YHVH HA-SATAN

What it is

Open the oldest scriptures and the Adversary is not a devil with horns. He is an officer of the court: the figure who rises in the divine council to accuse, to test, to drive the defendant out, who walks the earth to and fro assembling the case. He has a seat and he has a job. This book traces that seat through the text, from the council of Ugarit and Deuteronomy 32 through Job and Daniel, and asks who is sitting in it. The answer is not the cheap shock a reader braces for. It is stranger and more exact: YHWH does not become the Adversary; he occupies the Adversary's seat, discharging the accuser's office from his own throne. The charge falls on the station and its occupant. Station, not descent. A forensic reading of the seat of accusation, and of the second seat, the seat of intercession, that answers it.

What is inside

1. The seatThe satan as an office, not a name, in the oldest layer of the Hebrew Bible, and the council it sits in.
2. The Syllogisms of ApellesThe lost logical assault on Genesis by Marcion's disciple, rebuilt as working forms from Ambrose, Origen and Rhodo through Eusebius, and run on Deuteronomy 32. Each argument marked attested fragment or reasoned reconstruction.
3. The Stemma of TestimonyThe gospel critics' test of independent attestation turned on the heresiologists themselves. Eight authorities resolve to five. The core survives the deflation, and the drawing shows where.
4. The second seatThe seat of intercession that answers the seat of accusation, and the hearing at which it is answered.
5. The platesMuch of the argument is carried on original image plates and diagrams, set in EB Garamond. One of them puts the sent one in a corporate office with no procedure for him.

Who it is for

If the Book of Job never sat right: This is why. The prosecutor has a desk, and the book finds it.

If you want the apparatus: The Syllogisms and the stemma are the most rigorous pages in the corpus, and they are marked at every step.

If you came from the Backdrop: Part 1, Who Keeps the House, is the short form. This is the long one.

Where it sits in the corpus

The capstone of the corpus: the warden, read forensically. Companion to The Secret Supper. The series' Backdrop, Part 1, is its summary, and the account's rule holds throughout: a figure in a text, never a people.

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