu meaning “tool to vex [the people]”.)

Satan’s horns and his color red may also be due to other puns.