Liking Biblical Villains

[LordProtectorOliverCromwell]

I like Esau more than Jacob. Jacob was a trickster and a charlatan who ruined his entire family because of his despicable behaviour. Glad his uncle tricked him back. The prick.

 

I admire Satan for rebelling against the evil tyrant Yahweh. If he was so great, one-third of the angels wouldn't have rebelled and fallen from heaven. I admire him for helping to awaken humanity from ignorance by persuading Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

 

I admire Nimrod, a proud conqueror who did not fear God and who built the Tower of Babel. I admire Nebuchadnezzar for the same reason. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego deserved to be cast into the fire for their rebellion.

 

I admire Saul for his heroic exploits against the Philistines, for which David stole the credit.

 

I like Judas. He reported the liar Jesus to the authorities.

[Tsathoggua]

Ya got some good instincts! I always thought that Jacob acted like a snivelling little bitch towards Esau, myself.

[TrueFreedom]

There certainly is more than one side to those myths.  Do you take them as literal, historical accounts?

[megasamurai]

Everyone's a villain in the Bible. I do see how some villains show sympathetic traits (Saul showed mercy to an Amelekite and was punished for it), but don't forget the despicable actions of these characters. Saul comitted genocide against the Gibionites and was willing to kill all the other Amelekites. Let's talk Satan. He's a bastard through and through. He killed Job's family, tempted David to take a census knowing that god would send a plague, helped Judas kill Jesus in an agonizing death, and more. I don't think Satanism is a moral alternative to Christianity for this reason. He might have killed less than god, but he still killed. Worshiping any ancient being (believing they are exactly as depicted in the Bible, I am aware of the idea of sanitized versions of the Greco-Roman gods and even cuddly Satan who only respects people's freedom and isn't trying to get people thrown into hell as the Bible states. I think people who worship the sanitized versions of these beings are harmless, but deluded) makes me sick to my stomach. I guess just as Christians ignore any verses that portray god in a negative light, so do Satanists. 

[LogicalFallacy]

I don't look on it a villans and hero's. The Bible is mainly story's to try and explain the world and build a society around it. It has bits of poetry and history thrown in. In Jacob and Esau's case, its highly unlikely they even existed. It's probably a tale to explain the split in the Canaanite society around the 1300 BCE.

 

Regarding Satan being a hero/villan you need to watch some of the great youtubes out there that explain the development of Satan through the bible. In Job, Satan is not the arch enemy of God, but rather a tester sent by God. By the time we get to Revelations some 800 years later the Satan/Devil is the rebellious arch enemy of God. Thus he has taken on characteristics of other Gods in other mythologies. The greeks had stories of supreme Gods casting out defeated Gods from heaven.

[Lilith666]

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego deserved to be burned for not bowing to King Nebuchadnezzar? Nebuchadnezzar sounds an awful lot like someone else we know... (Funny that I never saw the irony until now.)

[megasamurai]

@LogicalFallicy: You are right about Satan being an incredibly inconsistent character. Why did God's alleged sworn enemy take orders from God in the Old Testament. If he hated God so much, why would he heed God's orders not to kill Job? Wouldn't killing God's beloved servant be a great way to spite him? I know that Satan wanted to prove Job's fallibility, but why not kill Job after he passed the test and proved Satan wrong? It's obvious he was just the tempter until the New Testament. 

 

Also, I've always wondered why the alleged main villain of the Bible, doesn't do much of anything. If you count the snake and Lucifer as Satan (a questionable position) Satan appears in seven scenes of the Bible: The fall, the garden, tempting Job, tempting David, tempting Jesus, tempting Judas, and all that stuff in Revelation. That means he appears in <30 pages of the Bible out of 2000 (most of these pages being Revelation). Doesn't the Biblical Satan come across as a lazy ass who doesn't do anything rather than a real villain. Where was he when pharaoh killed all the babies, when Herod killed all the babies, or any other atrocity happened. You can see he was behind everything, but why wasn't he mentioned? If he was so powerful, he could have tried to kill all the apostles and prevent the message from spreading. It's just weird that the main villain of the Bible is practically an extra who doesn't do much of anything.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

The character of "the accuser" (the satan) doesn't seem to amount to much in the Jewish scriptures. I went looking this morning for actual Jewish views on Satan and got mostly Christians giving their Christian view on what Jews believe. But even one Jewish site indicated a belief that this angel influenced the snake to make Eve question god. But they see him as a complete underling in the court of god; they do not incorporate any of the Roman/Greek influences of Pluto/Hades being a god of the underworld, which Christianity doesn't either but LOTS of Christians do. This creates a kind of polytheism, which when one looks at Roman/Greek religion, makes sense but is really incompatible with Jewish belief. In Judaism, this angel makes it difficult for people to choose "good" because then the choice has real meaning.

 

This is probably the best explanation of Jewish belief about this character: http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/12-35.html

 

The most interesting part of this explanation is that they don't believe that angels CAN fall. Thus, no rebellion, no "one-third of the stars swept from the sky", and so on. Angels are almost like a programmed being with only one purpose to which they are assigned by god. Demons were not part of original Judaism, but came in later by influences during the Babylonian captivity. I think that is where they also got the "Star of David", since it is a magic symbol that is very rare in Jewish writings and only after that period.

 

It is clear from the book of Daniel that there were "princes" that opposed Michael and other angels, but that book was written after the Babylonian captivity to create cultural heroes and a thread of belief that their god was still in control despite the captivity (this is my view of it), and incorporates the idea of a pantheon of what amount to gods and demons, but with different titles or purposes.

 

Back to the original post, most of the biblical heroes were jerks. Gideon was a pathetic hypocrite who pulled out the concept of "If Baal is god, then let him hurt me" after destroying the town's place of worship. Then he goes and gets a gang of rowdies and murders the priests of Baal instead of having Yahweh kill them. But apparently the Jews saw it as the same thing, which is why we have so much trouble from fanatic religions today where almighty gods need humans to carry out their vengeance.

[Voice]

You forgot Saul/Paul who encourages suppression of women, rock-bottom wages and slavery. He's a villain whose ideologies persist today.