ABSTRACT
Writing a history of evil in the Hebrew Bible faces the problem that the polyphonic biblical texts do not contain a systematic or coherent treatment of the origins of evil or the way humans and God deal with it. Thus, the problem of evil has to be approached from different viewpoints: the semantics of evil, the history of Israelite religion in its ancient Near Eastern context, and the various kinds of biblical literature dealing with it. The history of evil in the development of Israelite religion begins not with Adam, Eve and the snake, in the story of the First Sin in Genesis 3, but with the mythological aspects of evil. Ancient Israelite religion, as witnessed both by the texts of the Hebrew Bible and by extra-biblical evidence from ancient Israel, was deeply embedded in the symbolic system of ancient Near Eastern religions.
