In the last centuries before the Christian Era, the Devil enjoyed an impressive rise both in his professional status and his assigned areas of responsibility.
From being a minor official at the Heavenly Court, he rose to become a fully-fledged adversary of God, almost an anti-God, and like the deity he acquired his own institutional hierarchy of inferior angels. Many of those operatives also bore individual names and titles. Satan’s authority extended to the material world, and he could rely on the faithful service of significant numbers of the human population. As part of his professional advancement, his career history was retroactively written to build up his role in historic events, especially the Fall of Man.
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