Lucifer
Lucifer is the King James Version rendering of the Hebrew word in Isaiah 14:12. This word, transliterated hêlêl or heylel, occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible and according to the KJV-influenced Strong’s Concordance means “shining one, morning star, Lucifer”.
In this passage Isaiah applies to a king of Babylon, the image of the morning star fallen from the sky, an image he is generally believed to have borrowed from a legend in Canaanite mythology.
For the unnamed “king of Babylon”, a wide range of identifications have been proposed. They include a Babylonian ruler of the prophet Isaiah’s own time the later Nebuchadnezzar II, under whom the Babylonian captivity of the Jews began, or Nabonidus, and the Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon II and Sennacherib. Herbert Wolf held that the “king of Babylon” was not a specific ruler but a generic representation of the whole line of rulers.
In ancient Canaanite mythology, the morning star is pictured as a god, Attar, who attempted to occupy the throne of Ba’al and, finding he was unable to do so, descended and ruled the underworld.
The original myth may have been about a lesser god Helel trying to dethrone the Canaanite high god El who lived on a mountain to the north.
Hermann Gunkel’s reconstruction of the myth told of a mighty warrior called Hêlal, whose ambition it was to ascend higher than all the other stellar divinities, but who had to descend to the depths; it thus portrayed as a battle the process by which the bright morning star fails to reach the highest point in the sky before being faded out by the rising sun.
Similarities have been noted with the East Semitic story of Ishtar’s or Inanna’s descent into the underworld, Ishtar and Inanna being associated with the planet Venus. A connection has been seen also with the Babylonian myth of Etana.
As an adjective, the Latin word lucifer meant “light-bringing” and was applied to the moon. As a noun, it meant “morning star”, or, in Roman mythology, its divine personification as “the fabled son of Aurora and Cephalus, and father of Ceyx”, or (in poetry) “day”. The second of the meanings attached to the word when used as a noun corresponds to the image in Greek mythology of Eos, the goddess of dawn, giving birth to the morning star Phosphorus.
The Jewish Encyclopedia comments: “The brilliancy of the morning star, which eclipses all other stars, but is not seen during the night, may easily have given rise to a myth such as was told of Ethana and Zu: he was led by his pride to strive for the highest seat among the star-gods on the northern mountain of the gods … but was hurled down by the supreme ruler of the Babylonian Olympus.” The Greek myth of Phaethon, whose name means “Shining One”, has also been seen as similar.
The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible points out that no evidence has been found of any Canaanite myth of a god being thrown from heaven, as in Isaiah 14:12. It concludes that the closest parallels with Isaiah’s description of the king of Babylon as a fallen morning star cast down from heaven are to be found, not in any lost Canaanite and other myths, but in traditional ideas of the Jewish people themselves, echoed in the Biblical account of the fall of Adam and Eve, cast out of God’s presence for wishing to be as God, and the picture in Psalm 82 of the “gods” and “sons of the Most High” destined to die and fall. This Jewish tradition has echoes also in Jewish pseudepigrapha such as 2 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve.
The word Lucifer is taken from the Latin Vulgate, which translates as Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12, meaning “the morning star, the planet Venus”, or, as an adjective, “light-bringing”. The Septuagint renders in Greek as heōsphoros, a name, literally “bringer of dawn”, for the morning star.
Isaiah 14:12 is not the only place where the Vulgate uses the word lucifer. The Vulgate uses the same word in contexts where it clearly has no reference to a fallen angel: 2 Peter 1:19 (meaning “morning star”), Job 11:17 (“the light of the morning”), Job 38:32 (“the signs of the zodiac”) and Psalms 110:3 (“the dawn”).
To speak of the morning star, lucifer is not the only expression that the Vulgate uses: three times it uses stella matutina: Sirach 50:6 (referring to the actual morning star), and Revelation 2:28 (of uncertain reference) and 22:16 (referring to Jesus).
Other indications that in Christian tradition the Latin word lucifer did not carry connotations of a fallen angel are the names of Bishops Lucifer of Cagliari and Lucifer of Siena, and its use in the Easter Proclamation prayer to God regarding the paschal candle:
Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat: ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum. Christus Filius tuus, qui, regressus ab inferis, humano generi serenus illuxit, et vivit et regnat in saecula saeculorum (May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star: the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who, coming back from death’s domain, has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns forever and ever).
The pseudepigrapha of pre-Christian Enochic Judaism, the form of Judaism witnessed to in 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, which enjoyed much popularity during the Second Temple period, gave Satan an expanded role, interpreting Isaiah 14:12-15, with its reference to the morning star, as applicable to him, and presenting him as a fallen angel cast out of heaven for refusing, according to Jewish writings, to bow to Adam, of whom Satan was envious and jealous of the power over the earth granted to Adam.
Christian writers explained the motives of the angel’s rebellion and the nature of his sin in the same way, but added pride against God, which they mention more frequently than envy or jealousy with regard to humanity.
Christian tradition, influenced by the Jewish presentation of the passage of Isaiah as applicable to Satan, came to use the Latin word for “morning star”, lucifer, as a proper name (“Lucifer”) for Satan as Satan was before his fall. As a result, “Lucifer has become a by-word for Satan in the Church and in popular literature”, as in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
However, the Latin word lucifer kept its original positive sense for early Christians, as is evident from its use as a personal name by, among others, two 4th-century bishops, Lucifer of Cagliari and Lucifer of Siena, and its appearance in the Easter Proclamation as a description of Jesus.
Luciferianism is a belief system that venerates the essential characteristics that are affixed to Lucifer. The tradition, influenced by Gnosticism, usually reveres Lucifer not as the Devil, but as a liberator or guiding spirit or even the true god as opposed to Jehovah.
Although sometimes mistakenly associated with Satanism due to the Christian interpretation of the fallen angel, Luciferianism is a wholly different and unrelated belief system and does not revere the Devil figure or most characteristics typically affixed to Satan. Rather, Lucifer in this context is seen as one of many Morning Star, a symbol of enlightenment, independence and human progression, and is often used interchangeably with similar figures from a range of ancient beliefs, such as the Greek titan Prometheus or the Jewish figure Lilith.
Filed under: Uncategorized
