Ever wonder how lucifer became satan's name?

He stole something and most don’t even realize it.

© Jane Isley

I openly admit I love the weird, obscure, and one-off things in the Bible; I have random post-it notes all over my walls, stacks of folders with odd things in them, and that’s one of the reasons why I created Faithful Writers.

One of those weird things is about the word lucifer.

It’s important to understand where this word came from and also why we need to change our use of this word.

So, I’m just going to dive right in, lucifer is not satan’s name. This article is about how Jerome’s mistake led to satan stealing something from Jesus that people aren’t aware of.

A quick look at the controversial verse we’re looking at today.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, who didst weaken the nations!” Isaiah 14:12. (21st Century King James Version)

Not an ideal way to translate.

Jerome went about his work as an “interpretation of thought.” Not the worst thing that has ever happened to a Bible translation, but also not to best either. “Interpretation of thought” is not a true interpretation.

I get what he was attempting to do but wanting to convey meaning above word-for-word translation was not a good choice, especially since he relied on the Septuagint translation first, which already had translation errors.

It wasn’t until after he translated the Bible into Latin that he then decided to use the Hebrew text for a “more accurate” translation, instead of just using the Hebrew text to begin with.

In a nutshell, there is a ton of history, but I would drive you nuts trying to get through all of it.

My focus is on just one word, lucifer.

Jerome changed “heylel” to “lucifer” in Isaiah because the Septuagint had already mistranslated “heylel” as “eosphoros” (“phosphoros.”) It's also not the only place this happened, just the one that stuck and created this mess.

For 1000 years, the Vulgate was the gold standard Bible. Remember, The Roman Empire didn’t want the common people to be able to read the Bible, so there was little chance to examine or question Jerome’s translation.

Without realizing it, most people now think Isaiah was talking about satan because Jerome didn’t fully understand the Hebrew text.

Isaiah never talked about satan, he was talking about the king of Babylon.

In fact, satan is nowhere in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 14 is about the king of Babylon, his arrogance, and his eventual death because the king equated himself to God and was full of pride.

Isaiah shows us how far and hard that king fell for his tyranny, oppression, and sins against God. This story should be given back to that king as a reminder of what happens to people like that.

I have to address this — because of Isaiah’s description and Jerome’s translation, it was assumed by early Christians that this was a description of satan’s fall. Since we were never given those details, we should not presume this is an account of satan’s fall, this fall is entirely about this king.

The words we use for translation are just as important, if not more so than the ones we translate from.

“O Lucifer, son of the morning!”

The first thing to know is the Hebrew text reads hê-lêl ben- šā-ḥar;

It’s that word hê-lêl (heylel) where things went wrong.

hê-lêl is a pronoun, referencing a person and in this case specifically the King of Babylon. When Jerome translated it to “O Lucifer,” he created an inaccurate proper name.

Jerome used what the Septuagint translation said in this situation instead of what the Hebrew text said. Simply put, he didn’t understand the Hebrew text and did a copy-and-paste translation.

Some scholars have now come to theorize that he may not have been as “well versed” in Hebrew as previously assumed, which led to some of those questionable translation choices. (sources below)

Now we are stuck with the wrong word.

To this day, we have a Latin word still being put into some Bibles without proper translation efforts, I also discovered numerous references to translators just leaving lucifer in there because it was simply convenient to do so.

While this error has increasingly gotten better over time, we are still left with lucifer being a common word in the English language, with it being defined as “another name for satan.”

Most do not know this but Jerome wrote a commentary on Isaiah 14:12. and he admitted that the word meant something else. Check out the source here, you’ll also be able to view the images of his notes.

Why do I think this is important to know?

1. God stripped satan of a proper name, he doesn’t deserve one for what he did.

2. Did you know Jesus is described as “the bright Morning Star” in Revelations 22:16? (Greek)

3. Lucifer means “light-bringer” and “Morning Star.” (Latin)

4. There’s the issue right there. Jerome’s translation allowed satan to steal from Jesus, taint the meaning, have people thinking he’s somehow equal to Jesus, and now has a name that he was never meant to have.

   
   

We all know words have the power to create, hurt, crush, vilify, and be used to deceive. I do not believe we should be using a word that Jesus personally uses to describe Himself as for a name for satan.

The devil, the satan, the serpent, the dragon, those all describe what he is. Those are the words we are given to use when referring to him, not a name.

Yes, over time most have become capitalized, that’s a combination of cultural awareness of evil, language development, and sentence structure, but they are still descriptions, not names.

I choose carefully when and where I capitalize those words, my Grammarly is going nuts on me right now.

But I will not give satan the satisfaction of calling him by a name he stole.

© Jane Isley

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JSTOR — Revising the Vulagte Lancaster University, The Baker Deep End Blog, Answers in Genesis, Frank W. Nelte, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Hermeneutics, Scholarly Community Encyclopedia, Learn Religions, Biblical Translation Mistakes, Isreal Bible Center, Bible Scholars, Biblehub.com, Lucifer in Latin: An In-depth Etymological Analysis, Britannica, The British Museum, Biblical Hermeneutics, Gotquestions.org, Tales of Times Forgotten, Source, Wikipedia, The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels, Oxford English-Hebrew dictionary, Hebrew for Dummies, Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves & Raphel Patai, A Concise Lexicon to the Biblical Languages by Jay Green Sr and Maurice Robinson, Ph.D.