When Ancient Texts Remember What We've Forgotten

We think we know the story. The serpent appears in Eden, whispers doubt into Eve's heart, and humanity tumbles into rebellion. Ask most Christians to name the villain, and they will answer without hesitation: Satan. The devil. Lucifer. The ancient enemy of God and humanity.

But here is the oddity. Genesis 3 never calls the serpent Satan. Not once. The text identifies the tempter simply as ha-nakash, the serpent. The identification with Satan comes later, filtered through centuries of theological interpretation and intertestamental Jewish literature. By the time we reach the New Testament, the connection seems settled. Revelation 12:9 explicitly identifies "that ancient serpent" with "the devil and Satan." Yet between Genesis and Revelation lies a body of Jewish texts that preserves a different tradition, one that gives the deceiver of Eden an altogether unexpected name.

That name is Gadrel. Or in some manuscripts, Gadreel. And the text that remembers it is the Book of Enoch, a collection of Jewish apocalyptic writings that circulated widely in the centuries before Jesus (YHWShA) walked the hills of Galilee.

What do we make of this? Is Gadrel simply another angel among the fallen, or could this be an older name for the figure Christians later called Satan? The question matters more than we might suppose. Because if "Satan" began as a Hebrew title rather than a proper name, then the various figures identified as God's adversary across biblical and extrabiblical texts might represent different traditions trying to name the same reality. Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not suggesting we abandon the traditional Christian understanding of Satan as a personal, rebellious spiritual being. Rather, I am asking whether the ancient Jewish texts that shaped early Christian thought preserved memories of this being's identity that have since been forgotten.

The Witness of Enoch

The Book of Enoch, though not included in the Protestant canon, exercised enormous influence on Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Jude quotes it directly. Early church fathers cited it as authoritative. And while later Christian tradition grew cautious about its canonical status, no one doubts that first-century Jews (including Jesus's earliest followers) knew these texts well.

In Enoch 69:6-7, we encounter Gadrel. The passage states plainly:

"And the third was named Gadreel: he it is who showed the children of men all the blows of death, and he led astray Eve, and showed the weapons of death to the sons of men; the shield and the coat of mail, and the sword for battle, and all the weapons of death to the children of men."

Two accusations stand out. First, Gadrel led Eve astray. This directly parallels the serpent's role in Genesis 3, where the nakash deceives the woman into eating the forbidden fruit. Second, Gadrel introduced humanity to the instruments of violence and warfare. One might argue these are separate traditions about different fallen angels. Many do. The Book of Enoch describes multiple Watchers, each responsible for corrupting humanity in distinct ways. Semjaza led the rebellion. Azazel taught forbidden arts. And Gadrel, apparently, both deceived Eve and armed her descendants for mutual slaughter.

But here is what strikes me as most remarkable. Of all the Watchers named in Enoch, only Gadrel receives credit for the Eden deception. The text does not distribute this role among several angels or leave it ambiguous. Gadrel led astray Eve. If we take this tradition seriously (and first-century Jews certainly did), then we must ask: who was Gadrel, and why have Christians forgotten him?

Satan as Title, Not Name

The answer may lie in how the Hebrew Scriptures use the word satan. In the Old Testament, śāṭān (שָּׂטָן) functions primarily as a title meaning "adversary" or "accuser." The definite article appears in most occurrences: ha-satan, the adversary. Consider how the term appears:

In Job 1-2, ha-satan shows up at the divine council as something like a prosecuting attorney, testing Job's faithfulness with God's permission. The Satan of Job is not (at least on the surface) a rebel but a member of the heavenly court performing a specific function.

In Zechariah 3:1-2, ha-satan stands at the right hand of the high priest Joshua to accuse him. Again, the definite article suggests a role or office rather than a personal name.

Only in 1 Chronicles 21:1 does the word appear without the article, where "Satan" (or possibly "an adversary") incites David to number Israel. Even here, scholars debate whether the text names a specific being or describes a spiritual opposition more generally.

This is the problem. Or rather, this is the insight. The Hebrew Bible preserves a complex picture of adversarial spiritual forces without settling on a single, unified identity for God's great enemy. Different traditions employed different names and images. By the intertestamental period, Jewish theology had begun to systematize these figures, creating something closer to the Christian concept of Satan as a singular, personal opponent of God (YHWH). But traces of earlier, more varied traditions remained.

Now apply this to Gadrel. If satan functioned as a title that could be applied to various adversarial beings, then the figure called Gadrel in one tradition might be the same being later identified simply as "the Satan" in another. The Book of Enoch may preserve an older naming tradition that predates the consolidation of Satan as a proper name. This does not mean Gadrel and Satan are different beings. It suggests they may be different names for the same ancient adversary.

The Nakash of Genesis

Of course one can object that Genesis 3 identifies the deceiver as a serpent, not an angelic being. The text seems clear enough: "Now the serpent (ha-nakash) was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made." A serpent. A creature. Not an angel.

But what you cannot do, not if you want to remain coherent, is ignore what nakash actually means in Hebrew. The word carries at least three semantic ranges:

It can mean a literal serpent or snake.

As a verb, it means to practice divination or deceive.

As an adjective, it can mean "shining" or "bronze" (as in Moses's bronze serpent in Numbers 21:9, nekash nekhoshet).

That third meaning opens an intriguing possibility. Throughout Scripture, divine and angelic beings are consistently described using imagery of light and radiance. Isaiah 14:12 calls the fallen figure "Day Star, son of Dawn" (heylel ben shachar), which later Latin tradition rendered as "Lucifer," meaning "light-bearer." Ezekiel 28, in its lament over the king of Tyre, portrays a guardian cherub in Eden "covered with every precious stone," a figure ablaze with reflected glory.

What if the nakash of Genesis 3 was not a talking snake but a shining one, a luminous being who appeared to Eve in the garden? This would explain why later Jewish tradition (including the Book of Enoch) understood Eden's tempter as an angelic figure rather than a literal reptile. It would also explain why Genesis 3:14-15 describes the serpent's curse in terms that seem excessive for a mere animal. God does not simply condemn snakes to crawl on their bellies (which they already did). The curse anticipates an ongoing conflict between the serpent's "seed" and the woman's "seed," a cosmic struggle that extends far beyond zoology into the realm of spiritual warfare.

I remember a conversation with a colleague years ago who insisted that taking the serpent as a literal snake was the only properly "literal" reading of Genesis. I understand the concern. In an age when skeptics dismiss the Bible as mythology, Christians rightly want to defend the historical reality of the text. But here is the question: does defending biblical truth require us to flatten the text's own symbolic richness? Or might the most faithful reading recognize that Genesis 3 describes a real historical event involving a genuinely malevolent spiritual being whom the inspired writer identified with the Hebrew word for both "serpent" and "shining one"?

The Watchers and Their Fate

The Book of Enoch places Gadrel among the Watchers, a group of angels who descended to earth and corrupted humanity. According to Enoch 6-11, these beings violated divine boundaries by mating with human women and teaching forbidden knowledge. Their punishment was severe: imprisonment in darkness until the final judgment.

Could Satan (or the being later known by that title) have been one of these Watchers? The suggestion might seem odd to Christians accustomed to thinking of Satan's fall as a primordial rebellion predating human history. Yet the Watchers tradition offers a different timeline, one where angelic rebellion occurs after creation but within human history. This does not contradict the broader biblical witness so much as complicate it. Perhaps multiple rebellions occurred. Perhaps different biblical texts remember different aspects of the same cosmic conflict. Or perhaps (and this seems most likely to me) the ancient authors used varied images and names to describe spiritual realities that resist simple categorization.

What cannot be denied is that Enoch's description of Gadrel's punishment closely parallels the curse pronounced on the serpent in Genesis 3:14: "On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life." Both texts describe a being cast down, reduced from glory to humiliation, condemned to a grotesque existence in the dust. When Revelation 12:9 declares that "the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent," it uses language that echoes both Genesis and Enochian tradition. The casting down of Satan is not a new concept invented by the New Testament but the culmination of a theme running through Jewish apocalyptic literature.

That's the point. The early Christians did not create the Satan figure from whole cloth. They inherited a rich tradition of reflection on evil, rebellion, and divine judgment, a tradition preserved in texts like Enoch that shaped how first-century Jews understood the Genesis narrative. When they identified Jesus as the one who would crush the serpent's head, they drew on centuries of Jewish interpretation that saw Eden's tempter as far more than a cunning reptile.

Names and Identities

So we return to the original question. Was Gadrel an ancient name for Satan, forgotten as Christian theology developed and settled on different terminology?

The evidence suggests precisely that. If satan began as a title rather than a proper name, then earlier traditions would naturally employ different names for the adversary. Lucifer in Isaiah, Azazel in Leviticus and Enoch, Gadrel in the Enochian account of Eden—these need not be separate beings. They may be different names, drawn from different contexts and traditions, all pointing toward the same dark reality: a created being of great power and intelligence who rebelled against the Creator and seeks to corrupt creation.

This does not diminish Satan's reality or danger. If anything, it deepens our understanding of his ancient enmity against God and humanity. The devil is not a recent invention or a personified abstraction. He is the serpent, the shining one cast down, the accuser, the adversary whose names and titles multiply across Scripture and tradition precisely because no single name can capture the full scope of his rebellion and malice.

What difference does this make? Perhaps more than we realize. In a Christian culture that often reduces Satan to a cartoon villain or treats spiritual warfare as superstition, recovering the depth and complexity of the biblical witness to evil matters. The devil is ancient. His strategies are patient. And his opposition to God's purposes predates our lives, our civilizations, and even (if Enoch and Genesis are read together) the arc of human history itself.

Remembering What Was Lost

I do not claim to have proven that Gadrel and Satan are definitively the same being. The evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, preserved in texts whose canonical status Christians have long debated. But I am suggesting that we take seriously the possibility that early Jewish tradition remembered something about Eden's tempter that later Christian theology has obscured. Not because our theology is wrong, but because the process of systematization necessarily simplifies. When the church settled on "Satan" as the proper name for God's adversary, it unified a complex tradition. That unification brought clarity and power to Christian proclamation. But it also meant that earlier names like Gadrel receded from view.

Perhaps it is time to remember them. Not to replace our language about Satan but to enrich it, to recognize the deep roots of this ancient conflict, and to understand that the being who whispered doubt in Eden has worn many names across the centuries of human experience.

The story of evil's origin matters because the story of evil's defeat matters. And if Jesus, the seed of the woman, came to crush the serpent's head, then knowing the serpent's many names only makes the victory more profound. Whether we call him Gadrel or Satan or any other name, his power has been broken. The shining one who fell is destined for final judgment, and the children of Adam and Eve need not fear his schemes.

The invitation stands. To see the ancient texts with fresh eyes. To recognize that Scripture's witness to spiritual realities is richer and more layered than our systematic theologies sometimes allow. And to trust that the God who remembered Gadrel's deception also remembers his promise: that one day, all adversaries will be put under the feet of the Anointed One, and creation will at last know peace.

That is the story we find ourselves in. Not a simple tale of good versus evil with cartoon characters, but a deep and ancient conflict involving beings whose power and malice we can barely comprehend, and a God whose patience and justice will ultimately prevail. And perhaps, in recovering forgotten names from forgotten texts, we remember once again just how long this battle has been waged, and how certain its outcome.