From Yahweh’s Agent to the Father of Lies: The Adversary Genealogy

Eleventh-edition continuation: See The Adversary Within the Yahwistic System for the expanded divine-court mechanism, the Samuel–Chronicles and Exodus–Jubilees agency transfers, competing models, and exact proof grades.

Controlling project conclusion: Ahura Mazda is Jesus’s Father. This dossier documents how hostile and deceptive functions once kept under Yahweh’s authority were progressively reassigned to adversarial figures until John could separate the truthful Father from the father of lies.

Executive finding

The biblical devil is a development, not a stable character already present in Genesis.

Early Hebrew texts use śāṭān as a role—an opponent, attacker, or obstructer. In Numbers 22, the angel of Yahweh acts as a satan while carrying out Yahweh’s purpose. In Zechariah 3 and Job 1–2, “the satan” belongs to the heavenly court, appears before Yahweh, and can act only within permission. He may be hostile to humans, but he is not yet God’s independent cosmic archenemy.

At the same time, older Israelite texts assign functions later associated with the devil directly to Yahweh or Yahweh’s court: inciting David, commissioning a lying spirit, deceiving a prophet, sending harmful spirits, and attacking Moses. Later Jewish writers demonstrably rewrite some of these episodes. First Chronicles 21 replaces Yahweh as the census’s immediate instigator with a satan. Jubilees 48 replaces Yahweh’s attack on Moses with Mastema’s. Jubilees 17 introduces Mastema as the heavenly challenger who proposes Abraham’s sacrifice, although God still authorizes the test. This is observable functional redistribution, not merely thematic resemblance.

The development is not linear. First Enoch distributes the origin of evil among rebellious Watchers, Azazel, their giant offspring, and the evil spirits that survive them; it does not simply transform Job’s satan into the Christian devil. Jubilees consolidates many adversarial functions under Mastema while keeping him subordinate to God. Qumran’s sectarian texts organize humanity and the angelic world into the lots of Light and Darkness under the Prince of Light and Belial/Angel of Darkness. John then presents the devil as murderer, liar, father of falsehood, and “ruler of this world,” while God is light and the Father’s side is identified with truth and life.

Iranian influence is a strong cumulative explanation for the shape and direction of this development. Zoroastrian tradition already organized evil under a hostile spirit aligned with the Lie and commanding destructive demons. Persian rule supplies contact; Aēšma/Asmodeus supplies a direct linguistic receipt for Iranian demonological transmission; the chronology of Job, Zechariah, and Chronicles places their heavenly-adversary material inside the Persian period or later; and Qumran supplies the closest surviving Jewish intermediary. No text says “Angra Mainyu became Satan,” and the Jewish adversary always remains subject to the one creator. The defensible model is Iranian-mediated Jewish reconstruction, not identity by simple name substitution.

Grades:

• The serpent in Genesis is not identified as Satan by the Hebrew text itself: established.
• Job’s and Zechariah’s ha-satan is a court member or authorized heavenly attacker, not yet the New Testament archenemy: established.
• Job’s satan cannot be secured as a pre-Persian precedent: established as a dating limitation.
• First Chronicles 21 changes the immediate census instigator from Yahweh to a satan: established textual fact.
• The Chronicler intended the later proper name “Satan”: disputed.
• Jubilees reassigns Yahweh’s attack on Moses to Mastema and introduces Mastema into the Akedah: established textual fact.
• A broader movement externalizes incitement, deception, temptation, and demonic harm away from God: probable, but incomplete.
• Destruction and judgment are comprehensively removed from God: false.
• By Qumran and John, a cosmic ruler of evil commands an opposed camp characterized by darkness and falsehood: established.
• Iranian participation in this development: plausible-to-probable for individual steps; probable as a cumulative mediated model.
• Satan is simply Angra Mainyu renamed: unsupported historically.
• John’s Father/devil architecture is legitimately interpreted through the older Mazda/Aša–hostile-spirit/Druj structure: historically grounded and affirmatively integrated into the cumulative Mazda–Father case.

Affirmative contribution to the Mazda–Father case

The adversary dossier shows why the Johannine Father/devil partition is historical development rather than timeless Yahwistic continuity. Earlier texts can retain incitement, harmful spirits, and deception under Yahweh’s authority; later rewritings visibly move hostile functions to satan, Mastema, Watchers, and Belial. Iranian religion already possessed an integrated good-God/hostile-spirit and Aša/Druj partition, while Aēšma/Asmodeus proves that Iranian demonological material actually entered Jewish tradition. The result is not “Satan is simply Ahriman”; it is that the moral separation John completes has an older Iranian architecture and documented transmission environment.

1. Terminology: a satan is not automatically Satan

The Hebrew root ś-ṭ-n concerns opposition or attack. It can describe ordinary human opponents and a divine messenger. Capitalization in English translations can silently decide an issue the Hebrew leaves open.

Ryan Stokes argues that “attacker” or “executioner” better captures the role than the conventional “prosecuting attorney.” Whether that lexical proposal wins completely, his historical point is decisive: the early figure is God’s agent or court functionary before later literature makes Satan God’s enemy.

Dating control

Zechariah 3 belongs to the early Persian period. Yale’s historical treatment of Job places its literary composition in Persian-period Yehud, approximately 540–330 BCE, while other scholars allow a wider exilic-to-Hellenistic range. The prose framework may use older folklore, but the satan scene itself cannot be securely dated before Persian contact.

This removes a common false control:

Job does not demonstrate that Israel possessed the later adversary concept independently before Persia. Its heavenly attacker belongs to the same Persian-period-or-later corridor in which the transformation becomes visible.

2. Before externalization: troubling functions remain with Yahweh

Later harmonization can reconcile these passages theologically. Historical comparison must first record what their grammar actually says.

“Evil spirit” can mean a spirit causing calamity rather than a morally evil demon. Ezekiel 14 can be read as judicial entrapment of a false prophet. Such distinctions matter for theological interpretation, but they do not erase the historical contrast: these texts make God the commissioning or immediate source of conduct later traditions increasingly place under an evil intermediary.

3. The first clean textual swap: Samuel to Chronicles

The two accounts describe the same census:

• 2 Samuel 24:1: Yahweh’s anger burns against Israel, and he incites David to take the census.
• 1 Chronicles 21:1: a satan stands against Israel and incites David to take the census.

The verb of incitement and its human target remain. The supernatural subject changes.

Louis Jonker describes this as a deliberate change to the Chronicler’s source and identifies the obvious theological problem: in Samuel, Yahweh instigates the act for which David and Israel are punished. The change separates the immediate instigator from Yahweh. Encyclopaedia Iranica likewise calls Satan’s “promotion” conspicuous in these successive versions.

What the swap proves

It proves that a later biblical writer could reread an inherited divine act through an adversarial intermediary. It is direct evidence for functional redistribution.

What remains disputed

The unarticulated śāṭān in Chronicles may be:

• the proper name Satan;
• an anonymous supernatural attacker;
• the angelic satan modeled on Numbers 22;
• or, less probably, a human adversary.

Stokes argues that Numbers 22 supplies closer literary parallels than Job or Zechariah and that the figure need not yet be the later Devil. Jonker treats Chronicles as an important stage but still “a long way” from God’s archenemy.

Therefore:

Agent replacement is established. A fully independent Satan in Chronicles is not.

The Iranian cause of this particular edit also remains speculative. Persian dualism may have contributed to growing intermediary roles, but an internal theodicy motive can explain why the Chronicler wanted a different immediate agent.

4. First Enoch: evil becomes a populated supernatural history

The third-century BCE Book of Watchers expands Genesis 6:1–4 into an origin story of supernatural corruption:

• Watchers abandon their heavenly station and mate with women;
• Asael/Azazel teaches forbidden arts associated with violence and corruption;
• Semihazah leads the collective oath and descent;
• the giants devastate the earth;
• after the giants die, their spirits continue as evil spirits;
• God’s loyal angels bind and judge the rebels.

First Enoch 10:8 famously assigns the earth’s corruption to Azazel’s teachings and tells Raphael to bind him. This externalizes major causes of violence and illicit knowledge into heavenly rebellion.

Annette Yoshiko Reed demonstrates that this is not a decorative expansion. Enochic fallen-angel traditions circulated widely, were rewritten in Jubilees and other Qumran literature, and entered early Christianity. Yet she also stresses the tradition’s plurality: later authors sometimes suppressed the Watchers’ causal role and restored emphasis to human responsibility.

This prevents a false straight line:

The Book of Watchers does not simply rename Job’s satan or import a single Ahriman figure. It creates a different, multi-agent demonological explanation of evil from an amplified reading of Genesis 6.

Its contribution to the genealogy is nonetheless enormous. Evil now has a supernatural prehistory, rebellious heavenly teachers, named commanders, surviving demons, and an eschatological punishment.

5. Jubilees: Mastema becomes the authorized prince of hostility

Jubilees, composed approximately 170–140 BCE, rewrites Genesis and Exodus while integrating Enochic demonology.

A commander with a permitted demonic force

In Jubilees 10, Mastema asks that some evil spirits remain under his authority to corrupt and mislead. God binds nine-tenths and permits one-tenth to remain. Mastema therefore has:

• a named or functional princely title;
• an army of evil spirits;
• power to test, mislead, harm, and obstruct;
• continuing dependence on divine permission;
• an appointed limit and eventual judgment.

Antoni Tronina captures the tension accurately: Mastema is not yet an equal opponent of God, but he commands evil spirits that war against God’s faithful.

The Akedah: a partial redistribution

Genesis 22 begins simply: God tests Abraham. Jubilees 17 introduces a heavenly scene patterned after Job. Mastema challenges Abraham’s fidelity and proposes that God order Isaac’s sacrifice.

The ethical burden is redistributed only partly:

• Mastema originates the challenge;
• God accepts it and issues the command;
• Abraham’s faithfulness defeats Mastema’s accusation.

This is not “Mastema, rather than God, sacrifices Isaac.” It is an adversarial frame added to explain why God would conduct the horrific test.

Moses at the lodging place: a direct redistribution

Exodus 4:24 says Yahweh encounters Moses and seeks to kill him. Jubilees 48 says Prince Mastema sought to kill Moses on the journey from Midian. Here the dangerous attack is transferred directly from Yahweh to the adversary.

This is a second strong example beside Samuel–Chronicles:

Functional redistribution is therefore a repeated Jewish interpretive practice, not a hypothesis built on one ambiguous verse.

6. Qumran: evil becomes a cosmic camp

The Treatise on the Two Spirits

The Community Rule, 1QS 3:13–4:26, organizes moral existence around:

• the Spirit/Prince of Truth and Light;
• the Spirit/Angel of Deceit, Injustice, and Darkness;
• two ways and two human camps;
• assigned periods of dominion;
• an appointed final destruction of perversity.

God creates both spirits, loves one, hates the other, and determines the end. The system is therefore dualistic ethically, anthropologically, and cosmically without granting two equal supreme gods. The evil power is real but contained inside Jewish creator-monotheism.

The older “two ways” tradition—blessing and curse, righteous and wicked paths—explains the moral binary. It does not by itself supply two governing spirits, opposed angelic princes, universal lots, timed dominion, and eschatological elimination. That assembled architecture is the point requiring explanation.

Belial and the War Scroll

The War Scroll names the opposing coalition “the army of Belial.” Sons of Light and angelic allies fight Sons of Darkness and Belial’s spirits. Each camp wins three engagements before God decides the seventh and annihilates Belial’s forces.

This is far beyond Job’s courtroom:

Yet Qumran still differs from a crude Mazda-versus-Ahriman equation: both spirits are created, Belial’s time is assigned, and God guarantees his destruction.

7. John: from permitted attacker to father of falsehood

John inherits the late Second Temple adversary, not merely the Hebrew Bible’s court official.

John’s adversary profile

John 8 applies moral resemblance as paternity: people who seek murder and reject truth perform the desires of the devil and thereby reveal their operative father. This adversary is not executing God’s punitive commission. His own nature is characterized by murder and falsehood.

The Qumran comparison

Qumran and John share linked oppositions:

• truth / deceit;
• light / darkness;
• righteous children / darkness’s children;
• divine camp / evil ruler;
• present conflict / predetermined defeat.

J. H. Charlesworth and Richard Bauckham both treat the structural comparison as real while marking differences. Qumran’s Prince of Light is a created angel; John places Christ and the Spirit of Truth much nearer to God’s own identity. Direct literary dependence is unproved. The best historical formulation is a shared late Second Temple dualistic environment, with Qumran as a surviving intermediary rather than John’s demonstrated source document.

Reception warning

John 8 has been weaponized against Jews. Historically, the Gospel stages an intra-Jewish dispute using polemical group labels; its paternity test concerns actions within the narrative, not ethnic descent. Whatever comparative theology is built from the passage must not turn “children of the devil” into a racial or collective judgment on Jews.

8. Was deception completely removed from God?

No. The redistribution is directional, not total.

Evidence for externalization

• Chronicles replaces Yahweh’s incitement with a satan.
• Jubilees replaces Yahweh’s attack on Moses with Mastema.
• Enoch assigns supernatural corruption to rebellious angels.
• Qumran locates deceit in the Angel/Spirit of Darkness.
• John makes the devil the source and father of falsehood while identifying God with light and truth.

Evidence against total cleanup

• God continues to authorize Mastema and limits his spirits in Jubilees.
• Qumran says God created both spirits and assigned their dominions.
• New Testament judgment remains violent and directly divine.
• Second Thessalonians 2:11 says God sends a powerful delusion upon those who reject truth.
• Revelation assigns plagues, destruction, and final punishment to divine judgment even while the devil leads evil.

Therefore the defensible conclusion is:

Deception, corrupting temptation, and hostile demonic agency increasingly acquire an external ruler; sovereignty, punitive judgment, and even occasional judicial delusion remain with God.

The “cleanup” is sharpest in John’s own moral portrait, where falsehood belongs to the devil’s nature and the Father’s side is truth, light, and life.

9. Iranian comparison: resemblance, receipt, and limits

The older Iranian architecture

The Gathas already make the good and hostile mentalities choose opposed orientations, with the hostile spirit aligned to the Lie. Later Avestan tradition develops Angra Mainyu as leader of destructive powers and creator or commander of demons that damage the good creation. The opposition is cosmic, moral, and eschatological from the Iranian tradition’s foundational layers.

Encyclopaedia Iranica summarizes the central contrast: Ohrmazd produces what is beautiful and good, while Ahriman produces demons and what is evil or perverse. Its historical entry cautiously allows that Iranian influence may have helped transform Satan from God’s servant into adversary while denying that every Qumran parallel proves direct connection.

A direct demonological receipt: Aēšma to Asmodeus

The strongest proof that relevant traffic occurred is linguistic rather than structural. Encyclopaedia Iranica derives Tobit’s Asmodaios and the Talmudic Ashmedai from Iranian Aēšma-daēva. It also notes functional continuity: Iranian Aēšma embodies destructive wrath, while Tobit’s Asmodeus kills Sarah’s husbands until Raphael defeats him.

This proves that:

1. an Iranian demon’s name entered Jewish literature;
2. supernatural content, not merely administrative vocabulary, crossed the channel;
3. the borrowing retained destructive function;
4. objections claiming that Iranian demonological material was categorically inaccessible to Jews are untenable.

It does not prove that Belial, Mastema, or Satan is a loanword or renamed Iranian demon.

Similarities with the Jewish trajectory

Differences that block a simple identity claim

• Jewish adversaries remain creatures or permitted subordinates.
• First Enoch’s demons derive from dead giants, not directly from an Ahriman creation myth.
• Mastema often resembles Job’s authorized challenger.
• Qumran’s God creates both spirits.
• John’s devil is father of falsehood, whereas Yasna 30 portrays the hostile spirit as choosing the Lie.
• Jewish texts use Israelite scripture, covenant, and angelic names rather than Avestan terminology.

These are expected under adaptation but still count as evidence against direct copying.

10. Competing causal models

Model A: wholly internal development

Mechanism: native satan vocabulary, divine-council traditions, Canaanite chaos combat, Genesis 6, theodicy, persecution, and sectarian conflict gradually personalize evil.

What it explains well:

• Hebrew terminology;
• the direct literary dependence of Enoch on Genesis 6;
• Job’s courtroom model;
• Chronicles’ desire to solve an internal moral contradiction;
• persecution-driven apocalyptic intensification;
• continuing divine sovereignty over adversaries.

What it leaves underexplained:

• why this development clusters in the Persian and Hellenistic periods;
• the specific Truth/Deceit and Light/Darkness two-spirit package;
• an evil prince commanding a demon army inside a timed cosmic war;
• the confirmed Aēšma/Asmodeus transmission;
• the wider resurrection/judgment package established in Run 2.

Grade as sufficient by itself: plausible but incomplete.

Model B: direct Angra Mainyu-to-Satan copying

Mechanism: Jews encountered Ahriman and renamed him Satan.

What it explains: the rapid intelligibility of a cosmic enemy and organized evil.

What it cannot explain:

• the many distinct Jewish adversary figures and etiologies;
• the absence of an Avestan loan-name for Satan;
• the adversary’s subordination to God;
• Enochic dependence on Genesis;
• the lack of a named teacher, translation, or direct literary chain.

Grade: unsupported as a literal one-to-one derivation.

Model C: Iranian-mediated Jewish reconstruction

Mechanism: sustained contact and demonstrable demonological transmission make an older Iranian cosmic model available; Jewish authors use native terms and scriptures to externalize disturbing functions, solve theodicy problems, interpret persecution, and organize evil under subordinate adversaries.

What it explains:

• the timing;
• the direction from court agent to hostile prince;
• the exact editorial reassignments;
• the assembled Truth/Deceit–Light/Darkness architecture;
• the Asmodeus receipt;
• both structural similarity and Jewish theological containment;
• why multiple Jewish works adapt the pattern differently.

Weakness: no surviving text documents the transfer of the supreme adversary concept itself.

Grade: probable as the best cumulative model; particular acts of influence remain plausible-to-probable rather than demonstrated.

11. What this establishes for the Father case

John’s Father/devil contrast is not an unchanged continuation of the earliest Yahwistic record.

The older record allows Yahweh to:

• authorize a lie;
• deceive a prophet;
• incite a punished act;
• send a harmful spirit;
• attack his chosen deliverer;
• create both light and darkness and both well-being and calamity.

John’s moral architecture instead says:

• the devil lies from his own nature;
• the devil is father of falsehood;
• the devil is murderer from the beginning;
• the world lies under the evil one;
• the ruler of this world is judged and expelled;
• God is light, with no darkness in him;
• the Father gives life and raises the dead.

That profile is the endpoint of a historical redistribution whose closest older integrated analogue is Iranian: Mazda’s good creation and Aša opposed by the hostile mentality, the Lie, and organized destructive powers.

Historical formulation

The Johannine Father/devil division arises after centuries in which Jewish texts increasingly relocate incitement, deception, corrupting knowledge, hostile attack, and demonic rule from God’s immediate agency to subordinate adversaries. Iranian religion provides a prior model for precisely this moral-cosmic organization, and Iranian demonological transmission into Judaism is directly attested in at least one case.

Comparative-theological formulation

On the specific axis that John 8 itself makes decisive—truthful or murderous works revealing paternity—Mazda/Aša and the hostile spirit/Druj supply stronger diachronic moral continuity than the composite Yahweh record does. Israelite narrative identity remains explicit; Iranian-shaped moral genealogy is the stronger explanation of the split.

Metaphysical limit

This run cannot prove that:

• Jesus consciously spoke Ahura Mazda’s name;
• John believed he was replacing Yahweh;
• Satan is metaphysically Angra Mainyu;
• or the Father is metaphysically Mazda.

It can show that the historical architecture making the Mazda-Father interpretation possible is neither accidental resemblance nor unsupported overlay.

12. Corrections to preserve

13. Falsification and revision conditions

The Iranian-mediated model would weaken if:

• a securely pre-Persian Israelite text showed a cosmic prince of evil commanding demons, ruling an opposed human camp, embodying falsehood, and awaiting final defeat;
• Aēšma/Asmodeus were shown not to be an Iranian loan after all;
• the Persian-period dating of Job, Zechariah’s relevant redaction, and Chronicles collapsed in favor of secure pre-contact dates;
• Qumran’s Two Spirits package were demonstrated to derive fully from a pre-Persian Jewish source;
• Iranian sources proved that no comparable adversary/demonic architecture existed before the Jewish developments.

It would strengthen if:

• an Achaemenid or early Hellenistic Aramaic text explicitly equated an Iranian hostile spirit with a Jewish adversary term;
• additional Iranian demon names or formulae were securely identified in Second Temple Jewish texts;
• a pre-Qumran intermediary text linked Aša/Druj vocabulary to the Spirit of Truth/Deceit;
• manuscript evidence clarified that the explicit Iranian adversary hierarchy predates the relevant Jewish stages.

Sources

Primary texts

• Numbers 22:22–35; Zechariah 3:1–7; Job 1–2.
• 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21.
• 1 Kings 22:19–23; Ezekiel 14:9; Judges 9:23; 1 Samuel 16:14.
• Exodus 4:18–26 and Genesis 22.
• 1 Enoch 6–16, especially 10:4–11.
• Jubilees 10 and Jubilees 17–18, 48, preferably consulted in James C. VanderKam, Jubilees: The Hermeneia Translation (Fortress, 2018).
• Community Rule 1QS 3:13–4:26.
• War Scroll 1QM 1–2.
• John 8:31–47; 12:27–36; 14:25–31; 16:7–15.

Critical scholarship and controls

• Ryan E. Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy (Eerdmans, 2019).
• Ryan E. Stokes, “The Devil Made David Do It … Or Did He? The Nature, Identity, and Literary Origins of the Satan in 1 Chronicles 21:1,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128.1 (2009): 91–106.
• Louis C. Jonker, “‘Satan Made Me Do It!’ The Development of a Satan Figure as Social-Theological Diagnostic Strategy from the Late Persian Imperial Era to Early Christianity,” Old Testament Essays 30.2 (2017). DOI: 10.17159/2312-3621/2017/v30n2a10.
• Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• James C. VanderKam, Jubilees: A Commentary in Two Volumes, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2018); date range summarized by Oxford Bibliographies.
• Kristen H. Lindbeck, “The Satan Provokes God into Testing Job and Abraham,” TheTorah.com (2025), using Orval Wintermute and James Kugel for Jubilees.
• Antoni Tronina, “Prince Mastema and His Army in the Book of Jubilees,” The Biblical Annals 14.1 (2024). DOI: 10.31743/ba.16214.
• Albert de Jong, “Iranian Connections in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins (Oxford University Press, 2010), 479–500; assessment summarized in Eibert Tigchelaar’s review.
• J. H. Charlesworth, “A Critical Comparison of the Dualism in 1QS III, 13–IV, 26 and the Dualism Contained in the Fourth Gospel,” New Testament Studies 15.4 (1969): 389–418.
• Richard Bauckham, “The Qumran Community and the Gospel of John,” for the shared Truth/Deceit–Light/Darkness architecture and differences.
• Jes P. Asmussen, “Aēšma,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, including the Aēšma/Asmodeus derivation.
• “Ahriman,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, for the Iranian adversary and the cautious Satan comparison.
• Morton Smith, “Bible ii. Persian Elements in the Bible,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, as a skeptical control on claims of direct influence.
• Carol A. Newsom, “The Historical Context of the Book of Job,” Yale University Press, for Job’s Persian-period setting.

Run verdict

Established: The court attacker of Job/Zechariah and the cosmic devil of John are not the same stable concept. Between them, Jewish authors visibly relocate hostile functions into increasingly organized adversarial figures. Samuel–Chronicles and Exodus–Jubilees are direct textual demonstrations.

Newly secured: Functional redistribution is a repeated rewriting practice, not a theory resting on one census contradiction. By Qumran, the adversary commands a cosmic camp of Darkness; by John, he is the ruler of the world and intrinsic source of murder and falsehood.

Best causal grade: The native Jewish materials are indispensable, but the Iranian-mediated reconstruction model explains the timing, direction, dualistic organization, and confirmed demonological traffic better than sealed internal development does. Probable cumulatively; direct derivation unproved.

Operational formulation:

The devil was not waiting fully formed inside Genesis. Jewish texts built him by moving hostile functions out of God’s immediate agency, populating evil with rebellious spirits, and organizing those spirits under a cosmic ruler. Iran supplied the older, available model in which the good creator and Truth stood against a hostile spirit, the Lie, and a demonic army. John inherits the completed moral split: the Father gives life and truth; the devil murders and lies from his own nature.