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In his review of P. G. Maxwell-Stuart's "SATAN: A biography" (TLS, 21 Jan 2010), James Sharpe writes that in order to explain evil's presence as a challenge to the one God, Christianity created "the devil. And from the high Middle Ages (at the latest) the devil, or Satan, was a dominant figure in European Christian culture." Satan, however, predates Christianity.
In Zechariah 3:1, he is rebuked by God for seeking to challenge the Jewish people's claim to Jerusalem. Satan is testing Job in the first chapter of that book and in I Chronicles 21, he is enticing David to conduct a census despite its prohibition. The earlier Hebraic concept of an evil force then is not one who himself is evil but one whose task is to test, to provocatively confront man's belief and actions. It would be fair to assume that Judaism was more than challenged by Christianity which leaves the theological question of what is evil.
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