Is Lucifer in the Bible, and Who Is Isaiah 14 Actually About?

How did the Hebrew helel become Lucifer in English?

The Hebrew of Isaiah 14:12 reads helel ben shachar. Helel comes from a root meaning to shine, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines it as shining one, an epithet of the king of Babylon; ben shachar means son of dawn.

Greek translators of the Septuagint rendered helel as heosphoros, the dawn-bringer, their ordinary name for the morning star.

Jerome, translating from the Hebrew around 400, chose the Latin equivalent, lucifer, light-bringer. Romans used it for the planet Venus the way English speakers say morning star, and his Vulgate uses the same word elsewhere for ordinary things of the sky: the light of dawn in Job 11:17 and Psalm 109:3 (110:3 in English Bibles), and a heavenly body in Job 38:32.

By the time the verse reached English, Latin Christian writers had long read it as the devil's fall. Rufinus's Latin translation of Origen, made in 398, speaks of the fallen power as "he who formerly was Lucifer" (De Principiis 1.5.5).

Wycliffe's Bible in the 1380s and the King James Version in 1611 kept Jerome's word instead of translating it. English readers therefore met a Latin word printed as a name, and a phrase that meant a star in Hebrew, Greek and Latin came to read as the name of a person.

Why does Isaiah 14 describe a king falling from heaven?

Because the poem borrows the story of a star-god who tried to climb too high. The king's boast in verses 13 and 14 is cosmic: "I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon", and "I will make myself like the Most High". Verse 15 answers, "But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit."

Zaphon is a real mountain name. In the texts found at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit on the Syrian coast, Mount Zaphon is the seat of the storm god Baal, and the same tablets know a dawn god, Shachar, the word in helel ben shachar (KTU 1.23).

The closest parallel comes in the Baal Cycle (KTU 1.6 i 53-65). With Baal dead, the god Athtar, whom many scholars connect with the morning star, climbs Zaphon and sits on Baal's throne. His feet do not reach the footstool and his head does not reach the top, so he comes down and rules the earth below instead.

Read against that story, the poem mocks the king of Babylon as a morning star who reached for the mountain of the gods and ended in the pit. The cosmic language belongs to the taunt, since the higher the claim, the further the fall.

Is Lucifer a name in the Hebrew text?

No. Helel is a descriptive noun, shining one, and ben shachar, son of dawn, extends the description, so the phrase works as a title for the king rather than a name.

Meaning alone would not settle it, since Hebrew names usually carry meanings too. Use is the stronger evidence: a figure with a name is normally called by it again, and helel appears as a noun only at Isaiah 14:12.

No later book of the Hebrew Bible refers back to helel as anyone's name.

Helel is not the only Hebrew term that later readers turned into a name. Azazel in Leviticus 16 is a ritual term whose grammar is still debated, and later literature made it the name of a fallen angel by much the same route helel took in Christian Latin and English.

How did Isaiah 14 become a story about Satan?

Through Christian writers who read the poem alongside passages about Satan's fall, starting in the early third century. Tertullian, writing Against Marcion around 207, twice applies the boast of Isaiah 14:14 to the devil: once to explain "the god of this world" in 2 Corinthians 4:4 (book 5, chapter 11), and once for "the prince of the power of the air" in Ephesians 2:2 (book 5, chapter 17).

Origen went further in De Principiis, written around 220 to 230. In book 1, chapter 5, he quotes Isaiah 14:12-22 in full, argues that a figure who once rose in the morning must once have been light, and joins the passage to Luke 10:18, where Jesus says, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning" (NRSVUE).

Neither writer started from nothing. Second Temple Jewish writings such as 1 Enoch already told of angels who fell, and Luke 10:18 gave Isaiah's falling star a partner in the Gospels.

The Fathers did not treat Lucifer as the devil's proper name. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 notes that they took it to describe "the state from which he has fallen", and that the application to the devil nevertheless "has prevailed" in Christian tradition.

Many Christian commentators still read verses 12 to 15 as describing Satan behind the king of Babylon, while others read the whole poem as a taunt against Babylon alone. Both readings start from the same Hebrew; they differ over whether a text addressed to a king can also describe a being behind him.

Is Ezekiel 28 about Lucifer too?

Ezekiel 28 is the chapter most often paired with Isaiah 14, and it also addresses a named human ruler: "the prince of Tyre" at verse 2 and "the king of Tyre" at verse 12. Verse 2 tells him, "you are but a mortal and no god" (NRSVUE).

Its second half is harder to read as politics alone. Verse 13 places the king "in Eden, the garden of God", covered in precious stones, and in the King James Version verse 14 calls him "the anointed cherub that covereth" on "the holy mountain of God".

Translations differ at that verse. The NRSVUE reads "You were a cherub" and notes that the Hebrew adds "anointed guardian", while the Greek Septuagint reads meta tou cheroub, placing the king with the cherub rather than making him one.

The nine stones of verse 13 all appear among the twelve on the high priest's breastpiece in Exodus 28:17-20, from carnelian and chrysolite to beryl, onyx and jasper, so the poet dresses the king of Tyre in priestly as well as royal imagery.

Tertullian (Against Marcion 2.10) and Origen (De Principiis 1.5.4) both read Ezekiel 28 as the devil's fall, in the same works where they applied Isaiah 14 to him, so the two chapters have travelled together since the third century.

Ezekiel is the harder case of the two. Both chapters name a human ruler, but the Eden and cherub language of Ezekiel 28:13-14 goes further than any detail in Isaiah 14.