Satan

   In modern times ‘Satan’ is likely to be applied jokingly to a person who is tempting another not to do what he or she should do. In such a situation the well-known quotation from the New Testament, made known to us by Matthew and Mark, is likely to be heard: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ (In the New English Bible this has become ‘Get behind me, Satan.’) The words were said by Jesus to Peter when the disciple tried to stop his master from going to Jerusalem.

   While Satan is the proper name of the devil, its literal meaning is ‘adversary, ‘accuser’. Bernard Wolfe, in The Late Risers, plays with the quotation and makes a speaker say: ‘Get thee behind me, Jack Daniels,’ substituting the name of a brand of whisky.

   ‘Satan’ has sometimes been used as a substitute name for someone who is thought to be devilish. Shakespeare, for example, describes Falstaff as ‘that old white-bearded Satan’, but no-one actually addresses him in that way. ‘Satan’ does occur vocatively in Shakespeare, in The Comedy of Errors. When Pinch is trying to exorcize Antipholus of Ephesus he says: ‘I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man,/To yield possession to my holy prayers.’