This entry is adapted from a longer one here.

Consider the following texts:

2 Samuel 24:1 ESV
Again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, number Israel and Judah.”

1 Chronicles 21:1 NRSVUE
Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel.

These texts record the same event. Yet, the first account says it was God who incited David, while the second says it was Satan. Which is it?

The short answer that may scandalize some readers is that “the LORD” and “Satan” in these passages refer to the same person. Yahweh is the Satan. How so?  There is no defined, singular Devil in the Hebrew Bible. It may be hard today to imagine this, but the notion of a divine archenemy working against God’s plans for the ancient Israelites developed slowly over time. Some English translations continue to have “Satan” in some verses, leading uninformed readers to conclude that God’s cosmic enemy is the referent. Thankfully, many modern translations now have footnotes explaining the term. 

The key issue here concerns Hebrew grammar rules. The Hebrew word satan is not a proper noun; it is not a person’s name. It is a noun deriving from a related verb that means “to be at enmity with” or “be hostile toward.” The word satan means “accuser” or “adversary.” An adversary can be human or divine. In the Hebrew Bible, satan occurs 27 times as a noun. Below are some examples: 

“Then the LORD raised up against Solomon an adversary [satan], Hadad the Edomite, from the royal line of Edom.”—1 Kings 11:14

“But the princes of the Philistines were angry with him; so the princes of the Philistines said to him, ‘Make this fellow return, that he may go back to the place which you have appointed for him, and do not let him go down with us to battle, lest in the battle he become our adversary [satan]. For with what could he reconcile himself to his master, if not with the heads of these men?’”—1 Samuel 29:4

“And the Angel of the LORD said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out [as satan] to stand against you, because your way is perverse before Me.’”—Numbers 22:32

Notice how the term refers to both human and divine beings in these texts.  

Sometimes, satan presents with a definite article (which in Hebrew is a letter prefixed to the word). Just as is true in English, Hebrew grammar forbids prefixing the definite article to a person’s name. Hence, we do not say, “The Sade,” “The Paul,” or “The Buhari.” We name the persons “Sade,” “Paul,” and “Buhari.” Seventeen times in the Old Testament, satan presents with a definite article. Such passages include all the references in Job. Hence, these verses in Job do not name a particular person. The accuser in Job is simply doing a God-approved job, much like the lying spirits who enticed Ahab to his death in 1 Kings 22:19-23. 

That leaves us with ten occasions when satan does not have a definite article with it. Almost all the ten anarthrous occurrences are straightforward. Michael Heiser writes, “Of these ten, seven refer to human beings and two refer to the Angel of Yahweh for sure. The lone outlier is 1 Chron 21:1.” The three passages cited above fall into this category of anarthrous occurrences. Hence, there is only one occurrence of satan in the Hebrew Bible without a definite article that may potentially refer to God’s archenemy. But does the passage refer to the Devil?

Here is 1 Chronicles 21:1-2 again:

“Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.”

This text is a reworked version of an older text in 2 Samuel 24:1-2:

Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, “Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.”

These passages say the same thing, except for the Chronicler’s description of who incited David. How are we to deal with this observation? Well, the obvious first choice is to claim a contradiction here. If “Satan” here refers to the Devil, then we have two different instigators in the passages. This conclusion, however, is quite unlikely. The Chronicler is doubtful to have accurately reproduced the other details in the account but missed the identity of the instigator. It is even more unlikely that a religious Jewish Chronicler would mistake the identity of Yahweh for Yahweh’s archenemy. Another common idea is that the Chronicler sought to dissociate Yahweh from such an evil act by reinterpreting the 2 Samuel passage. While this idea is more plausible than the first, it has its own problems. For example, the Chronicler does not show a similar concern to dissociate Yahweh from evil in his account of King Ahab’s death in 1 Kings 22.

So, many of the offered solutions do not adequately account for the data. There is a better alternative, one that posits that the labels “Satan” and “the LORD” pick out the same referent. That is, Yahweh is the satan of 1 Chronicles 21. There is only one other place in the Old Testament where satan occurs without a definite article and refers to a divine being. That verse is in Numbers 22, the famous story of Balaam, Balak, and the talking donkey. Verses 21 and 22 say the following:

So Balaam rose in the morning, saddled his donkey, and went with the princes of Moab. Then God’s anger was aroused because he went, and the Angel of the LORD took His stand in the way as an adversary against him. And he was riding on his donkey, and his two servants were with him.

The translators here opted for “as an adversary.” But the term is the same as that found in 1 Chronicles 21:1. If we translate consistently, verse 22 above will read, “the Angel of the LORD took His stand in the way as Satan against him.” In other words, the Angel of Yahweh is a satan against Balaam. Taking this insight into the 1 Chronicles passage, we may conclude that the “Satan” there is Yahweh. Michael Heiser summarises:

This connection between the word satan and the Angel of Yahweh is crucial to understanding the discrepancy between 1 Chronicles 21:1 and 2 Samuel 24:1. In both accounts the Angel is present as the one who dispenses God’s judgment upon David (1 Chron 21:14-15; 2 Sam 24:15-16). Since God and the Angel of the Lord were frequently identified with each other in the Old Testament (e.g., Exod 3; Judges 6), the best solution seems to be that we don’t have Satan, God’s cosmic enemy, in the Chronicles passage. Rather, we have two writers both referring to God—one using “Yahweh” and the other referring to Yahweh in human form, the Angel (cp. Joshua 5:13-15) in another adversarial role.

As we have argued elsewhere, the Angel of Yahweh is a second Yahweh person, since he self-identifies as God in the Hebrew Bible. 

So, we see that the idea of a fully developed archenemy of God does not exist in the Old Testament. “Satan” was no proper noun. But the seeds of the concept exist. Several Jewish writers would later develop the idea of a divine archenemy starting from Genesis 6:5. This enemy figure was developed under different names and attributes, such as Asael (or Mastema), Angel of Darkness, and Belial—and it is not certain that these terms for an archenemy pick out the same person. By Jesus’ time, however, the idea of “the Devil” or “Satan” was essentially fully formed. The New Testament characterizes the Devil in different ways. The Devil is to be resisted (James 4:7); he has been sinning from the beginning (1 John 3:8); he prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8); he tempted Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4); he prompted Judas to betray Jesus (John 13:2); he holds the power of death (Hebrews 2:14); he was a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44); he leads some Christians astray (1 Timothy 5:15); he masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14); and he tries to outwit Christians ( 2 Corinthians 2:11). It is also highly likely that some first-century Jews anachronistically read the Devil into older Jewish texts. For instance, Revelation 20:2, speaks of the “ancient serpent,” probably referring to the serpent in Eden. However, Genesis 3:1 introduces the serpent as merely “more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.” There is no notion of the serpent being the devil at this point. It was just a wild animal that God made earlier during the creation week.

So, who incited David? Yahweh did, as a satan against David.

Works Cited

Heiser, Michael. “The Absence of Satan in the Old Testament.” Drmsh.com, Feb 1, 2010, The Absence of Satan in the Old Testament – Dr. Michael Heiser (drmsh.com).

Heiser, Michael. “The Absence of Satan in the Old Testament.” Drmsh.com, Nov 15, 2013, Yahweh and Satan in Samuel and Chronicles – Dr. Michael Heiser (drmsh.com).