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A History of Lucifer
(See our YouTube video by this title)
We are going to look at the history of Lucifer, and at the recently popularized claim that
this is a name for Satan.
As a lead-in to the study, we will read Lamentations 2:1, where the prophet Jeremiah is
writing about the destruction of Jerusalem by the army of the king of Babylon in 586 BC.
In reading this verse, keep in mind that the word “Zion” is a Biblical name for Jerusalem:
“How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in His anger! He cast
down from heaven to the earth the beauty of Israel, and did not remember His footstool
in the day of His anger.”
The verse tells us Israel was cast from heaven to the earth. Should we think that Israel
literally was in heaven, or is this a figurative expression? Obviously, this is figurative.
The destruction of Jerusalem by the army of the king of Babylon is figuratively described
as a casting of Israel from heaven, and this observation will be crucial to building our
understanding of a passage in Isaiah chapter 14, where the word Lucifer is used in a
proverb against the king of Babylon.
This word Lucifer is a compound Latin word from lux, meaning light, and the suffix fer—
Think of an aquifer, a water–bearer, or water–bringer. The literal meaning of Lucifer,
which in Latin is pronounced with a hard c, is light–bringer, but in common usage it was
a name for the morning star, what we call the planet Venus.
Ancient civilizations had a fascination with a morning star because of how it reflects the
light of the rising sun before the sun reaches the Horisont. Many ancient language
groups had their own names for this. The Arabs called it Zuhratun, the Assyrians called
it Belit, the Babylonians called it Istar. But most important for our purposes here is that
Greek-speaking people, in the Koine Greek of New Testament times, call the morning
star Phosphoros.
In the earlier Koine Greek, in the centuries before the New Testament was written, this
word was pronounced Heosphoros. The difference in pronunciation is similar to us
saying something like, “He sleeps,” whereas a few centuries ago they would have said,
“He sleepeth”–different ways of pronouncing the word, but the exact same meaning.
This is important, because in the inspired New Testament Greek, in 2Peter 1:19, the
word Phosphoros is used in reference to Jesus Christ. In English, this part of the verse
reads, “Until the day dawns, and the morning star [referring to Christ] rises in your
hearts.” This term, morning star, comes from the Greek Phosphoros, which translates
into the Latin Lucifer. What the Greeks call Phosphoros, the Latin speaking people call
Lucifer. The Roman senator Cicero, a contemporary of Julius Caesar and the major
influencer of style in Latin writing, and his work On the Nature of the Gods, explained:
“The Latin equivalent of Heosphoros is Lucifer...the morning star” (2:20:53). So we
have Heosphoros/Phosphoros in Greek, and Lucifer in Latin—respective names for the
morning star.
With those background observations in place, let’s look at how the word Lucifer has
been used in church history. In the year 355 AD, the bishop of Rome, Pope Liberius,
sent a delegation to meet with the emperor, Constantius, and arrange for a church
council in the city of Milan. The head of this delegation sent by the pope was a pastor
named Lucifer, bishop of the church in Cagliari, the capital city of that very large island
off the west coast of Italy called Sardinia.
Bishop Lucifer was known as a strong advocate of orthodox theology, and in particular
for his aggressive stance against false teachers who tried to compromise the knowledge
of Christians on the uncreated Deity of Jesus Christ. Lucifer suffered significant
persecution for his stand, and later the Roman Catholic Church declared him a saint.
Today, in Cagliari of Sardinia, there is a chapel that has stood for centuries and is
dedicated to this person they call Saint Lucifer. Every year on May 20, the Catholics in
Cagliari celebrate what they call The Feast of Saint Lucifer. None of these celebrants
would take seriously the claim in the English speaking world that Lucifer is a name for
Satan.
There was another fourth century pastor named Lucifer, Bishop of Siena, a capital city
in the Italian province of Tuscany, and throughout history there have been other
Christian people named Lucifer. This should not seem awkward to us, since Latin
translations of the Bible, and most importantly the Vulgate (the dominant Bible
translation in Europe for more than a thousand years), in 2Peter 1:19, translates the
Greek Phosphoros into its Latin equivalent Lucifer. So a person reading this verse in the
Greek New Testament would see that we are waiting for Phosphoros to rise in our
hearts, whereas a person reading in the Vulgate or other Latin translations would read
that we are waiting for Lucifer to rise in our hearts.
Another important observation is the translation of Phosphoros in Spanish-language
Bibles, most notably in the Reina-Valera, which has been the dominant Spanish
translation for centuries, in Spain and in countries south of the U.S. border. In the widely
used Reina-Valera, the expression in 2Peter 1:19 is translated, “Lucero, hijo de la
mañana,” that is, “Lucifer, son of the morning.” All of this raises the question of how the
idea ever came about that Lucifer is a name for Satan?
Throughout church history there have been theologians, such as Tertullian and Origen
in the third century, and Augustine in the early–fifth century, who suggested that the use
of the word Lucifer in Isaiah chapter 14, in a proverb against the king of Babylon, could
actually be an address to Satan–but those scholars offered only speculation and
provided no evidence for others to take their idea seriously.
The idea that Lucifer is a name for Satan did not take root and begin to spread until the
17th-century publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton. This work of literature is a
fictionalized account of the Bible story, presenting Jesus as a created being alongside a
glorious archangel named Lucifer. Because of the world-class sophistication of Milton’s
literary style, Paradise Lost was widely read, exposing millions to the idea that Lucifer is
a title of ancient glory for the devil.
The second major push in popularizing this idea came with the rise of Mormonism in the
19th century. The claim that Lucifer is a name for Satan became a part of Mormon
doctrine. But in English-speaking Protestant churches, this idea did not begin to spread
until the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield
actually wrote in the Bible, in his bottom-of-page commentary on Isaiah 14:12, that
“Lucifer...can be none other than Satan” (you can read this on page 725 of the New
Scofield Reference Bible).
Scofield had strong financial backing, enabling the mass marketing of his Study Bible,
thereby pushing the Lucifer–Satan idea into the imagination of millions of churchgoing
people, from where it spilled out into the secular culture, so that today our culture is
saturated with the assumption that Lucifer is a title of ancient glory for the devil. But
does the Scripture itself support this idea?
In the Book of 1John 3:8, the Scripture tells us that Satan has said “from the
beginning,”and I want to compare this with John 8:44,
“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was
a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no
truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar
and the father of it.”
The Scripture tells us that Satan is a liar from the beginning. Do we arrive at this
knowledge by scientific investigation, or are we dependent on Divine revelation for such
knowledge? Obviously we are dependent on revelation, so that we have to respect the
boundaries of what is revealed.
When the Bible tells us Satan is a liar from the beginning, our intelligence cannot push
out past the beginning and pull information back into our world. From the beginning of
what is revealed to us, from the beginning of what we can know, Satan is a liar. How did
it come about that Satan came to be this? We don’t have a clue. Think of someone
trying to push a tomato through a cement wall. It is going to smear, it will not go through.
When scholars try to push beyond what is revealed in the Bible, they smear knowledge,
they do not advance it. Nowhere does the Bible give glory to Satan: Not in the future,
not in the present, not in the past.
So, with these observations on the table, let’s turn to Isaiah chapter 14, where we are
going to focus on verses 12-15. In reading these verses we want to be mindful of what
we are told in verse four, that this passage is “a proverb against the king of Babylon.”
This is a proverb, so it is going to require some careful thinking. Not imaginative
thinking, but a studious search of the Bible to compare Scripture with Scripture for
establishing our knowledge on the solid ground of direct observation. The verses read
“How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down
to the ground, you who weakened the nations! For you have said in your heart: ‘I will
ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the
mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north; I will ascend above the
heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ Yet you shall be brought down to
Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit.”
This passage announces a judgment on the king of Babylon and refers to him as
“Lucifer, son of the morning.” We are going to come back to that expression and
examine it carefully, but let’s look at the next few verses to help us with context.
Verse 13 tells us this judgment is coming on the king because of a series of charges
against him. It would be tedious for us to study every charge on the list, but we are
going to research enough to secure an understanding of what these expressions refer
to, and to certify our knowledge of who is being addressed in this proverb.
The first charge against the king is that he has said in his heart, “I will ascend into
heaven.” Let’s pause and think about this. If this is an address to Satan, then it raises
the question of how Satan could be cast out from heaven for saying he will ascend to
heaven. As Christians, we should require sensible interpretations of Scripture, but what
sense is there in believing someone could be cast OUT from a place for saying he will
go TO that place? Imagine me saying, “I was deported from Canada for saying, ‘I will go
to Canada.’” That would be an absurd statement. So right from the outset we have a
VERY serious problem with the idea of this passage being an address to Satan. The
devil already was in heaven—how could he be cast out for saying, ‘I will ascend into
heaven’?
We will come back to the saying about ascending to heaven, but for now let’s go to the
charge where the king says in his heart, “I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I
will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north.” The key
expressions for understanding this charge are “mount of the congregation” and “sides of
the north.” In Psalm 48:1-2 we are given a clear explanation of what these terms refer
to:
“Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in His holy mountain.
Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion on the sides of the north,
the city of the great King.”
In these verses, notice in particular the words “city, mountain, Zion, and sides of the
north.“ There is no need for an imaginative work of interpretation. By direct observation
we can see that “the sides of the north” is a Biblical expression for Zion, God‘s holy
mountain, and by extension the city of Jerusalem. This connects squarely with the
saying of the king of Babylon, that he will “sit on the mount of the congregation on the
farthest sides of the north.”
In Psalm 74:2, the Scripture gives even more detail by saying: “Remember Your
congregation, which You have purchased of old, the tribe of Your inheritance, which
You have redeemed—this Mount Zion where You have dwelt.”
Notice the words “congregation, mount, Zion, and dwelt.” The mount of the
congregation is Zion, the place God chose for His dwelling, as the Scripture says with
even more emphasis in Psalm 76:2, ”In Salem also is His tabernacle, and His dwelling
place in Zion.”
We know from the Bible that God‘s literal dwelling is in heaven, but in old covenant
times He chose the earthly city Jerusalem as the place for His temple, the place of
which He says in 2Chronicles 6:6, among many other places, “I have chosen
Jerusalem, that My name may be there.” God’s figurative dwelling was Jerusalem, Zion,
the Temple Mount, the place on earth which He chose to identify with His name.
Along with God’s temple being on Mount Zion, His throne also was there. The throne of
David in Zion was figuratively called “the throne of the Lord,” as the Scripture tells us in
1Chronicles 29:23, “Then Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king instead of
David his father.” Just as the temple served figuratively as the place of God‘s dwelling in
heaven, so also the throne of David served as a type or copy of the Lord‘s throne in
heaven, as the Scripture bears witness again in 1Chronicles 28:5, where David said to
Israel at the coronation of Solomon, “God has chosen my son Solomon to sit on the
throne of the kingdom of the Lord.”
When the army of the king of Babylon ascended Mount Zion and burned down the
temple and the city, for Israel this was a symbolic casting from heaven, as we read in
Lamentations at the beginning of our study. For the king of Babylon, in sending his army
to burn down the dwelling place of God, this was figuratively an ascending to heaven to
exalt his own throne over the throne, the temple, and the name of God.
These dots are not difficult to connect, and these observations from Scripture are
consistent in what they point to. The charges against the king of Babylon show the
arrogance of his heart in sending his army to ascend and destroy the dwelling place of
God for the figurative casting of Israel from heaven to the earth. There is no justification
for an imaginative interpretation of reading into this proverb an address to Satan.
When we look at the accumulation of observations and the dovetailing of Scriptural
expressions, the evidence piles up consistently that this proverb is exactly what the
Scripture tells us it is, a proverb against the king of Babylon, announcing the judgment
upon him for the arrogance of his heart in ascending to the place of God‘s dwelling and
exalting himself over the name of the Most High.
So with all of this on the table, we have a strong frame of reference for examining the
address to this king as “Lucifer, son of the morning.” By way of bringing this study to a
conclusion, let’s look at that expression in verse 12 of Isaiah chapter 14.
In the Hebrew, the expression “son of the morning” is ben sahar, with “ben” as the word
for son and “sahar” one of the Hebrew words for morning. So, that’s the easy part, “son
of the morning,” but the word translated “Lucifer” comes from the Hebrew Helel, and this
is the only place in the Bible where that Hebrew word is used. So, how do we get from
Helel to Lucifer? Instead of attempting an amateur linguistic analysis, since the Hebrew
language is vastly out of my range, I’m going to rely on a team of renowned translation
experts, the Jewish scribes who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.
The history starts in the third century BC, in the North African city of Alexandria, which
was a major cultural and intellectual center, with the world’s most famous library and
with a Jewish population estimated to be as high as one million.
The reason for making the translation was that by this time, a majority of Jewish people
living outside of what would later be called Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland,
could not read or even speak Hebrew, and the mainstream language in that part of the
world was Greek. Obviously these scribes would have possessed a commanding
knowledge of both languages, and they produced, over a lengthy period of time, the
famous translation called the Septuagint.
When the Septuagint translators came to Isaiah 14:12, they agreed that the best
translation of the Hebrew Helel into Greek was Heosphoros, the same word, with a
time-adjusted pronunciation, used in the Spirit-inspired Scripture of 2Peter 1:19.
Heosphoros, as we have already noted, was the more ancient way of pronouncing the
New Testament word Phosphoros, which in common usage referred to the morning
star.
Although a language scholar could give us a more rich and detailed breakdown of these
Greek and Hebrew words, for our purposes here we have enough to know that the
bilingual Jewish scholars, who knew both the language and the culture of the Jews and
the Greeks in Alexandria, agreed that the best translation for Helel is Heosphoros.
About four centuries after the completion of the Septuagint, when church scholars
began translating the Bible into Latin, when they came to Isaiah 14:12 they made a
commonsense decision that if Heosphoros is the best translation of Helel into Greek,
then the best translation into Latin is Lucifer. So we have: Helel—Phosphoros–Lucifer.
Many centuries later, when church scholars began translating the Bible into English,
when they came to this verse in Isaiah 14, they brought the Latin Lucifer directly into the
English, with a softening of the c. This is how it came about that the word Lucifer is used
in the King James translation of the Bible.
Again, in summary review on this point, we have Helel—Phosphoros—Lucifer. From the
original Hebrew, to the Greek Septuagint, to the Latin Vulgate, to the English King
James.
Having said that, let’s look at a couple Biblical examples of God using mocking flattery
toward arrogant persons. A good starting place is Ezekiel 28:2-3, where the Lord
addresses the prince of Tyre, who had come to believe he was a god. The verses read:
“Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre, ’Thus says the Lord God: Because your heart is
lifted up, and you say, “I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods, in the midst of the seas,” yet
you are a man, and not a god, though you set your heart as the heart of a god (Behold,
you are wiser than Daniel! There is no secret that can be hidden from you!)’”
Having read this, let’s make a commonsense observation. We have a human prince
who believes he is a god, and when the Lord says to him, “Behold, you are wiser than
Daniel! There is no secret that can be hidden from you!”—was it really the case that he
was wiser than Daniel and that no secret could be hidden from him, or was God
mocking this arrogant prince who believed he was a god? Obviously, this is an example
of God mocking an arrogant person.
Let’s look at one more example of God speaking to arrogant people with mocking
flattery. In Isaiah 47:12, where the Lord is speaking again to the Babylonians, He says
to them:
“Stand now with your enchantments and the multitude of your sorceries, in which you
have labored from your youth—perhaps you will be able to profit, perhaps you will
prevail.”
When God says to the Babylonians, ”Stand now in the multitude of your
sorceries...perhaps you will prevail,” is it really possible they were going to prevail
against God with their sorceries, or is this another case of God mocking arrogant
people? Obviously this is a taunt, the very thing God has done with the arrogant king of
Babylon in calling him Lucifer—“O you great shining one, you morning star, this is what
will come upon you.” This use of the word Lucifer is a taunt against an arrogant king—it
is not an acknowledgment of an ancient glory allegedly belonging to Satan.
In conclusion, with regard to Satan being cast from his original place in heaven, the
Lord Jesus Christ tells us explicitly in John 12:31, that Satan was not cast out until the
cross. On the strength of the blood sacrifice of Jesus, the accuser of the brethren has
been cast down. In the time of the king of Babylon, and any time prior to the sacrifice of
Christ, Satan had not yet been cast from his original place.
We have no way of visualizing or even thinking intelligently about the mechanics and
physics of the angelic and heavenly realms, but we do know that by the death of Jesus,
Satan has been cast from his original place and can no longer, ever again, bring
accusation against the saints to the throne of God. If the voice of accusation against us
cannot be heard at God’s throne in heaven, why should we allow it to have a place in
our ears on earth?
But now the accuser is cast down, that evil one whom the Scripture in Revelation 12:9
identifies as “that Serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan.” Not “Lucifer,” but “that
Serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan.” He has no glory coming in the future, and
the Bible gives no justification for believing he had an ancient glory in the past.
But the Bible does warn us, in 2Corinthians 11:14, that Satan desires to present himself
as an angel of light. Given these observations, and taking into account all that we have
looked at in this study, who, more than any other individual, would want us to believe
the name Lucifer is a title of ancient glory for Satan? Who would want us to believe this
more than the devil himself?
God bless you in the name of Jesus Christ, the true Lightbringer!

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