Moses spoke of the fallen one long before the Greeks

See, then, whether the man who charges us with most impious errors and with having strayed from divine riddles is not himself plainly in error. He has not perceived that the writings of Moses, which are much older not only than Heraclitus and Pherecydes but even than Homer, brought in the account of this evil one who fell from the heavenly places. For the “serpent” (Genesis 3:1), from whom Pherecydes’ Ophioneus derives, and who became the cause of man’s being cast out of the divine paradise (Genesis 3:23–24), hints at something of this kind: he deceived womankind with a promise of divinity and of greater things (Genesis 3:5), and the man is said to have followed her (Genesis 3:6).

And the destroyer in Moses’ Exodus (Exodus 12:23): who else could he be but the one who causes destruction for those who obey him and do not resist his wickedness or struggle against it? Again, the one sent away in Leviticus, whom the Hebrew text named Azazel (Leviticus 16:8–10), was no other than he. The one that bore his lot had to be sent away into the wilderness and driven off to avert evil; for all who belong, through their wickedness, to the portion of the worse one stand opposed to those who are of God’s lot, and are deserts, empty of God. And the sons of Belial in Judges (Judges 19:22): whose sons are they said to be, because of their wickedness, if not his?

But more clearly than all these, in Job, who is older even than Moses himself, “the devil” is recorded as standing before God (Job 1:6; 2:1) and asking for power against Job (Job 1:9–12; 2:4–6), so as to surround him with the heaviest calamities: first the loss of all his possessions and of his children (Job 1:13–19), and second the covering of Job’s whole body with a savage elephantiasis, as the disease is called (Job 2:7). For I pass over what the Gospels say about the devil who tempted the Saviour (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), so as not to seem to bring proof against Celsus on the point in question from more recent writings. In the last parts of Job too, where the Lord spoke to Job through whirlwind and clouds (Job 38:1) the words recorded in the book that bears his name, one may find not a few things said about the dragon (Job 41:1–34).

I say nothing yet of the passages in Ezekiel that speak as though of “Pharaoh” (Ezekiel 29:2–3; 32:2), or “Nebuchadnezzar,” or the ruler of “Tyre” (Ezekiel 28:2–19), or of those in Isaiah where the king of Babylon is lamented (Isaiah 14:4–21). From them one could learn not a little about wickedness: what beginning and origin it had, and that wickedness came into being from some who shed their wings and followed the first who shed his wings.