It gets tricky when you try to translate from an ancient language to a modern language.
I posted on the same passage a while back, where the translators chose different English words (#465):
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-chat/ot-the-religion-thead/msg114394/#msg114394
[...]
Ian, I am sorry I missed that post of yours...
Yet, the people of faith will literally adapt their way of living and thinking to these ancient and equivocal pieces of
social engineering directives...
What I was trying to provoke with my Rolling Stones' line of their song "
Sympathy for the Devil" is a reaction to that powerful and dreaded dogmatic word, called the "Satan."
So, let's have yet another look at some historical facts, not so widely advertised...
"Satan" is not exactly the Devil, as Christianity has established.
Satan, actually, is a Hebrew term meaning "opponent; adversary; the one who plots against another" and it comes from the Classical Greek adjective
satanios or
setanios that means the adverse; the contrary; the drawn away one. Before the Christian Church associated Satan to their fictional entity called The Devil, the term "satan" was initially used by the ancient Jewish priesthood to accuse those who gave shelter to the Jewish subjects that started fleeing from Judea in the second century BCE because they could not pay their monstrous taxes to their priesthood (= their bankers, who lost a major portion of taxation due to migration). Please, search for the
silver half-shekel of the sanctuary, a special coin and the only form of money Judeans could use to pay their taxes to their priesthood because it did not have any pagan inscriptions on it, and how their priesthood controlled that coin's value through its manipulated scarcity. Rings any bells?
Another little known fact is the distinction between the
Hellenes and the
Greeks. Since the third century BCE, Alexander the Great had conquered all the eastern Mediterranean countries, and established the Greek language, customs and civilisation. By the next century,
Hellenes were called all the people who were speaking the Greek language, either were they natives of Hellas or Hellenised natives of the conquered countries, since the Hellenic language, customs and civilisation were spreading rapidly all over the eastern Mediterranean world like a wildfire in dry grass. It was then that the Judeans begun adapting the foreign language and customs, like wearing clothing that leaved uncovered almost their entire body or their latest terrible habit to wash naked in public or private baths despite their horrible religious doctrines, as reported in the Old Testament... Of course, their priesthood was scared to death with the imminent extinction of their ruling. It was then, the third century BCE, that the Jewish priesthood conceived their monstrous plan to
translate their sacred books, the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), into Greek by assigning this job to Jewish scholars, called, the 72 (or 70) Elders.
So, "
Satans" were initially called the
Ethnic Hellenes (not the Christianized ones but the native ones who were advocating free and rational thinking) who were giving shelter to the migrating Judeans, since what we call "
Greeks" were the
Christian converts of Hellenic descend, especially after the
genocide of 19 million Hellenes (out of a total population of 21 millions) that took place right after the fourth century CE by the "loving, humane and forgiving" Judeo-Christianity, which was a Jewish sect that was initially created by the Pharisees, using their high ranking member called
Saul of Tarsus (or
Paul the Apostle), to distort the ideas of
Rabbi Joshua ben Josef (aka,
Excellent Joshua, son of Josef), that Essene who dared to stand against the Pharisees who finally got him crucified...
Of course, Christianity continued to use the term "Satans" for the Ethnic Hellenes, who were not able to be convinced to throw rationality out of the window, or to worship something so ugly and irrational, compared to their own spiritual heritage, or to mutilate their penises because they rightfully considered the Jewish legacy of
circumcision, this
indelible marking of religious ownership, as a form of bodily mutilation and, hence, "barbaric."
By the way, as the term "Satan" means the adversary, the term "Devil" comes from the Latin
Diabolus, coming from Greek
Diabolos, meaning "accuser; slanderer; calumniator" from the verb
diaballen, meaning "to slander."
As for me, I was raised an Otrhodox Christian; but I got better.
-George
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