▪ Jeffery 1938: 47-48: »The tendency among the Muslim authorities is to derive the name from
balasa ‘to despair’, he being so called because God caused him to despair of all good — so Rāghib,
Mufradāt, 59, and Ṭab. on ii, 32. The more acute philologers, however, recognized the impossibility of this (an-Nawawī, 138), and Zam. on xix, 57, says
ʔiblīs ʔaʕǧamī wa-laysa mina l-ʔiblās kamā yazʕamūn [
ʔiblīs is a foreign word, and not from
ʔiblās as some argue]. al-Ǧawālīqī,
Muʕarrab, 17, also justly argues against an Ar derivation. – That the word is a corruption of the Grk
diábolos has been recognized by the majority of Western scholars.
1
In the LXX
diábolos represents the Hbr
śāṭān in Zech. iii, but in the N.T.
ho diábolos is more than ‘the adversary’, and particularly in the ecclesiastical writers he becomes the chief of the hosts of evil. It is in this sense that
ʔiblīs appears in the
Qurʔān, so we are doubly justified in looking for a Christian origin for the word. – One theory is that it came through the Syr, the
ḏ being taken as the genitive particle,
2
a phenomenon for which there are perhaps other examples, e.g. [Syr]
YPNS for [Grk]
diaphōnás (
ZA, xxiv, 51), [Ar]
qisṭās for [Grk]
dikastḗs (
ZDMG, 1, 620),
zinṭāriyyaẗ for [Grk]
dysentería (Geyer,
ZweiGedichte, i, 119 n.). The difficulty is that the normal translation of
ho diábolos is [Syr]
ʔBLQRṢā, the ‘accuser’ or ‘calumniator’, both in the Peshitta (cf. Matt, iv) and in the ecclesiastical literature. There is a form [Syr]
ḎYBLWS, a transliteration of
diábolos, but
PSm, 874, quotes this only as a dictionary word from
BB. There is apparently no occurrence of the word in the old Ar literature,
3
so it was possibly a word introduced by Muḥammad himself. If we could assume that some such form as
ḎYBLWS was colloquially used among the Aramaic-speaking Christians with whom Muḥammad came in contact, the above explanation might hold, though one would have to assume that the
ḏ had been dropped by his informants. The alternative is that it came into Ar directly from the Grk, and was used by the Ar-speaking Christians associated with the Byzantine Church.
4
– Grimme,
ZA, xxvi, 164, suggested that it might have come from SArabia, perhaps influenced by the Eth [Gz]
diyāblos. This, however, is apparently a rare word in Eth [Gz], the usual translation for
diábolos being
sayṭān, though sometimes
gānen is used (James iv, 7; 1 Pet. v, 8, etc.). Moreover, even if there were anything in Grimme’s theory that this was the form that crossed over into Arabia, his further supposition that the
diyā‑ was taken to be the SAr
ḏ = [Ar]
ḏī is very far fetched.«
▪
EALL (Gutas, “Greek Loanwords”): probably a direct loan from Grk
diábolos.
▪ Rolland2014 refers also to Nişanyan2001 who derived the word from Grk
epíboulos ‘qui machine contre, qui tend des pièges, insidieux’ rather than from
diábolos, but the Nişanyan’s online TES (as of 24Sept2014) has again
diábolos. In any case, the word has probably undergone paronymic attraction from √BLS ‘despair’.