Looking for Satan in All the Wrong Places

Mosaic reader Lynn Goucher writes:

I am a Jew by choice, who converted formally a little over a year ago. I was raised in a secular Christian home and have always been perplexed and somewhat disgusted by the Christian obsession with the devil. Although Christians insist that the devil appears in the Torah, my understanding is that the biblical Hebrew word satan, from which comes the name Satan, has been mistranslated as “devil” when it really means “obstacle.” Am I right or wrong?

The answer is: both. It depends partly on which books and periods of the biblical corpus one is looking at; partly on how one reads them; and partly on which post-biblical commentators one chooses to read them with.