Originally posted by tjcoady
Which Biblical devil? There isn't a Biblical Devil- the only mentions of anything even close to a Devil in the Bible is the Snake in the Garden in the first version of the Genesis stories and the Adversary mentioned in the Book of Job, who God makes a bet with.
well, as far as I understand it "The Devil" is a conflation of various characters within the Bible and various competing deities to Yahweh, guys like Baal for example.
there is the story of Lucifer, fallen from heaven for pride. his myth repeats in The Quran too. there's the existence of djinns (demons? spirits? sprites?), of whom Iblis (Lucifer) was the only one spared when the angels came down from heaven to slaughter them. Iblis then went on to become God's most favoured (before Adam was made, naturally), thus the pride and fall narrative is set-up...
so I guess what I'm referring to is that conflation, as you're right in the technical sense, there is no "Devil".
oh and as to Goethe's Faust, it's been a decade since I last read the work, but I recall that he learnt remorse and repentance, that God forgave him... true it's not "tricking" really, but the devil did get outsmarted, in a sort of Shylok-Antonio sort of way.