 I want to try to explain a statement that you would have noticed in your reading, perhaps heard me say at some other time or noticed on my blog, but it's a natural part of the discussion in this class dealing with what the Old Testament says about the character that we know as Satan. And that is that I've made the statement before, and again you're reading reinforce this that in the Old Testament, the word Satan in Hebrew is not a proper personal name. There is no Satan character in the Old Testament. Now what I mean by that is that the word Satan is not used to name God's great enemy in the Old Testament. God certainly has a great enemy in the Old Testament. You go back to Genesis 3 with the Nakhash, the serpent, who in the Old Testament is never called Satan, by the way. So God definitely has an enemy. It's just that this word isn't applied to that enemy as a proper name in the Old Testament. That's going to be something that develops in the inter-testamental period and the New Testament. And I want to show you the grammatical reason for that. So here on our screen I have a beginning Hebrew grammar open to its section on the definite article. This is Futato's beginning biblical Hebrew that we use in the Memorah first year Hebrew course. Up here in 5.6, just so that we're all on the same page knowing what the definite article is, the definite article is the word the. It's that word that stands before a noun that makes it definite as opposed to an indefinite article like in English, a car or an apple. In English it's the word the. Well in Hebrew, Hebrew appends something to a noun to identify it as definite. And the absence of that thing would therefore make it indefinite. So what Hebrew does is it appends something in front of a noun that's made up of three parts. The letter hey, a patak, which is this little line under the hey, so you have the ha sound. And third, a strong dagesh, which is a dot in the first letter of the word. And here are some examples. Suss is the horse, haddavar, the word, hamelik, the king. If we took the definite article off these, if we just had suss it would be a horse and so on and so forth. And when we get to guttural letters, there are four guttural letters in Hebrew plus resh, you won't get this dot. And I'm not going to bother taking you through that section just so that we have a basic understanding of what the definite article is. I'm going to switch to a Hebrew reference grammar. This is the leading Hebrew reference grammar in our time anyway. And I have a section of it marked out here where Joanne and Moroka discuss the definite article as it pertains to proper nouns. And you'll notice the statement right here. No proper noun of person, a proper personal noun, takes the article. Not even when it has the form of an adjective or a participle. The only exception to this, and it isn't really an exception, is the phrase half of the tribe of Manasseh. Here we have ha menaseh. A literal translation would be half of the tribe that is Manasseh would be how you would translate that very literally. So in English it would be the half tribe of Manasseh, so the the would go with the half. But we don't have a proper personal name that is called the manasseh or the Abraham. You don't have anything like that in Hebrew by rule of Hebrew grammar. We don't do that in English either. So in other words, if I could illustrate it with a PowerPoint slide. Ha, the hey plus the patak with the dot, plus a noun. When you get that combination that is not going to be a proper personal noun. That means that if we see ha, there's our dot, ha satan, then ha satan is not a proper personal noun. Now we're back here in our software and I want to show you in an inner linear what we have going here. This is Job 2.1, this is one of the more famous examples of quote unquote Satan in the Old Testament. This is with the sons of God. This is the prelude to the book of Job and God and the satan are going to have this conversation that leads to Job's suffering. We have right here, ha satan. We have the hey with the patak, there's our satan word. Now I'm going to search this lemma, in other words all the places where satan occurs with or without the article. Just the lemma and I'll slide this over here and here's what we get. Satan occurs 27 times in 23 verses and I want you to see something. In all the passages that you would think of as Satan in the Old Testament, satan has the article, which means it's not a proper personal noun in any of those passages. Let's take a look. Zechariah 3, 1 and 2, this is when ha satan is standing and Joshua the High Priest is there with the dirty clothes and whatnot, the heavenly scene. That's typically understood as Satan, God's arch enemy. If you look at the occurrences, we have ha satan, ha satan, ha satan. It's not a proper personal name. All of the occurrences in Job, every one of them, you'll notice. Let's just go through all of them. Ha satan, ha satan, ha satan, ha satan, so on and so forth. I'm not just going to repeat the word entirely for every instance. But if you look here, the definite article is on every one of these. So in Job, that famous Job 1 and 2 scene, ha satan right here. Job, his fate is not in the hands of God and God's great enemy, Satan, the devil. It's a conversation between God and ha satan, the adversary, which in biblical theology in its ancient Near Eastern context is an actual office or sort of role within the Divine Council. And we'll talk about that in this class in conjunction with some other things we read and see. But I just wanted you to see the textual basis for the issue of satan not being a proper personal noun in the Old Testament. Now, there are a few places where satan occurs without the article and you think, wow, maybe there we have a divine being, the arch enemy of God. Well, that actually doesn't work because when satan is without the article, there are three instances, numbers 22, two of them. You'll notice there is no ha here. This is actually the angel of the Lord functioning as an adversary, an opposer, as a satan. So we don't have the devil there. And the other one is down here in 1 Chronicles 21-1. This is the famous case where in the book of Samuel, when David takes the census, it's Yahweh instigating him to do that. And here in 1 Chronicles 21-1, it's satan. And so commentators like to fight over, well, is it Yahweh or Satan? Well, it's actually Yahweh in both instances because in 1 Chronicles 21, if you keep reading, the being that sort of functions to oppose David and punish him later is in fact the angel of the Lord, just like it was in Numbers 22. And so the reason why you'd have satan here and Yahweh in the other passage is the writer of Chronicles associated Yahweh with this word satan by means of the angel of the Lord, back in Numbers 22, right up here. So there's no contradiction between the passages. You would just have to detect the fact that the author is referencing the angel here in an adversarial manner back down to 1 Chronicles 21-1. And the dead giveaway in 1 Chronicles 21 is the satan is described as having a drawn sword in his hand, which is the same, that phrase is only used in the Old Testament, of the angel of the Lord. So again, it's a very sound, solid, textual connection between this satan and the angel of the Lord and of course a connection between the angel of the Lord and Yahweh. So there's no contradiction between 1 Chronicles 21 and the Samuel passage about David's census. So this is the end of our overview.