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eBook details

• Title: Speak of the Devil! (Classical Blather) (Essay)
• Author : Verbatim
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 75 KB

Description

Although we may be tempted to lose heart because we appear to live in an age of increasing religious polarization and sectarian hostility, it is reassuring to recall that at bottom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share some core beliefs, one of them being the chief source of temptation itself. Whether under the name of Iblis, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, the Prince of the Air, or Old Scratch, the Devil as the chief of all devils and embodiment of all that is evil pervades the formal theological beliefs and folk consciousness of well over half the world's population. (1) Other societies may have demons (2) or divinities with certain attributes they share with the Arch-Fiend--ruler of the underworld (Hellenic Hades, Sumerian Ereshkigal), evil trickster (Norse Loki), after-death punisher of the wicked (Egypt's crocodile-headed devourer Amemait) (3)--but only People of the Book (4) can boast an Adversary who has it all. He's the Enemy (5) we love to hate; yet as the proverb from which we took this column's title goes on to say, Western society has often been squeamish about saying his name aloud for fear it will cause him to materialize in front of us (6) and do us harm. To get around this, a generous assortment of euphemisms have been invented: Father of Lies, the Dickens or the Deuce, (7) Old Harry/Scratch/Nick, (8) the Evil One, the Tempter, Prince of Darkness, and so on. The word devil comes from Latin diabolus, a straight borrowing of Greek diabolos, "slanderer" (from dia- "against," and ballein "to throw"), itself a gloss for Hebrew satan "adversary" (from satan, "to plot against")--in St. Jerome's Vulgate simply rendered as a transliterated proper noun, Satanas. (9)

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