Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [314]
The same kind of story exists about the creation of man in Midrash and also in the pseudepigraphical book the Vita Adae. In chapter 14 of the Vita Adae, we find a very interesting tradition of the fall of Satan:
And Michael went out and called all the angels, saying, “Worship the image of the Lord God, as the Lord God has instructed.” And Michael himself worshiped first, and called me and said, “Worship the image of God, Yahweh.” And I answered, “I do not worship Adam.” And when Michael kept forcing me to worship, I said to him, “Why do you compel me? I will not worship one inferior and subsequent to me. I am prior to him in creation; before he was made, I was already made. He ought to worship me.”
Satan refuses to worship Adam even though he is described as the “image of God.” The “image of God” is one of the attributes of God’s principal angel. Afterwards, Satan actually says the lines of “Day-Star, Son of Dawn” in Isaiah 14, the personage whom the Vulgate calls “Lucifer”: “I will set my throne above the stars and I will be like the Most High” (Vita Adae 15). This passage is structurally parallel to the Merkabah story of Aḥer (Elisha b. Abuya) in front of Metatron in the heavenly throne room. Aḥer looks upon Metatron enthroned in heaven and concludes that there are “two powers in heaven,” suggesting that the heresy he has in mind is Christianity or any other tradition with strong mediatorial figures. As a result, Metatron is punished with fiery whips. The Quran (Suras 2, 7, 15, 17, 18, 20, 38) also relates this legend of the fall of Satan, with a particularly strong parallel in Sura 7. Later Muslim tradition interprets Satan as God’s most loyal subject because he refuses to bow down before anyone other than God. Different scriptural communities saw this heavenly scene in ways consistent with their understanding of God’s relationship to his principal angelic mediator.
In this story, God (not the angel Michael as in Vita Adae) asks all the angels to bow down to the newly created Adam and they all agree except Satan (The Quran calls him Tblis), who refuses because no one but God deserves worship. This story makes Satan the most loyal rather than the least loyal of God’s angels, thus tacitly giving approval to some kinds of seeming evil as really the greatest good, a very subversive doctrine which then justifies some antinomianism in Sufism and the extreme Shi’ite wing of Islam. ’Iblis is apparently an Arabicization of the Greek word diabolos.
Third Enoch handled these objections and returned to the narration. Rabbi Ishmael tells the story of Enoch’s glorification and enlargement into Metatron, a parallel phenomenon to the transformation of Enoch into the “Son of Man” in 1 Enoch.
Metatron also receives the heavenly secrets and gets a special robe, crown and name-YHWH Hakaton-all of which have special meaning within this mystic discipline, not only as the rewards for the righteous but as names for special spells and theurgic techniques. The term YHWH Hakaton (“the Lord, Jr.”) suggests that transformed humans even become part of the divinity. Enoch receives the homage of the divine retinue and is finally transformed into a fiery being, the angel Metatron.63
Having witnessed the birth of a new angel, if not a new star, readers are now treated to a tour of the heavenly family, complete with ranks and officers. All the angels known in the Bible are described and fit into the master plan, with special attention to the angels described in Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. For example, a group of angels called “the Watchers” of Daniel 4 are singled out for special attention in chapter 28. They are also significant characters in the Enoch literature.
Next follows a description of the disposition of