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The History of the Devil
The notion of the devil does not originate in the Bible, as many may think. In the Old Testament, Satan is just another one of God's servants. It is in Iran that the religious teacher Zarathustra simplified things, ending up with only two - a God of the Good and a God of Evil. This belief then spread throughout the Middle East. In the Jewish world, Satan, God's obedient servant, was gradually replaced by Saden, God's eternal enemy. The Greeks had an underworld called Hades. It didn't have fire, but the valley outside Jerusalem, called Hell, did. In Hebrew it was known as Gehenna, a smouldering rubbish heap to which fire was regularly set. That is where bodies of executed criminals were burned. Gehenna was the inspiration for the Christian hell.