The forked-tongue Devil? I had never really given this detail of traditional portrayals of the Devil much attention because, given the usual of association of the serpent in the Garden with the Devil, my mind just took this tongue as an obvious extension of the imagistic association of the two. But what if the serpent was chosen as an image after the notion of the forked tongue had already been associated with evil, serpents chosen simply because they have forked tongues? What if it is the forked tongue itself that determines the Devil’s character in the dominant Christian imagination? If this is the case, what do forked tongues tell us about the nature of the figure who is poised as the antagonist of the Christian narrative?
But first: My curiosity was piqued this morning as I was reading an account of the speeches and prayers made by some of the right wing followers of Donald Trump as they stormed the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021. One thing that stood out to me was the frequent use of the words “Satan” and “satanic” in reference to basically all other Americans who disagreed with the stormers’ view of the world. That led me to wonder which words for the Devil had been recorded in the Bible when referring to the comments of Jesus himself. What words did Jesus use when he talked about Satan? And what exactly might he have meant when he used those words and names? In other words, were these right wing Christians—carrying out acts of violence in the name of Jesus—taking Jesus’s name in vain? Were they in some way perverting the words of Jesus? Was this a kind of slander?
One of the first difficulties in trying to answer such a question, of course, is that the New Testament books of the standardized Bible were written in Koine Greek and so were not actual transcriptions of the Aramaic (or, some would argue, popular Hebrew) that Jesus presumably spoke. So the question then becomes, “Which Greek words did the writers of the Gospels use in describing the Devil? And more specifically, which words did they suggest that Jesus would have used had he been speaking Greek?”
While I am not in a position to answer these questions myself, what did jump out at me in casually pursuing this topic was the following quotation from the New International Version (NIV) of Matthew 4:1, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” The Greek version reads, “Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀνήχθη εἰς τὴν ἔρημον ὑπὸ τοῦ πνεύματος, πειρασθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ διαβόλου.” The Greek word for “devil” here is “διαβόλου” (diabolou). I have learned enough over the years to recognize that the etymological roots of the word are dia- and bolos. As in the words “symbol” and “hyperbole,” the bol root comes from βάλλειν (ballein, “to throw,” as in “throw the ball,” bol). Dia- means “through” or “across,” suggesting that the word diabolos speaks of one who speaks across, against the grain. The diabolos is, in other words, perverse—per-verse: one who turns away, one who knocks the originally-intended direction of a word off track and into some counter-direction.
Now, the evil aspects that we associate with the Devil seem to go far beyond simple verbal misdirection. Certainly evil encompasses much more than bad words. But what if we spend a moment and pursue this etymological hint (perhaps risking our own mis-speaking by reducing the multiple meanings of the word διάβολος to “speaking badly”), this opens up the possibility of a deeper understanding of the word “word,” of λόγος. If we take seriously the third line of Genesis, “And God said, Let there be light” (the Hebrew word amar meaning to say or utter) or the opening line of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word” (the logos: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος), then the issue of speaking, of words carries tremendous weight in our considerations of divine action. (I am very aware that the Greek logos means far more than “word” in the Bible and elsewhere.) So it stands to reason that the figure posed as the antagonist to God would be characterized as the one who uses the logos in a countervailing way.
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