Isaiah 14 and the making of Lucifer

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Almost every road to the name Lucifer passes through one verse in the Book of Isaiah. This page reads that verse in its own setting, follows it into Latin, and traces how Christian writers came to hear in it the fall of Satan. It also shows the other side of the same Latin word, where lucifer is a title of Christ.

People who hold this passage sacred will find no mockery here. The aim is to show how a reading developed. Knowing a reading’s history does not settle whether it is true. That remains a question for each tradition and each person.

The Hebrew text: a taunt song for the king of Babylon

Historical Isaiah 13 and 14 belong to a group of prophecies against foreign nations. What follows is a taunt song. It is a poem mocking a dead tyrant.

The poem imagines the underworld, called Sheol in Hebrew, stirring to greet the fallen king. The kings of the nations, now shades, rise from their thrones and say that he has become as weak as they are. Maggots are his bed and worms his covering. Then comes the passage that later people made famous. In the King James Version:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.” (Isaiah 14:12 to 15)

The poem goes on. Onlookers stare at the corpse and ask, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms …” (14:16). The king lies unburied, cast out of his grave. Throughout, the subject is a human ruler, a man.

Helel ben shahar

The Hebrew of verse 12 reads, in transliteration, eikh naphalta mi-shamayim helel ben shahar. The phrase helel ben shahar is the heart of the matter. Many scholars think the phrase names the Morning Star. A minority read helel as a form of a verb meaning “howl” or “wail.” The word appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, so certainty is not possible.

Modern English translations reflect this. The New Revised Standard Version has “Day Star, son of Dawn.” The New International Version has “morning star, son of the dawn.” The Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation has “day-star, son of the morning.” The King James Version’s “Lucifer” turns the phrase into a proper name because it follows the Latin. It kept the name from earlier English Bibles such as the Wycliffite and Geneva versions, and the Catholic Douay-Rheims has it too. The New King James Version still uses it. Most modern translations do not.

What the image means

What is the image doing? The prophet compares the king to the Morning Star, the brightest light in the dawn sky, which climbs high but always fades before the rising Sun. A king who claimed to rise above the stars of God is mocked as a light that could not hold its place. Scholars often compare the Ugaritic story of Athtar, who climbed to Baal’s throne on Zaphon and was too small for it. Whether the prophet knew that exact story, or a related myth, is debated. That a poet borrowed mythic language for political mockery is widely accepted.

Which king? The text says “king of Babylon.” Some scholars think the poem was first written about an Assyrian king and later applied to Babylon. One candidate is Sargon II, who died in battle in 705 BCE. His body was reportedly never recovered. Others prefer a Babylonian ruler. Jewish tradition often linked the passage with Nebuchadnezzar. For this page, the important point is shared by all these views: in its first setting, Isaiah 14 is about a human tyrant.

That is the ancient evidence. The reading of the poem as the fall of Satan came later, from Christian interpreters of the early centuries, as the sections below show. For many Christians that later reading is also a true reading of scripture. This page describes its history and does not judge it.

Jerome’s Vulgate and the word lucifer

Historical The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the last centuries BCE. That translation, the Septuagint, rendered helel ben shahar as ho heosphoros ho proi anatellon, “the dawn-bringer who rises early.” A Greek-speaking reader would hear the name of the Morning Star.

Around 390 to 405 CE, the scholar Jerome produced a new Latin translation of the Bible, working from the Hebrew for most of the Old Testament. This translation became known as the Vulgate, the “common” version, and it was the standard Bible of Western Christianity for over a thousand years. In Isaiah 14:12, Jerome wrote:

“quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes”

In English: “How you have fallen from heaven, lucifer, you who rose in the morning; you have crashed to the earth, you who wounded the nations.”

Jerome chose the normal Latin word for the Morning Star. He was not inventing a name. He used lucifer in other places too, always for the dawn or the morning star:

• Job 11:17, where the restored sufferer is told that he will rise “like lucifer.”
• Job 38:32, where God asks Job whether he can bring out lucifer in its season.
• Psalm 109:3 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 110 in most modern Bibles), “ex utero ante luciferum genui te,” “from the womb, before the morning star, I begot you.” This verse comes from the Vulgate’s Gallican Psalter, which Jerome revised from the Greek.
• 2 Peter 1:19, discussed below.

None of these uses is a name for the Devil. In early manuscripts, Latin had no consistent capital letters for proper names, so lucifer in Isaiah 14 looked like the word in Job. Only later, as the Devil reading took hold, did printers and people treat it as a name. English translators then carried the Latin over. John Wycliffe’s circle used “Lucifer” in their English Bible of the late fourteenth century. The King James translators of 1611 kept it.

Interpretation: from king to fallen angel

Later tradition The New Testament gives a few images of Satan’s defeat. “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Revelation 12:7 to 9 describes a war in heaven in which Michael and his angels fight “the dragon,” who is “cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” Revelation 12:4 says the dragon’s tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven.” Later tradition would read this as one third of the angels joining the rebellion.

Origen (c. 185 to c. 253 CE), a Greek-writing scholar of Alexandria, developed the reading at length in On First Principles (book 1, chapter 5, section 5). The work survives mainly in Rufinus’s Latin translation, so the word Lucifer in it is Rufinus’s Latin. Origen quotes Isaiah 14:12 to 22 and argues that it shows a being who “formerly was Lucifer, and who used to arise in the morning.”

In the public-domain translation by Frederick Crombie, he asks: “For if, as some think, he was a nature of darkness, how is Lucifer said to have existed before? Or how could he arise in the morning, who had in himself nothing of the light?” He links the passage to Luke 10:18 and concludes, “For at one time he was light.” Origen’s purpose was theological. He wanted to show that evil is not part of anyone’s created nature but a fall from goodness by free choice. Ezekiel 28 serves the same argument in his work.

Augustine (354 to 430 CE), bishop of Hippo in North Africa, shaped Western theology more than any other early writer. In The City of God (book 11, chapters 13 to 15) he discusses the fall of the angels, Isaiah 14, and Ezekiel 28. For Augustine, the root of the angels’ fall was pride, a love of self that turned away from God. That idea, pride as the first sin, became central to the medieval and Miltonic Lucifer.

Lucifer as a name for Christ

Later tradition The Second Letter of Peter speaks of the prophetic word as “a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19). The Greek word for “day star” is phosphoros. Jerome’s Vulgate has: “donec dies inlucescat et lucifer oriatur in cordibus vestris,” “until the day dawns and the lucifer rises in your hearts.” Most Christian people have understood this morning star as Christ, or as Christ’s light in the believer.

Later tradition The Exsultet is an ancient Latin hymn sung at the Easter Vigil in Catholic and other Western churches, as the great Easter candle is lit. Its text is usually dated to the fourth to seventh centuries, and its exact origin is uncertain. Near its end, it prays that the candle may still be burning when the Morning Star rises:

“Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat: ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum: Christus Filius tuus, qui, regressus ab inferis, humano generi serenus illuxit.”

In English: “May the morning star find its flame alight: that morning star, I say, which knows no setting, Christ your Son, who, coming back from the dead, has shed his peaceful light on the human race.”

What it all adds up to

In Hebrew, Isaiah 14 mocks a dead king of Babylon by comparing him to the Morning Star, helel ben shahar, who tried to climb above the stars and fell. The Greek translation called that star heosphoros. Jerome’s Latin called it lucifer, the ordinary Roman word for the Morning Star. Christian writers, beginning by the third century, read the passage alongside Luke 10:18, Ezekiel 28, and Revelation 12 as the story of Satan’s fall, and so Lucifer became the Devil’s name before his fall. In the same centuries, the same Latin word continued to name Christ as the true Morning Star in 2 Peter and the Exsultet.

Where to go next

For the whole story from the ancient morning star to modern Luciferianism, read my Lucifer for beginners guide, and for the claims you will meet online, my Lucifer myths page.