Complete Monster/The Bible

Even the holiest of books is not devoid of some of the worst Complete Monsters of literature, or at least that's how they're commonly interpreted.


 * First, let's mention Satan himself. To most Christians, he is indeed pure evil and the source of all evil. In other interpretations, he's never directly described as being the creator of evil, even if he was the serpent and tempted Adam and Eve, but he does become a true monster in Revelations, where he initiated The End of the World as We Know It, conquering the planet and scaring the pants off us so that he essentially rules as a god.
 * That being said, he's also a variable character. It's never made clear whether he rebelled against God or tried to supplant Him himself.
 * Is there really a difference in this case?
 * The Bible consisted of some other Complete Monsters like the Pharaoh in (Exodus) who oppressed the Israelites and forced them to work as slaves for him, sent men to kill their children, and refused to repent for this or let them go even though he acknowledged God's existence and saw Moses perform miracles. The reasoning for was simply because he feared the Israelites would grow to a number he couldn't contain. What a dick.
 * Later adaptations of the Exodus (not within the Bible, of course) tend to soften his image, particularly The Prince of Egypt, but nevertheless preserve the basic plot. As for the child murder spree bit, at least one official source (which was used for that particular moment of The Ten Commandments) has him do what Herod did (see below for more on that).
 * Haman, from the Purim Megilla, is even worse than Pharaoh. A Treacherous Advisor who plots the genocide of the Jewish people simply because he felt offended by one Jew's refusal to bow to him, he is arguably the worst human villain in Biblical literature. And his Xanatos Backfire at the gallows he had planned for Mordecai was also quite spectacular, especially after he went to King Ahasuerses to talk him into having Mordecai hanged (never getting around to it due to an unrelated matter) and wound up instead feting Mordecai for his heroism in saving the king's life from a couple of rebellious eunuchs--which wound up being the point where even his wife told him to his face that his obsession with killing the Jews would become self-destructive real soon.
 * Antioch from the Maccabees book. The terrible tortures he and his people subject a whole Jewish family to (seven teenage boys and their mother) are pure Nightmare Fuel, to the point where the author himself, after writing about how the family was boiled alive for their faith, actually said, "As for the rest of the martyrs who fell because of Antioch's killing spree against the Jews, need I say more?"
 * Goliath of the Philistines is described as being an almost literal monster of a man who is devoid of humane qualities and speaks blasphemy against God any chance he gets. He also enjoyed slaughtering people - a lot of people.
 * Herod the Great. We know from secular histories that he was a paranoid SOB who murdered his own sons when he suspected them of plotting against him and was, in fact, responsible for many massacres. Why do secular historians not cover the massacre of the infant boys in Bethelehem? For him, it was just another day, another possible threat dealt with. Or because there are no other records at all about this event - either because, like the census, that isn't mentioned by any Roman records, it was made up to add some glamour to Jesus' infancy, or because Bethlehem was so small a village that very few children would have been killed in the event and not enough people wrote about it to provide us with surviving records.
 * Herod knew that nobody would mourn his death after he killed every infant in Bethlehem with extreme prejudice, so he ordered every Jewish priest killed like those infants on the day he died--just so there would be mourning in the land, all right--in a Thanatos Gambit which was ultimately never carried out.
 * And some of the Pharisees and Romans who crucified Jesus were possibly this, particularly head priest Caiaphas, commonly depicted as a hypocritical, power coveting zealot.