The Spiritual Beings of Scripture

ISatan in God's court

c. 4174 BCderivedPrimeval

Angels already existed when God made the earth

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?Job 38:4, 7

God is questioning Job, and the question assumes an audience that was already present when the earth was formed. That audience is named in verse 7: the sons of God, a Hebrew phrase the Bible uses for angels. They are described as shouting for joy while the work went on.

Two points follow, and both govern every plate after this one. First, angels are created beings rather than eternal ones. Ezekiel 28:15, addressing the being who became Satan, speaks of "the day that you were created," and Colossians 1:16 lists thrones, dominions, principalities and powers among the things God made. Second, angels existed before human beings did. Every conflict in this exhibit is therefore between a creature and its Creator, never between two equals.

Genesis 1 — the globe’s creation marker.

angel

A spiritual being created by God. The underlying Hebrew and Greek words both mean "messenger."

sons of God

Hebrew bene ha-elohim. In Job and in Genesis 6 the phrase refers to angels. The World English Bible renders it "God's sons."

IISatan's power on earth

c. 4170 BCundatedPrimeval

God sentences the serpent in Eden and announces its defeat

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.Genesis 3:15

Genesis 3:15 records the first appearance in the Bible of the being later called Satan. The scene is not a negotiation and not a trial: God pronounces a sentence. The sentence already contains the outcome — a descendant of the woman will crush the serpent's head, while the serpent will only strike his heel. Christian readers from the second century onward have understood this verse as the first promise of Christ's victory.

The Bible never says when Satan rebelled. It gives only a window. At the close of the sixth day, Genesis 1:31 records that everything God had made was "very good." By Genesis 3:1 the serpent is already working against God. The rebellion happened somewhere between those two verses, and the New Testament narrows it no further, saying only that the devil "has been sinning from the beginning" (1 John 3:8).

The globe’s Fall marker. Satan’s own rebellion falls somewhere between this and creation.

Satan

From Hebrew ha-satan, "the accuser" or "the adversary." The Bible uses the word both as a job description and as a name.

the serpent

Revelation 12:9 identifies "the old serpent" of Eden as "the devil and Satan." That identification is why this plate belongs to Satan's thread.

IIIThe angels imprisoned before the Flood

c. 2600–2518 BCundatedPrimeval

A different group of angels sinned before the Flood and has been imprisoned ever since

Angels who didn’t keep their first domain, but deserted their own dwelling place, he has kept in everlasting bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.Jude 6

The angels described in Jude 6 are the exhibit's second thread, and it is a short one, because the Bible closes it in a single act.

Jude describes angels who abandoned the position assigned to them and left their proper dwelling. God, he says, has kept them in chains, in darkness, awaiting judgment. Second Peter 2:4 describes the same group, says God cast them into Tartarus, and then in the very next verse moves directly to the Flood and to Noah. That adjacency is why this plate carries a picture of the Flood: the two events sit side by side in the text itself. Both passages are traditionally read alongside Genesis 6:1–4, where the sons of God take human wives and the Nephilim appear on the earth.

These angels are kept separate from Satan's angels throughout this exhibit for one reason. The Bible places the two groups in opposite conditions at the present moment: this group is in chains and has been since before the Flood, while Satan, in the same New Testament, "walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8). Combining them is common in later Christian writing, but the Bible does not state it, and these texts work against it.

From the globe’s “earth filled with violence” marker to its Flood marker.

Tartarus

A Greek word for the deepest prison beneath the underworld, where Greek myth confined the defeated Titans. It appears once in the New Testament, at 2 Peter 2:4.

Nephilim

A Hebrew word appearing only at Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, describing beings on the earth before the Flood. The Greek Old Testament translated it "giants."

Watchers

The term for these angels in 1 Enoch, and in the Bible only at Daniel 4:13, 17 and 23. 1 Enoch is scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon and in no other.

IVThe fallen angels worshipped as gods

c. 2417 BCderivedPrimeval

At Babel the nations are divided, and each is allotted to a spiritual power

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the children of men, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel. For Yahweh’s portion is his people.Deuteronomy 32:8–9

Genesis 11 ends with the languages confused and humanity scattered. Deuteronomy 32 says what happened at the same moment on the other side: as the nations were divided, they were also apportioned. Verse 9 makes the contrast — Yahweh keeps one people directly, and the rest are handed to someone.

Deuteronomy 4:19 names who: God "allotted" the sun, moon and stars, "all the army of the sky," to the peoples under heaven. Daniel 10 shows two of those powers by name and title, a "prince of the kingdom of Persia" who resists an angel for twenty-one days and a "prince of Greece" behind him. Psalm 82 shows God putting those same beings on trial for ruling their nations unjustly, and sentencing them: "you shall die like men."

This plate is the origin point for everything on this thread. Every national religion in the exhibit begins here, at the dispersion — which is why they are contemporaries rather than a sequence.

The globe’s Babel marker, the last event of its Primeval act.

allotted

Deuteronomy 4:19 uses a word of formal assignment, the same term used for dividing land among tribes. The nations were not abandoned; they were assigned.

prince

In Daniel 10 the word denotes a spiritual ruler set over a nation, not a human king. Michael is called Israel's prince in the same passage.

VThe fallen angels worshipped as gods

after c. 2417 BCundatedPatriarchs onward

In India a shining figure descends from the mountain and teaches men to meditate

But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God, and I don’t desire that you would have fellowship with demons.1 Corinthians 10:20

Paul is not saying the gods of the nations are nothing. Two verses earlier he says the idol itself is nothing — and then says the sacrifice reaches something real. The word he uses is demons.

The Hindu tradition tells the origin of yoga in a form the previous plate has already prepared. Shiva is Adiyogi, the first yogi: he comes down from Mount Kailash, and on the bank of a lake he transmits the practice to seven men who wait for him, the Saptarishi, who then carry it to the rest of the world. He is not born into it and he is not taught it. He arrives with it, from a mountain, and hands it down.

Set that beside 1 Enoch 6 and the structure is not similar but identical: two hundred beings descend onto a mountain — Hermon — and give humanity knowledge it did not have, and the knowledge is a real body of skill, taught deliberately, to named recipients.

On this chronology every national religion begins at the dispersion. The surviving Hindu texts are later than the events they record, as are the Mesopotamian and Greek ones.

Adiyogi

"The first yogi." The name for Shiva as the origin and first teacher of yoga in Hindu tradition.

Saptarishi

The seven sages who receive the transmission from Shiva and disseminate it. Named as a group throughout Hindu literature.

Kailash

A mountain in the Tibetan plateau, treated in Hindu tradition as Shiva's dwelling. The descent is from a summit, as at Hermon in 1 Enoch.

VIThe fallen angels worshipped as gods

after c. 2417 BCundatedPatriarchs onward

In Canaan a storm god takes the title Lord, and Israel is warned by name

They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods that they didn’t know, to new gods that came up recently, which your fathers didn’t dread.Deuteronomy 32:17

Baal is the god this exhibit can document most closely, because his own worshippers' library survives. The name is a title rather than a personal name — it means lord, master, owner — and the Old Testament treats his cult as Israel's central and recurring temptation rather than as a foreign curiosity.

Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel, which the globe places at 860 BC, is not a local dispute about religion. It is a test of which being actually answers, staged in front of 450 prophets. One side calls all day and cuts itself and receives nothing. The other answers with fire.

Deuteronomy 32:17 gives the category these belong to, and it is the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 10:20 nearly fifteen hundred years later: demons.

Begins with the dispersion, like every religion on this thread. Israel's direct confrontations with it are datable: Carmel at 860 BC on the globe's scale.

Baal

Hebrew and Ugaritic for "lord" or "master." A title applied to the storm god Hadad, and used across the Levant.

Molech

The god to whom children were burned, forbidden by name in Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–5. 2 Kings 23:10 places the site in the valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem.

VIIThe fallen angels worshipped as gods

after c. 2417 BCundatedPatriarchs onward

In Greece the gods live on a mountain, take human wives, and father heroes

God presides in the great assembly. He judges among the gods. … I said, “You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless you shall die like men, and fall like one of the rulers.”Psalm 82:1, 6–7

Psalm 82 puts the gods of the nations on trial and passes sentence. They are addressed as real beings with real authority, charged with governing unjustly, and told they will die like men.

Greek religion describes the same arrangement from inside it. The gods live on a mountain, hold assembly, quarrel over which peoples and cities they favour, and — the detail that matters most for this exhibit — take human wives and father children by them. Hesiod calls the resulting generation the race of heroes, half-divine, and places it between the bronze race that was destroyed and the iron race that followed.

Genesis 6:4 describes the same category and the Septuagint translators, working in Alexandria in the third century BC, translated the Hebrew Nephilim with the Greek word gigantes — giants. They reached for the vocabulary their own religion already had, because their own religion already had the story.

Begins with the dispersion. Hesiod writes it down around the eighth century BC, describing an age he places long before himself.

race of heroes

In Hesiod's Works and Days, the fourth of five ages: demigods born of gods and mortal women, placed between the bronze race's destruction and the present iron age.

Septuagint

The Greek translation of the Old Testament, made in Alexandria from the third century BC. Its rendering of nephilim as gigantes shaped every later Western picture of a giant.

VIIISatan in God's court

c. 2000–520 BCundatedPatriarchs — Exile

Satan appears in God's court and asks permission to test Job

Now on the day when God’s sons came to present themselves before Yahweh, Satan also came among them. Yahweh said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, “From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”Job 1:6–7

Long after the events in Eden, Satan is still admitted to God's presence. The passage describes a set occasion on which the angels present themselves before God, and Satan arrives with them. God questions him, and he replies that he has been moving about the earth. He then accuses Job of serving God only for what he gets out of it, and asks permission to strip Job of his possessions. Permission is granted with one restriction: he may touch what Job owns, but not Job himself. In Job 2 he returns, asks for more, and is granted more — with a second restriction: he may not take Job's life.

The Bible shows this same court three more times. In 1 Kings 22:19–22 the prophet Micaiah sees God enthroned with the angels ranged on either side; God asks who will persuade King Ahab into a fatal battle; a spirit volunteers, is questioned on its method, and is authorised. In Zechariah 3:1–2, around 520 BC, Satan stands at the right hand of Israel's high priest to accuse him — the position a prosecutor occupied in an ancient court — and that request is refused outright, the rebuke repeated twice. And in the account of King David's census, 1 Chronicles 21:1 says Satan moved David to number Israel while 2 Samuel 24:1 says God did: one act, credited to both.

Together these passages settle a question readers often raise. Satan was not confined to earth after Eden. He moved between the earth and God's presence, he acted only after asking, and he was answered — sometimes with a limit, sometimes with a refusal.

Job itself is undated. The three other court scenes are datable: the census c. 1000 BC, Micaiah c. 853 BC, Zechariah c. 520 BC.

present themselves

The wording describes a formal appearance before a ruler, as a royal court convening on an appointed day.

divine council

The assembled angels, pictured as a court around God's throne. Also translated "the army of heaven" (1 Kings 22:19) and "the council of the holy ones" (Psalm 89:7).

IXSatan in God's court

11 September, 3 BCcontestedChrist & the Church

A sign appears in the sky: a woman clothed with the sun, and a dragon waiting

A great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. … And another sign was seen in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon … His tail drew one third of the stars of the sky, and threw them to the earth.Revelation 12:1–4

Revelation 12 does not describe one moment. It opens with a sign in the sky, moves to a child being born and caught up to God, and only then reports a war. Those are separated in time, and this exhibit separates them: the sign here, the war on plate XII.

The sign is the one item in the chapter that can be checked against the sky. The woman is the constellation Virgo, the sun clothes her when it passes through her figure, and the moon is beneath her feet for the short interval each year when a new moon sets in that position. Ernest L. Martin ran the calculation and found a single window: the evening of 11 September, 3 BC, from about 6:15 when the sun set to about 7:45 when the moon set. He argued that this dates the birth, and the chapter agrees with him about what the sign accompanies — verse 2 has the woman in labour.

What cannot be dated the same way is the dragon. Readers have proposed Draco, Hydra, Serpens and combinations of them, and read "a third of the stars" as Hydra's share of the sky or as a meteor storm. Those proposals do not agree with each other and none produces a date. The woman does.

Ernest L. Martin's calculation of the Virgo configuration, in The Star That Astonished the World. Note that it does not match the globe, which places the nativity at 5 BC — a two-year disagreement this exhibit does not resolve.

Virgo

The constellation the woman is identified with. The sun passes through it each year in late summer; the described configuration also needs the moon at her feet, which narrows it to hours.

contested

This exhibit's dating word for an event whose position readers genuinely dispute, as against one that is merely imprecise.

XSatan's power on earth

c. AD 27reckonedChrist & the Church

Satan offers Jesus every kingdom on earth, and Jesus does not deny they are his to offer

Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory. He said to him, “I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me.”Matthew 4:8–9

The devil takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows him every kingdom on earth, and offers all of them in exchange for worship. Jesus refuses — but note the grounds on which he refuses. He answers that worship belongs to God alone. He does not dispute that the kingdoms are Satan's to give.

Elsewhere the New Testament lets the same claim stand. Paul calls Satan "the god of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:4) and "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2), and John writes that "the whole world lies in the power of the evil one" (1 John 5:19).

This passage is where the two halves of the exhibit meet. What Satan does inside God's court is one line of the story. What he does with power on earth is the other. Here both are visible in a single exchange.

Counted from the globe’s nativity marker at 5 BC.

the devil

From Greek diabolos, "slanderer" or "false accuser." The New Testament uses it interchangeably with Satan.

XISatan in God's court

AD 30reckonedChrist & the Church

Satan asks for Peter by name, and Jesus prays against the request

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have all of you, that he might sift you as wheat, but I prayed for you, that your faith wouldn’t fail.Luke 22:31–32

Jesus tells Simon Peter that Satan has asked to have him and the other disciples, in order to sift them as a farmer sifts wheat. The Greek verb behind "asked to have" is a formal one: to demand something by request, as a claim.

Jesus does not say the request was refused. He says that he prayed for Peter — that Peter's faith would not fail — and then tells him what to do afterward, which assumes the sifting will in fact take place. Within hours Peter denies knowing Jesus three times, and after the resurrection he is restored.

This is the last request the Bible records Satan making. On the next plate, the standing that allowed him to make such requests is taken away.

The night before the crucifixion, the same year as the globe’s Pentecost marker.

sift as wheat

Shaking harvested grain so the chaff separates and falls away. The image is of violent testing that leaves only what is solid.

XIISatan in God's court

AD 30contestedChrist & the Church

Satan loses his access to God's court

The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. … the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them before our God day and night.Revelation 12:9–10

Revelation describes a war in heaven. The angel Michael and the angels with him fight a dragon, the dragon loses, and "no place was found for them any more in heaven." A voice from heaven then names precisely what has ended: "the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them before our God day and night."

The activity being ended is the accusing — the same activity seen in Job 1 and Zechariah 3 on plate VIII. This is therefore not the moment Satan became evil, which happened long before Genesis 3. It is the moment he lost the standing to prosecute.

When this occurs is debated among readers. The sign that opens this chapter is on plate IX, and it is datable. The war is not. In the order of the vision itself it follows the male child being "caught up to God" in verse 5, which many take to be the ascension of Christ, and that is why it sits here rather than beside the sign. Jesus said near the end of his ministry, "Now the prince of this world will be cast out" (John 12:31).

Placed at the ascension because the vision's own order puts the war after the child is caught up. The sign that opens the same chapter is separated out to plate IX, where it can be dated astronomically.

Michael

An archangel, named in Daniel 10 and 12, in Jude 9, and here. Daniel calls him the prince who stands guard over Israel.

the dragon

Verse 9 identifies the dragon explicitly as the serpent of Eden, the devil and Satan — four names for one figure.

XIIISatan's power on earth

c. AD 95reckonedChrist & the Church

Revelation gives Satan's throne a location: the city of Pergamum

I know your works and where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. … in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.Revelation 2:13

In the letter to the church at Pergamum — a real city on the west coast of what is now Turkey — Christ tells that congregation he knows where they live: "where Satan's throne is." He names a member of the church, Antipas, who was killed there.

This is the only place in the Bible that gives Satan's seat a geographic location, and the letter treats it as somewhere a person could walk to. Pergamum held several candidates. An enormous altar stood on the acropolis. The city had one of the earliest temples anywhere to the worship of a living Roman emperor. And it held a famous healing sanctuary whose emblem was a serpent coiled on a staff. Readers have argued for each. The letter does not say which is meant.

The date Revelation is usually assigned. The letter describes the city as it stood then.

Pergamum

A wealthy Greek city in the Roman province of Asia, near modern Bergama in Turkey. One of the seven churches addressed in Revelation 2 and 3.

Antipas

A Christian of Pergamum, named here as having been killed for his faith. Nothing further about him is recorded in the Bible.

XIVSatan in God's court

Still futureundatedRevelation

Satan is imprisoned, released, and finally judged

He seized the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan … and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss … After this, he must be freed for a short time.Revelation 20:2–3

Revelation 20 brings Satan's thread to an end, and it does so in stages rather than in one act. An angel seizes him, binds him, and shuts him in the abyss for a thousand years. When that period ends he is released for a short time. Verse 10 gives the final outcome: he is thrown into the lake of fire.

The two threads of this exhibit finish in the same place but arrive by different routes and on different timetables. The angels of Jude 6 were imprisoned once, before the Flood, and have simply waited since. Satan is sentenced in Eden, keeps his access to God's court through most of the Bible, loses it, is bound, is released, and is judged last of all.

The globe’s final act, which has not happened.

the abyss

Greek abyssos, "the bottomless place." In Revelation it is a holding prison, distinct from the lake of fire, which is the final destination.

a thousand years

The period described in Revelation 20:2–7. Christians differ over whether it denotes a literal span or a symbolic one; this exhibit takes no position.