Who is the Satan of Whom?

You know that my favorite podcast is a podcast about scripture. It's called The Bible as Literature and it has a subpodcast called Tarazi Tuesdays. In the recent episode Who is the Adversary of Whom? we hear, with an ear that hears, of a Hebrew word that happens to be a cognate with Ge'ez that immediately caused my ears to perk up. We hear of nehash/nehas.

The discussion surrounds the Scroll of Job (eeyob) and the function of the satan (adversary/enemy/opponent/complainant). The serpent (nehas) in Genesis shares this function of adversarialness, enmity, opposition, and complaining. Idols made from copper/bronze of serpent deities are also brought up.

In the Ge'ez Calendar, still used by the secular government of the nation-state of Ethiopia, the month closest to August in the West is called Nehasay. I say closest because Ethiopia has 13 months and is currently in the year 2011. I had heard the scholar Dr. Michael Heiser once pronounce the word nehash, but it wasn't until I heard Dr. Fr. Paul Tarazi, Fr. Marc Boulos, and Dr. Richard Benton discuss the relationship between the sh/s sound as this world travelled across Hebrew and Arabic that I connected it with the Ge'ez month of Nehasay. I immediately called my friend doctoral candidate in history, and lover of Ge'ez, David Spielman to see if his Ge'ez-English dictionary would corroborate my hypothesis that this was no false cognate but the real-deal. Here is what he found.

Copper and sorcery are meanings retained in the Ge'ez! Glory be to God for Semitic roots that help us to slowly but surely better understand His word of life.