NOTE: This page is only about the version of the Devil in the Holy Bible, and not his hundreds of other interpretations of him such as Mormonism (Nephi), Satanism, or characters like Chernabog from "Fantasia" or the Benefactor from "The Shift." Therefore, none of the actions of Satan's innumerable alternate interpretations should be added here.
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For God knows that when you will eat of it fruit your eyes opened and you Will be like God, knowing good and evil.
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~ The Devil as the serpent tempts Eve in Genesis 3:5
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All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.
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~ Satan attempting to corrupt Jesus in the New Testament.
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I will ascend higher than the highest clouds; I will be the Most High.
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~ Lucifer planning his rebellion in Isaiah 14:14
Lucifer, also known as The Devil or Satan, is the main antagonist of the Bible. He is widely perceived as the divine embodiment of all evil and the archenemy of all living beings, especially God the Father.
While he may have had redeeming qualities before his fall, he is totally debased from those factors, showing no known positive aspect of him whatsoever and doing whatever he can to obtain his endgame, and even if he is indicated to do good for others being his demonic army and accursed worshippers, that is only because he wants to keep them on his side. Even before turned evil and while he was an angel of God it is heavily implied that he was not truly loyal to him and was always proud and desired to take His throne so he could become all-powerful.
Satan is indirectly, lot of times directly responsible for all of the pain and suffering caused by people as he corrupts them all, though his intent of him knowing this is of constant relentless initiative.
He is the theological symbol of evil.
Having become the lead catalyst of sin, he is the most responsible for it having infected humanity as well as its general existence.
He turned against God because he was prideful and self-loving of his own image, because he wanted to rule Heaven and be more powerful and attractive than his maker.
He convinced one third of the angels in heaven to side with him and go against God. Hence, Satan committed the war in heaven by recruiting an army of renegade angels to help him try to usurp God, resulting in him being kicked out of heaven forever. These fallen angels would later be known as demons who relentlessly seek to demonically possess the physical bodies of God's children into malevolent endeavors.
Hebrew Bible / Old Testament
He possesses a regular garden snake and tempts Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit against which God gave them his specific word. This makes him the exact reason why Adam and Eve, as well as the rest of humanity, are tainted by impurity.
He goaded Cain to murder Abel in cold blood. He laughed, and God transformed the color of Cain's skin.
Satan had the very idea pitched to God to torture Job. He makes his life absolutely miserable as he took his wealth, killed his livestock, killed his servants, and eventually even killed his own children he also cursed Jobās body with boils and pushed Jobās friends to accuse him of sinning; this madness continued for two years straight.
New Testament
He cripples an old woman, who remains infirm for eighteen long years.
Satan attempted to turn Jesus to his side, telling him to break his fast and provoke his father over Jerusalem by feigning a suicide. When this didn't work in his favor, he demanded he fall down and worship him forever, only backing down when left with no choice.
One of the reasons why Jesus didn't always do miracles for people was that whenever he does good things Satan stands right next to him, with Jesus hinting that Satan would attempt to use his luminous powers for his own gain.
He possessed Peter, one of the Twelve Apostles, to try and convince Jesus not to die for humanity to be saved. Jesus had to give Peter the harsh and firm cold shoulder to back Satan off.
Because of his actions placing humanity at high risks for damnation, Jesus saving humanity from eternal torment had to be done by being tortured willingly in Gethsemane and was executed with extraordinary brutality in Golgotha, with his death resulting to take every single sin in existence, making the savior suffer the worst fate ever known.
In Satan's last attempt to deceive humanity, he tried to get humanity to overthrow the Holy Camp of the saints in the New Jerusalem, which the population of the number was described to be of the sand and the sea, possibly being well over quintillions of people that left God no other option but to end them for their excessively hateful approach on seeking conquest of his kingdom.
Why He Doesn't Stand Out?
He suffers too much from off-screen villainy and Fridge Horror. His rebellion, for example, doesnāt have a confirmed kill count, and no indication of the damage caused is ever given. In fact, his worst on-page crime is killing several people who were important to Job. Therefore, he fails the heinous standard of the Bible, where mass genocide and abuse of power on a much larger and far more heinous scale are common throughout:
Queen Jezebel ordered the deaths of all the prophets of Yahweh and manipulated several innocent people to their deaths, Naboth being one of them, because it made her feel more powerful.
The Pharaoh ordered the massacre thousands of innocent and defenseless Hebrew babies, who perished in the Nile river, just because he was paranoid about potentially being overthrown.
The Canaanites sacrificed countless of their firstborn children on top of committing several other crimes such as rape, and although there is no confirmed number as to how many children were killed, these crimes were confirmed to be commonly practiced for about four-hundred years.
King Herod also brought forth thousands of infanticides in Bethlehem for the exact same reason.
Haman the Agagite desired to massacre countless Jews out of his petty vendetta against Mordecai and was nearly successful. Ironically, Haman himself fails the heinous standard, so Satan would fail it too much to even qualify as NPE.
Abimelech murdered seventy members of his own family so no one could compete with him for power.
The Antichrist was in a class of his own, massacring more than 100,000 innocent people just for being on God's side.
Even if Satan is on par with Jezebel and Abimelech, and even if the Devil can be said to be responsible for all of the above's actions, the first idea doesn't change his moral scaling at all, and the second idea still rests on extrabiblical theology counted under Fridge Horror.
He has very debatable moral agency due to being occasionally portrayed as a force that needs to exist for the cosmos to be in balance. Indeed, when Jesus asked for Satan to change his ways, Satan never showed a sign of him doing this, it could be possible that the reason why Satan is like this is because of his vow against God, eternally making himself bound to his constant state of embracing his tyrannical perversion of vengeance to his maker. After all, if he ever stopped doing his job, immoderate amounts of light would be completely out of control, and that would not be good at all (keep in mind that too much of a good thing becoming a bad thing is as natural as it is inevitable as all things exist in duality).
While it doesn't justify it, even him cursing Job and the old lady was done with God's express permission for the latter's own purposes.
With only a small handful of page time, his characterization seems to be questionable as there isn't much given from him with a couple of things being his generic lust for unprecedented cosmic power, along with him being an extremely vengeful destroyer. Although he used to be the angel Lucifer, no elaboration is given on what kind of man he was back then, or his relationships with others, so it doesn't give him any characterization. He also never once physically appears in the Old Testament (whether or not he is the serpent in the Book of Genesis is up for debate; even then, he only has three or four lines).
Most of his actions are temptations rather than threats of violence as humans still have free will to not follow him.
Trivia
Quite ironically in spite of his VB status, he has the second highest amount of Pure Evil versions of all characters behind William Afton (see "Satan" on the PE Wiki), without counting PEs that are based on him.
He is the first Villainous Benchmark ever to exist.
However, if he really wasn't the serpent and recruited the creature off-page, then he appeared in person in the Book of Matthew, after Queen Jezebel appearing in 1 Kings, who herself fails the Heinous Standard.
And considering there's a vast amount of other villains from mythology, legends and folklore who came long before Christianity and who also fail the Heinous Standard, then this might as well affect the Devil's position in the future.
The extent of his involvement in the innumerable grievances of humanity is open to interpretation owing to several different factors:
While the Bible depicts him the origin of evil, God calls Himself evil's creator in Isaiah 45:7. Technically the Hebrew term for "evil" in that passage doesn't always refer to moral evil,[1] but it still reflects a theology that all things, including the Devil, are God's dominion.
It is unclear in the Bible if the many figures designated as "Satan," "the Devil," "the Serpent," etc. are all the same individual person or if they are different individuals in different circumstances. Such a thing is still debated by professional scholars, and so isn't the sort of topic that can be covered in full here.
Paul describes how sin and death entered the world through "one man" (Adam) in Romans 5:12. While the story of Adam and Eve describes them being tempted by the serpent (who is presumed to be Satan), Paul here seemingly places the blame on Adam.
Last but not least, if he had a confirmed body count in the Book of Revelations, he could theoretically be Inconsistently Heinous.
