The Fall of Satan — Book of Job, plate 16

Satan falls with his head below his shoulders and his feet thrown towards heaven. His muscular body fills the centre of William Blake’s engraving, but its strength has become helpless weight. On either side, human witnesses remain on the broken ground. Above them, a bearded figure sits with an open book across his knees. The picture makes a violent descent take place within an otherwise remarkably steady arrangement. ^[1]

The Fall of Satan is the sixteenth illustration in Blake’s Book of Job sequence. Its subject is his own expansion of the biblical story: Job never witnesses this spectacular expulsion in the book itself. Blake joins Job’s encounter with God to passages from the Gospels, Revelation and Paul. The inscriptions around the scene make that joining visible, asking us to read the fall through several biblical voices at once. ^[1][2]

The familiar title can suggest the war in heaven illustrated in Blake’s Paradise Lost drawings. Here, however, Job and his companions anchor the event to another story. Their different reactions matter as much as the body hurtling between them. The engraving shows a power losing its place, and people discovering that they stand in different relationships to its defeat.

A body with nowhere to stand

Begin with Satan’s head. His mouth opens towards us, his face compressed between his arms. The forearms bend around his head while the legs rise above his torso, one extending farther than the other. His unevenly bent legs and closely held arms make the descent look involuntary. The broad chest and strongly modelled thighs make the inability to resist especially palpable. ^[1][3]

Two smaller bodies fall beside him. One is seen chiefly from behind, with hair hanging below its inverted head; the other curls sideways, its limbs drawn close. All three occupy a bright, irregular channel. Jagged edges break into the dark background, while longer tongues of flame rise from the opening below. The channel has the sudden brightness of a lightning flash and the sustained, winding shape of fire. These effects let the image accommodate both the language of falling lightning and an abyss into which the figures disappear.

The curving forms around the bodies enlarge the movement. They sweep down from beneath the throne and gather around the falling group. At either side, the great wings and flowing drapery of the heavenly attendants rise towards the upper corners, turning back around the central light. The eye can follow these long curves downwards, then return along them to heaven. Blake gives the plunge a surrounding order that survives its violence.

The contrast depends on the engraving’s marks. Close strokes darken Satan’s limbs; shorter, varied lines articulate the faces and clothing of the witnesses. Across the upper background, lines radiate from the light around the seated figure. The pale interior of that light and the bright fissure below are both made through the paper showing between dark marks. A single restricted range of ink and paper distinguishes calm illumination from destructive brilliance.

There is no armed angel striking Satan in this scene. The principal attendants flank the opening, while the seated figure raises one hand above the book. The fall is already taking place. That choice moves attention from a contest of weapons to a change in position: the figure once able to move between heaven and the human world is being removed from their shared space. ^[1]

The people beside the opening

Job kneels at the lower left, his long beard falling over his bare chest. One hand rests flat against the ground. His wife kneels close behind him, with a hand held to her breast. Both look upwards. Their bodies retain a comparatively open shape, and the ground beneath Job’s palm gives him a physical steadiness that the inverted figures lack. He has somewhere to rest his weight.

Across the fissure, three men crowd into the lower right corner. Their backs bend, their heads turn or draw together, and one raises a hand near his face. The group seems to contract under what it sees. Blake places this tightly folded mass against the more upright pair on the opposite bank. The fracture makes a distinction that can be followed through posture before it is explained through theology. ^[1][3]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue identifies the two groups as Job and his wife, calmly accepting the Lord’s judgement, and Eliphaz with the other two companions. He reads the splitting ground as separating their responses. The friends remain on its edge; the picture does not show them tumbling into the abyss alongside Satan. Their fear belongs to witnesses whose position has become precarious. ^[1]

That distinction also leaves room for what follows. At the biblical ending, God rebukes Eliphaz and his companions for their speech, then requires them to seek Job’s prayer. Job’s intercession precedes his restoration. The frightened men in this engraving therefore have a future beyond the present judgement. Within the wider Book of Job illustrations, their relationship to the sufferer can still change. ^[2]

The likenesses falling with Satan

The smaller falling figures complicate any simple division between good people on one bank and bad people on the other. Butlin identifies them as likenesses of Job and his wife, recalling forms already present in the flames around Satan in the second illustration, Satan Before the Throne of God. He calls them simulacra: appearances of the couple, distinct from the people kneeling safely below. ^[1][14]

Looking between the engravings makes the return striking. In plate two, Satan travels horizontally beneath the enthroned figure, carrying the fiery forms around his outstretched body. The lower household remains together. In plate sixteen, the central body has turned head down, the surrounding likenesses have acquired full inverted bodies, and the human gathering is divided by the opening. A composition first used to connect heavenly permission with earthly vulnerability becomes the structure of expulsion. ^[14][1]

These repetitions make it difficult to read Satan as an unrelated monster who has briefly entered the picture. The falling forms carry recognisable human associations. Butlin interprets their solidity as the form error must acquire before it can be cast out. That is an account of Blake’s imaginative procedure, rather than a literal incident recoverable from Job’s narrative. The engraving allows the couple to witness the removal of likenesses that are bound to Satan while remaining distinct from their own living bodies. ^[1]

Whose judgement is written below?

The largest inscription beneath the picture comes from Job 36:17: “Thou hast fulfilled the Judgment of the Wicked”. In the biblical chapter, Elihu is speaking to Job. He declares that he has more to say on God’s behalf, describes affliction as an occasion for instruction, and warns Job against iniquity. The verse begins with an adversative and continues by saying that judgement and justice have taken hold of him. ^[1][2]

Blake isolates part of that sentence and places it below the falling accuser. The changed setting gives it a new force. Read with the picture, fulfilment can suggest judgement accomplished through Satan’s defeat; read with its original chapter, the words retain Elihu’s pressure upon the sufferer. The reader has to hold both relations in mind. A speech within Job’s debate has become a large statement beneath a vision that the biblical speaker never describes.

The writing up the outer sides comes from another speaker again. Zophar asks in chapter eleven whether Job can discover God completely through searching. His questions measure divine wisdom against heaven and the depths below. In context, they form part of a rebuke: Zophar has already accused Job of speaking falsely and has claimed that his punishment is less than his wrongdoing deserves. These are a friend’s words in an argument, not a detached pronouncement by the book’s narrator. ^[2]

Around Blake’s image, those questions describe the very height and depth we are looking into. The eye moves upwards towards the throne and downwards towards the fissure. Yet Zophar’s confident application of divine mystery to Job’s supposed guilt becomes troubling when the engraving shows the accuser being cast out. The border preserves the words while changing the conditions under which we hear them.

Across the top, Job himself supplies a third voice. His statement that Hell is naked before God comes from chapter twenty-six, a reply beginning with sharp questions about how his companion has helped the powerless. It develops into an account of divine reach through waters, clouds, heaven and the depths. Even that magnificent description ends by acknowledging how little has been heard or understood. Blake places this language of exposure above a scene in which the dark lower space has opened to view. ^[1][2]

Lightning, the accuser and the weak

Under the principal inscription, a curved line of smaller writing joins the report of Christ’s returning followers to his vision of Satan falling. Luke’s tenth chapter begins with the sending out of seventy disciples. They return delighted that demons submit to them through Jesus’s name; Jesus responds that he has seen Satan fall like lightning. Blake compresses and adapts the exchange, introducing Jesus by name and using the verb of seeing found on the engraving. ^[1][15]

The surrounding Gospel passage gives the event a particular emphasis. Jesus tells the disciples to rejoice that their names are recorded in heaven, rather than in their power over spirits. He then thanks the Father for revealing what has been hidden from the wise to babes. The fall belongs to a discussion of revelation, knowledge and the proper grounds for joy. This context helps explain why a vision of Satan’s defeat can become meaningful within Job’s education, beyond its immediate dramatic appeal. ^[15]

The inner inscription at the left identifies the defeated power through Revelation: the accuser who prosecuted the brethren before God day and night has been cast down. In Revelation twelve this announcement follows the heavenly battle between Michael’s angels and the dragon. The chapter continues with danger on earth, as the expelled dragon pursues the woman and her offspring. Blake selects the declaration of accusation defeated and places it beside Job’s human ordeal. The scriptural source includes a larger conflict than this one engraving undertakes to narrate. ^[1][16]

At the right, John’s Gospel supplies the expulsion of the prince of this world. In John twelve, Jesus speaks of the judgement of the world as his death approaches. The casting out is followed by his statement about being lifted up and drawing people to himself, which the Gospel connects explicitly to the manner of his death. Blake’s border thus brings Christ’s saving action into the interpretation of Job without adding a Crucifixion scene to the picture. ^[1][17]

At the bottom, two small lines from First Corinthians describe God choosing the foolish and the weak to confound the wise and mighty. Paul’s chapter challenges divisions, status and confidence in human wisdom through the preaching of the cross. Beneath Blake’s image, these words bear directly on its unequal bodies: the powerful torso falls, while the elderly sufferer remains supported on the ground. Physical strength has ceased to guarantee authority. The smallest lettering gives a different measure by which to judge the largest body. ^[1][18]

The inscriptions therefore do more than name the action. Their speakers and settings differ, and Blake has brought them into a new relationship. Job’s debate, the disciples’ return, Christ’s approaching death and an apocalyptic victory converge around a single illuminated opening. The thin flames, cloud bands and small heavenly forms in the border carry the eye between them. Reading becomes part of looking around the whole sheet.

The wording also has a history of revision. In his study of unrecorded proofs, Robert N. Essick reported that a 1936 auction catalogue described a plate sixteen impression without the passage identifying the accuser. Essick could not trace the sheets and relied on the sale descriptions; he also distinguished surviving proof states in which the first line of that passage preceded the addition of its continuation. The border’s declaration of defeat acquired its fuller wording during the plate’s development. ^[19]

The same auction description recorded a version of Luke’s exchange beginning “And he said unto them”. The following proof state named the speaker explicitly: “Jesus said unto them”. Essick suggests that Blake probably wanted to identify who was speaking. That modest change matters in a border gathering several biblical voices. The finished wording ensures that the statement about Satan’s fall belongs unmistakably to Jesus. These are reported stages in the engraving’s making, rather than variants visible on every surviving impression. ^[19]

The open book above the abyss

The enthroned figure has a long beard, a robe and an open book; his raised hand and level seat offer a counterweight to the overturned bodies. Small radiant faces and descending infant forms occupy the light around him. The two larger winged attendants turn inwards. Their presence gives the upper space company and attentiveness, while Satan’s compressed body appears increasingly isolated as it descends. ^[1][3]

Butlin interprets this figure as Christ with the Book of Life, connecting Job’s judgement with Blake’s treatments of the Last Judgement. The Christian inscriptions support that reading, but the face alone does not settle it. Discussing the tradition behind the identification, Penelope Minney observes that there are no obvious identifying tokens in Blake’s depiction. She also cautions against making books uniformly oppressive in the series: the open volume here accompanies a scene of release. ^[1][20]

Minney reads the expulsion as a personification of Job’s change of mind in chapter forty-two. That interpretation gives the headlong body an inward significance. Error can grip a person powerfully even when its authority is false. Its defeat becomes something Job can see, after the arguments about what his suffering must mean. ^[20]

In that chapter, Job acknowledges the limits of what he has said and understood. He distinguishes his earlier knowledge through hearing from his present seeing, then repents in dust and ashes. Blake gives the change a visible event: Job looks upwards while the false power falls away. The connection depends upon reading his response alongside the invented scene; the biblical verses themselves contain no description of the falling bodies. ^[2]

Blake’s own writing offers a closely related way of thinking, although it is not a commentary on this particular plate. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, he says that rejecting error and embracing truth brings a judgement upon an individual. Elsewhere in the same text he describes Christ delivering the accused from the accuser, and links forgiveness at Jesus’s judgement seat with the accuser’s expulsion. These passages make judgement an act of liberation from a destructive relationship, as well as a division of figures in space. ^[21]

The engraving gives that distinction a memorable shape. Job’s suffering body is still present; nothing in his kneeling posture erases what has happened to him. Yet the centre is occupied by the fall of the one who accused. The human witnesses, the calm book and the terrible descending weight belong to a moment when the explanation of suffering through accusation is itself brought into judgement.

One design, different surviving sheets

The engraved publication line carries the date 8 March 1825. Tate’s shared series catalogue distinguishes that inscription from the completion and issue of the suite in 1826. John Linnell’s engraving agreement with Blake dates from 1823; the finished undertaking contained twenty-one subjects and a title plate. These stages explain why several dates can appear in accounts of the same design. ^[1]

Individual sheets have further histories. Tate catalogues A00027 as a line engraving dated 1825 and reprinted in 1874. The Yale Center for British Art identifies its separate impression, B1978.43.1518, as 1826. Its printed publication line still bears 1825. The identity of a design, the date engraved into its copperplate and the date assigned to a particular impression answer different questions. ^[1][3]

Those distinctions matter when comparing the fine strokes and pale spaces. The composition remains recognisable across sheets whose paper, printing and later history differ. Its arrangement is still legible: a book held open above, a body deprived of support below, and witnesses whose ways of looking have begun to separate. Blake gives Job a vision of the power that tormented him losing its hold.