This book is hard to anticipate as to its challenge: your assumptions about the devil and demons will be thoroughly confronted and won't survive the encounter unscathed.
For a while, I have suspected that the bible, and the Old Testament in particular, is a lot less 'spooky' (and a lot more 'political') than interpreters commonly assumed, and this book provides the missing concepts and methods and background context to chart your way through the biblical material in a more natural and coherent manner. The spirits and demons fade to the background as shadows, even as they come alive as literary characters in the eschatological conflict between light and darkness, Satan and God, in the New Testament's more urgent apocalyptic dramatisation.
The character of Satan is virtually absent, along with demons in the Old Testament. The few references to Satan in the Old Testament simply do not correspond to the literary figure later developed as the arch-enemy of God and the saints. The book does a good job of working through the details of these Old Testament Satan references, real and unreal, deconstructing the idea that the Satan character was developed at the time, or appeared in the various alleged proof texts.
The Satan character in the New Testament is more developed, and the much more frequent references to demons and evil spirits call for a more careful approach to textual interpretation and application. Here the authors strain the limits of permitted methods to provide an alternative to the common assumption that the Satan character is a real being leading a charge of demons and fallen angels in an ongoing war. The war may be real enough, but the Satan character isn't necessarily the being traditional Christian theology has developed and studied.
The book is complex, advanced and challenging, and the reader will be led to re-evaluate previous theories and to entertain the alternative offered by the authors, which I found generally persuasive although difficult. It has taken me several months to digest the challenge of this book. It is beyond what I can do to address much of the details in this review.
Instead, I will briefly mention a line of enquiry and an interpretation of the Satan character as developed and dramatised most vividly in the New Testament in the book of Revelation, that the authors have neglected. Well, the authors do develop and discuss the Satan character of Rev. 12 in an interesting and challenging way, and this is actually what prompted my further analysis of this character discussed below.
The Satan character seems to be introduced with reasonable clarity in Rev. 2:9 and 3:9 as wayward Israel, under the description the 'Synagogue of Satan.' It would be this 'Synagogue of Satan' that would be brought low, as their claim to be the true Jews was about to be demonstrated false by their imminent demise. So, when the beast character is introduced in chapter 11 working in Jerusalem, before being judged along with the city of Jerusalem when the Kingdom of God came in power, 'destroying those who destroyed the land [of Israel]' the message should be clear: an evil force arises from the abyss and takes over the land of Israel, destroying it along with themselves, when Jerusalem is judged for shedding the blood of the prophets, as per Deut. 32, Mat. 23:29-39 etc. This event is the same Rev. 9:1-11 when the abyss is opened and the forces of destruction arise out of the abyss to plague and destroy the land [of Israel], and probably also the same as when the dragon is released from the abyss for a short time in Rev. 20, although there does seem to be some variety as to the description of which characters come from where and go to where. In chapter 12, the dragon character is introduced as a snake who is Satan, the ancient serpent. Walton correctly points out and defends that this ancient serpent is from Is. 27:1 and not Gen. 3. Yet, the context of Is. 27:1 is that the dragon that is killed is wayward Israel, and wayward Israel is killed when the temple is destroyed (Is. 27) to atone for Israel's sin. The dragon killed is therefore fairly obviously, the same Israel that is put to death in Is. 65 by YHWH for her sins and her ancestors' sins, which the Lord applies to the destruction of the Second Temple in the First Century generation in Mat. 23:29-39. It is also at the wedding feast of Is. 25:6-8, that wayward Israel misses out on in Is. 65:11-15, and which the Lord applies to his generation of Israel in Mat. 8:10-12 who rejected the gospel. In chapter 12 this dragon character is presented as having in the past sought to kill the newborn male child Messiah, which fairly clearly corresponds to Israel under Herod as recorded in Mat. 2. This dragon character is demoted in chapter 12 from heaven to earth (or the 'land' [of Israel]), and goes on a specific persecution campaign for 42 months, the same period as the beast in chapter 11 and 13, who are also persecuting, at the time of writing of Revelation, the Christians to whom the book was originally sent in the late 60s A.D. (and not the 90s A.D. as assumed by Walton). In chapter 13, the dragon's throne is given to the beast, the beast exercises the political and military authority over the dragon's kingdom for 42 months. It follows that the dragon, or Satan, in Revelation, is a political-military power, which was taken over for a specific period by a rebel government, before being judged and destroyed. Chapter 11 makes it clear that this power is exercised in and from Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem is judged for the evil work done by the beast as the government or leader of the kingdom of the dragon. Chapter 12 identifies the dragon with the last days Israel to be killed from Isaiah. And chapter 13 identifies the power taking over that kingdom as the same character as the little horn from Dan. 7, the rebel government that is killed and destroyed along with the Fourth Beast when the kingdom of God comes in power. This identification allows us to make sense of many of the other references to Satan in the New Testament.
For example, the kingdom, house or city divided against itself, and that falls, is the kingdom of Satan in Mat. 12, yet this same kingdom and house was the Israel that rejected Messiah and the holy spirit, committed the unforgivable sin, and ended up being judged to be taken over by demons, the same judgement as the Great City 'Babylon' (Jerusalem) is given in Revelation: 'She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit.' This kingdom / house / city is judged when the Kingdom of God destroys it, Dan. 7; Mat. 12:28; Rev. 11:15-18.
Another obviously very closely related Satan passage in the New Testament is 2 Thes. 2, where a rebel figure takes over the Jerusalem temple 'by the activity of Satan.' In this passage, the rebellion in Jerusalem is predicted, as the sign that the Day of the Lord judgement was about to fall, and the rebel figure corresponds to the little horn of Dan. 7, and as the Fourth Beast of Dan. 7 is destroyed by the Kingdom of God, so in 2 Thes. 2 the rebel figure is destroyed: 'the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.' The connections to the Olivet Discourse via the reference to lawlessness and deception and the temple are quite obvious, and these are the same things we see in Rev. 11-13 discussed above. Hence, the political and military character of 'Satan' are clarifying as to the nature of the Satan and the work of Satan and the identity of being Satan's people in the New Testament context. It makes the Satan character less 'spooky' and more realpolitik representative of the forces the killed Messiah, persecuted his followers, and were totally shattered at the fall of the Second Temple.
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