Satan gets top billing in a new adult animated cartoon series launched last week on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.
“Hazbin Hotel” depicts the ruler of hell as a visionary who tries to create a new order in heaven but is rebuffed by “heartless” angels protecting God. He is joined in his endeavors by his consort, Lilith — formerly partnered with Adam, the trailer says.
Announcing the series, Amazon promised in an X posting: “Heaven and hell like you’ve never seen them before.”
The two-minute preview upends the biblical account of Satan found in Chapter 3 of Genesis in which the first humans, Adam and Eve, are expelled after encountering the devil and listening to him.
In the Bible, Lucifer is depicted as a cunning serpent who beguiles Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve then entices Adam to eat, and the pair are subsequently expelled from paradise to earn their livelihood by the sweat of their brow.
In the “Hazbin Hotel” telling, Satan is noble, the angels protecting God are meanies, and we’re introduced to Lilith, an apocryphal character found in the Babylonian Talmud and the “Alphabet of Sirach,” a medieval Jewish folklore text.
Scholars suggested Lilith was Adam’s first wife and was dismissed from Eden because she would not submit to her husband’s authority. She’s been adopted by some Jewish feminists as a role model.
In “Hazbin Hotel,” much of the action focuses on a presumed daughter of the Lucifer-Lilith pairing, Hell Charlie Morningstar, who opens a hotel aimed at rehabilitating the demons who fell from grace with the devil.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Prime Video streaming service.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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