The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy is a history of the origin, shaping, and reshaping of beliefs about (the) Satan. It traces the development of ideas pertaining to this figure from the earliest references to the Satan in the Hebrew Bible to the varied depictions of the Satan and his evil forces in the Jewish and Christian literature of the late Second Temple period. It explains the origin of this tradition as evidenced in the Hebrew Scriptures and describes the interpretive process that transformed an agent of God into the preeminent antagonist and archenemy of good"--