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Concept
War in Heaven
Summary
In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, the Book of Revelation describes a past war in heaven between angels led by the Archangel Michael against those led by "the dragon", identified as the devil or Satan, who was defeated and thrown down to the earth. Revelation's war in Heaven is related to the idea of fallen angels, and possible parallels have been proposed in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
The Christian tradition has stories about angelic beings cast down from heaven by God, often presenting the punishment as inflicted in particular on Satan. As a result of linking this motif with the cited passage of the Book of Revelation, the casting of Satan down from heaven, which other versions of the motif present as an action of God himself, has become attributed to the archangel Michael at the conclusion of a war between two groups of angels, of whom (because of the mention of the dragon's tail casting a third of the stars of heaven to the earth) one third are supposed to have been on the side of Satan, in spite of the fact that the casting down of the stars () is recounted as occurring before the start of the "war in heaven" ().
Commentators have attributed Satan's rebellion to a number of motives, all of which stem from his great pride. These motives include:
a refusal to bow down to mankind on the occasion of the creation of man—as in the Armenian, Georgian, and Latin versions of the Life of Adam and Eve. Islamic tradition holds a similar view: Iblis refuses to bow down to Adam.
the culmination of a gradual distancing from God through rebellion (an idea of Origen of Alexandria).
a declaration by God that all were to be subject to his Son, the Messiah (as in Milton's Paradise Lost).
Official source
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