I've been thinking about something while looking into the historical development of Satan and demonology.

Today, when people talk about the Devil, several figures are often treated as if they had always been the same being:

The serpent of Eden.
Satan.
Lucifer.
Azazel.
Belial.
Sometimes even figures such as Mastema.

But when you go back to the older texts, things become considerably less straightforward.

The serpent in Genesis isn't called Satan.

The ha-satan of Job operates within God's heavenly court rather than as an independent ruler of evil.

Isaiah's Helel ben Shachar, later translated as Lucifer in the Latin tradition, appears in a taunt directed at the king of Babylon.

Then Second Temple Jewish literature gives us figures such as Azazel, Shemihazah and the Watchers, Mastema and Belial, each appearing within their own traditions and narratives.

Later Jewish and Christian traditions increasingly connect, reinterpret and sometimes merge these ideas until we eventually arrive at something much closer to the Devil most people recognize today.

So here's the question I'm interested in:

At what point do you think it becomes legitimate to treat these figures as manifestations of the same being rather than separate figures later joined by tradition?

And perhaps more importantly:

Do you personally see Satan, Lucifer, the serpent, Azazel, Belial, etc. as different names or manifestations of one entity, or as genuinely distinct beings?

I'm curious how people from different religious, occult and philosophical backgrounds approach this.

𖤐 Lux ex Tenebris 𖤐

At what point do you think it becomes legitimate to treat these figures as manifestations of the same being rather than separate figures later joined by tradition?

At no point if I was to take a literal Biblical view of them.

Do you personally see Satan, Lucifer, the serpent, Azazel, Belial, etc. as different names or manifestations of one entity, or as genuinely distinct beings?

It depends if you are interpreting them in a Christian manner, in a Jewish manner, a gnostic manner or an occultic manner.

Let's imagine the Old Testament was literally true for a moment without any distortion, pilfering of other religions traditions or nationalistic fantasism. The New Testament would be an exercise in displacing it with new concepts, religious historical revisionism, with a few token references to the old texts to make out that it is a refinement of the old texts/truths. So really the devil of the NT has nothing to do with anything in the OT and is a new character that was revealed by God/the authors/editors/whatever; reusing the name of the character in the OT, simplifying the spelling, and changing his personality and purpose completely, a bit like film directors or soap opera writers do to characters when they are out of ideas or bored with no sense of professionalism.