Lucifer Is Not a Name for Satan!

Most people believe that Lucifer is the true name for Satan. This notion has been reinforced by over a thousand years of western Christian tradition and by the constant appearances of Lucifer as a name for Satan in popular culture. In reality, however, the name Lucifer does not occur anywhere in any of the Hebrew or Aramaic texts that make up the Hebrew Bible, nor any of the Koine Greek texts that make up the Christian New Testament.

In fact, although the name does occur in many English translations of the Bible, it only occurs in one verse—the Book of Isaiah 14:12—which actually has nothing to do with Satan in any way. The only reason why anyone associates this passage in Isaiah with Satan at all is because some early Christians, including the church fathers Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria, spuriously interpreted it as an allegory for the fall of Satan.

A note concerning my knowledge of Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin

In the course of this article, I will be discussing a lot of Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin words, so I feel I should clarify how much knowledge I personally have of these languages. As of the time I am writing this article, I have taken nearly five full semesters (i.e., two and a half years) of university-level Ancient Greek and seven full semesters (i.e., three and a half years) of university-level Latin. I have also studied both languages on my own significantly. As a result of this, I have become quite proficient in both languages, at least insofar as my undergraduate classes are concerned.

By sharp contrast, I have, unfortunately, not taken any Hebrew language classes of any sort whatsoever. My knowledge of Biblical Hebrew is limited to basically the Hebrew alphabet and a very small, rudimental vocabulary. I have, however, consulted works written by scholars who do know Hebrew, as well as numerous dictionaries, so I’m hoping my discussion of Hebrew does not make me seem like a complete idiot.

The scholarly literature concerning Satan

Before we can talk about how Satan acquired the name Lucifer, we need to talk a little bit about the origin of Satan himself and how he is portrayed (or, to be more accurate, not portrayed) in the Hebrew Bible. Many scholars have written monographs on this subject, including ones that are accessible to the general public. I won’t try to give an exhaustive literature overview here, but I will briefly mention some of the major works.

The American historian and religious studies scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell published a classic five-volume history of the Devil, consisting of The Devil (published 1977), Satan (published 1981), Lucifer (published 1984), Mephistopheles (published 1986) and The Prince of Darkness (published 1988), with each volume covering a different historical period. Russell covers a lot of fascinating history, but he ends up assimilating figures from all sorts of different cultures around the world who are even vaguely associated with the concept of evil under the label “Devil” and consequently is less focused on the origins and history of the specific figure of Satan in the Abrahamic religions.

The New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels has written a book titled The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics, which was published in 1995 by Random House. Although it is an excellent, well-written, and interesting book, it does not entirely live up to its title, since it is primarily an exploration of how early Christians used the idea of Satan as a sociopolitical tool to demonize Jewish people and people whom they regarded as “pagans” and “heretics” and it doesn’t adequately cover the actual origins of Satan as a mythological, literary, and theological figure.

Finally, Henry Ansgar Kelly, an emeritus professor from UCLA who spent much of his career researching and writing about Satan, has written a book titled Satan: A Biography, which was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. Kelly’s folksy writing style is sometimes a bit jarring for a scholarly monograph. He also has a highly irritating habit of idiosyncratically capitalizing common nouns and even entire phrases that don’t need to be capitalized. For instance, he bizarrely, yet consistently, capitalizes seemingly random words like human, demon, spirit, and angel throughout the book without providing any explanation.

Nonetheless, Kelly’s book gives an overall excellent and thorough account of the origin of the Abrahamic Satan. In fact, it is the most focused and comprehensive account of the origins of the specific mythical, literary, and theological figure of Satan in the Abrahamic religions that I am currently aware of. Consequently, I will reference Kelly’s work quite a bit in the coming sections.

The YouTube channel “Religion for Breakfast” also has an excellent video titled “The Origins of Satan,” which I highly recommend for those of my readers who wish to learn more about this subject than I will be covering in this brief essay, but who don’t want to read a whole book about it.

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of Henry Ansgar Kelly’s book Satan: A Biography

Satan in the Hebrew Bible

The first thing my readers should know is that Satan is not actually a name. In the Hebrew language, the word שָׂטָן‎ (śāṭān) is simply a common noun meaning “accuser” or “adversary.” Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, many different figures are described as śāṭān, including both human and supernatural figures.

The first instance in the Hebrew Bible where the word śāṭān is applied to a supernatural being occurs in the Book of Numbers 22:22. In the verse, Yahweh sends an angel to confront the prophet Balaam and the angel is explicitly described as a śāṭān. The verse reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), with divine names restored:

“Elohim [i.e., God]’s anger was kindled because he [i.e., Balaam] was going, and the angel of Yahweh took his stand in the road as his adversary [i.e., his śāṭān].”

There are only two books in the entire Hebrew Bible where the word śāṭān is clearly used to refer to a specific supernatural entity: the Book of Job and the Book of Zechariah. In both of these works, in all instances in which the word clearly describes a specific supernatural entity, it is accompanied by the Hebrew definite article, making it הַשָּׂטָן (ha-śāṭān), which means “the satan” or “the accuser.”

In both the Book of Job and the Book of Zechariah, the satan is portrayed an angel who works for Yahweh. His job is to try to trick or seduce humans into sinning in order to test whether they are truly faithful to Yahweh and then, if they do end up sinning, prosecute them in the heavenly court for their sins. There is not a single reference anywhere in the entire Hebrew Bible to the notion of Satan as the fallen Prince of Darkness or the cosmic enemy of God. These ideas do not appear until the New Testament at the very earliest.

ABOVE: Balaam and the Angel, painted in 1836 by the German painter Gustav Jäger

Isaiah’s prophecy against the “king of Babylon”

Now let’s talk about the famous Hebrew verse that, through its much later Latin and English translations, has given us the name Lucifer.

Isaiah, son of Amoz, was a Jewish prophet who is thought to have been active in the southern kingdom of Judah between c. 740 and c. 686 BCE. He is believed to have written most of chapters one through thirty-nine of the Book of Isaiah. A lengthy section of this work, spanning chapters thirteen through twenty-three, consists of prophecies in verse predicting, essentially, that Yahweh will rain down judgement upon various nations of the earth for their wickedness.

The Book of Isaiah, chapter fourteen, includes a poem mocking the “king of Babylon” and prophesying Yahweh’s judgement against him. Isaiah introduces the poem with a brief prose preface in verses 3–4 in which he explicitly states that his poem is about the “king of Babylon,” writing, as translated in the NRSV (with divine names restored):

“When Yahweh has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.”

It is not entirely clear which “king of Babylon” to whom Isaiah’s poem is addressed, because he never mentions the king by name. As we will see later in this article, most early Christians seem to have interpreted the “king of Babylon” in Isaiah 14 as Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon who famously destroyed the city of Jerusalem and its Temple in around 587 BCE, roughly a hundred years after Isaiah’s probable death.

Isaiah, however, could not have written about Nebuchadnezzar II unless he really had the gift of prophecy and there is no particularly good evidence to suggest that this poem is about Nebuchadnezzar II anyway. Historically speaking, it is more likely that Isaiah was either writing about King Sargon II of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ruled 722 – 705 BCE), of whose reign he was a contemporary and who claimed the title of “king of Babylon,” or about the kings of Babylon in general, without a specific king in mind.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an alabaster relief carving of King Sargon II from his royal palace at Khorsabad, dating to between c. 722 and c. 705 BCE, now held in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad

The “Shining One, son of Dawn” in Isaiah 14:12

In any case, in verses 12–20, Isaiah mocks this unnamed “king of Babylon” by comparing him to the morning star (i.e., the planet Venus as it appears when it is seen just above the horizon shortly before dawn), which he uses as an archetype of pridefulness. In doing this, Isaiah is most likely drawing on an older Canaanite myth, in which the god associated with the morning star attempted to raise himself above all the other deities and was, as a result, cast out from heaven. Isaiah declares, as translated in the NRSV (with a couple minor edits of my own):

“How you are fallen from heaven,
Shining One, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of Elohim [i.e., God];
I will sit on the mount of assembly
on the heights of Zaphon;
I will ascend to the tops of the clouds,
I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the depths of the Pit.
Those who see you will stare at you,
and ponder over you:
‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble,
who shook kingdoms,
who made the world like a desert
and overthrew its cities,
who would not let his prisoners go home?’
All the kings of the nations lie in glory,
each in his own tomb;
but you are cast out, away from your grave,
like loathsome carrion,
clothed with the dead, those pierced by the sword,
who go down to the stones of the Pit,
like a corpse trampled underfoot.
You will not be joined with them in burial,
because you have destroyed your land,
you have killed your people.”

There is nothing anywhere in this passage to suggest that Isaiah is talking in any way about the satan, nor is there any mention of the satan anywhere in the entire Book of Isaiah.

The second line of the part of the poem that I have quoted here reads as follows in Hebrew: הֵילֵל בֶּן-שָׁחַר (hêlêl ben Šāḥar). As I understand the matter with my basically nonexistent knowledge of Hebrew, the word הֵילֵל (hêlêl) has two possible meanings. On the one hand, it could be a name derived from the verb הלל (halal), meaning “to shine,” in which case it would mean “Shining One.” Alternatively, as this post about the meaning of the word, which seems to have been written by someone who knows a great deal more about Hebrew than I do, argues, it could be the masculine singular imperative form of the Hebrew verb ילל (yalal), meaning “to wail,” “howl,” or “cry out.”

The interpretation of הֵילֵל as a derivative of the verb הלל (halal), meaning “to shine,” makes the most sense to me in context, since the subject of this passage is clearly the morning star. A name that means “Shining One” would certainly make a lot of sense as a name for the morning star, since the morning star’s most distinctive quality is that it normally shines brighter than all the other objects in the sky, except for the sun and the moon.

If הֵילֵל is derived from the verb meaning “to shine,” however, this would make it a hapax legomenon (i.e., a word that only occurs once) for the entire Hebrew Bible. If it is a form of the verb ילל (yalal), meaning “to wail” or “to cry out,” however, then the exact same form of the verb actually occurs in two other places in the Hebrew Bible. In both places, it is translated as a command to “wail,” “howl,” or “cry out.” It notably occurs in the Book of Zechariah 11:2, which the NRSV renders as follows:

“Wail, O cypress, for the cedar has fallen,
for the glorious trees are ruined!
Wail, oaks of Bashan,
for the thick forest has been felled!”

It also occurs in the Book of Ezekiel 21:12, which the NRSV renders as follows:

“Cry and wail, O mortal,
for it is against my people;
it is against all Israel’s princes;
they are thrown to the sword,
together with my people.
Ah! Strike the thigh!”

If this interpretation is correct, then Isaiah 14:12 does not say “Shining One, son of Dawn,” but rather “Wail, son of Dawn!”

I personally think that the former interpretation I have mentioned here is correct and that הֵילֵל does, in fact, mean “Shining One,” but there are plenty of people on the internet who seem to know a lot more about Hebrew than I do who think that the latter interpretation is correct, including the author of the post I linked earlier.

In any case, regardless of what the word הֵילֵל actually means, it is clear that Isaiah uses it in the context of comparing the king of Babylon to the morning star.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the planet Venus reflected over the Pacific Ocean

The Greek Septuagint

The first language that the works of the Hebrew Bible were translated into from Hebrew was Koine Greek. The Letter of Aristeas to Philokrates is a pseudepigraphical letter that was composed in around the late third or early second century BCE. It records a famous legend, which claims that the Hellenistic Greek king Ptolemaios II Philadelphos of Egypt (ruled 284 – 246 BCE), from whose epithet the name Philadelphia ultimately derives, commissioned a group of seventy-two Jewish rabbis—six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel—to translate the writings of the Hebrew Bible into Greek so that they could be added to the Great Library of Alexandria.

He supposedly ordered each translator to work independently, without consulting any of the others, so that he would know if any of them were dishonest with their translations or made any kind of mistakes. Through the miraculous intervention of God, every single one of the seventy-two translators supposedly produced exactly the same translation, without a single word being different.

This tale is certainly not historically true. In historical reality, various educated Jewish people living in Alexandria in the third century BCE most likely translated the writings of the Hebrew Bible from Hebrew into Koine Greek haphazardly and of their own volition, without any organized process or explicit order from the king. Nonetheless, because of the legend that it was supposedly produced by seventy-two translators, the early Hellenistic Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is known today as the Septuagint, a name which comes from the Latin word for “seventy.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze bust of Ptolemaios II Philadelphos, under whose sponsorship the translators of the Septuagint are said to have worked

The Septuagint became the standard Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible throughout the Hellenistic world. After the Romans conquered the eastern Mediterranean, the Septuagint remained the standard translation. Most of the authors of the texts that are now included in the New Testament knew the writings of the Hebrew Bible primarily or exclusively through the Septuagint.

Often, when there is a discrepancy between the Hebrew text of a work that is included in the Hebrew Bible and its usual translation into English, the Septuagint is to blame. For instance, as I previously discussed in this article I published in August 2020, the Septuagint mistranslates the Hebrew word רְאֵם (rĕʾēm), which most likely means “aurochs,” into Greek as μονόκερως (monókerōs), which means “unicorn.” This mistranslation passed from the Greek Septuagint to the Latin Vulgate to many modern English translations. This is the reason why so many English translations of the Bible in use today seem to treat unicorns as though they are real animals.

The Septuagint, however, probably did not mistranslate the Hebrew word הֵילֵל (hêlêl) in Isaiah 14:12. The Septuagint renders the word in Hebrew with the Greek word Ἑωσφόρος (Heōsphóros), which literally means “Dawn-Bearer.” This is the standard name in Koine Greek for the planet Venus when it is seen in the morning just above the horizon shortly before dawn, directly equivalent to the modern English phrase “morning star.” If the word הֵילֵל means “Shining One” and is a name for the morning star, as I think it is, this a perfectly accurate translation. It is, however, one that will become important later on.

ABOVE: Medieval manuscript illustration of a unicorn from the Aberdeen Bestiary folio 15r, dated to c. 1200 CE

The line about Satan’s fall in the Gospel of Luke

There is one passage in the New Testament that is frequently cited to support the identification of the “Shining One, son of Dawn” in Isaiah 14:12 as Satan.

In the Gospel of Luke (henceforth abbreviated gLuke), chapter ten, Jesus sends out his disciples to spread his teachings and perform miracles in his name. In gLuke 10:17–20, Jesus’s disciples come running back to him to tell him that they have successfully cast out demons in his name. Jesus, in turn, responds by saying that he saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:

“The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!’ He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’”

This passage has traditionally been interpreted to mean that the pre-incarnate Jesus saw Satan fall like lightning at the beginning of time right after Satan first rebelled against God. This interpretation, however, is utterly implausible. Firstly, gLuke was most likely written in the 80s or 90s CE and there is no clear evidence to suggest that a story about Satan having rebelled against God and been cast out from heaven even existed at this time for gLuke to reference it.

Secondly, it is unclear whether the author of gLuke believed in the idea of the pre-incarnate existence of Jesus. It is true that this idea was probably already in circulation among Christians at the time when gLuke was written. In fact, it may already be attested in the early Christian creed that the apostle Paul quotes in his Epistle to the Philippians 2:5–11, which may go back as early as the mid-30s CE. Nonetheless, gLuke does not clearly reference this idea; the earliest gospel to unambiguously reference the idea of the pre-incarnate existence of Jesus is the Gospel of John, which was probably written later than gLuke.

Thirdly, even if we assume that the author of gLuke was aware of the story of Satan having rebelled against God and been cast out of heaven and that he did believe in the pre-incarnate existence of Jesus, it would make very little sense for Jesus to describe in one sentence an event that he supposedly saw thousands of years earlier as a pre-incarnate being and then immediately change the subject to talk about the powers he has given to the disciples.

I agree with what Kelly argues in his book, which is that the explanation that makes the most sense in the context of the passage is that, when Jesus says that he “saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning,” he is describing an apocalyptic vision that he has seen of Satan’s imminent downfall, which the disciples are helping Jesus in the moment to bring about.

ABOVE: Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan, painted in 1518 by the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (i.e., “Raphael”)

What Kelly calls “the new biography of Satan”

According to Kelly, the first person who is known to have interpreted the “Shining One, son of Dawn” who is mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 as Satan is the early Christian apologist Ioustinos Martys (lived c. 100 – c. 165 CE).

Although this interpretation of Isaiah 14:12 is not found in any of Ioustinos Martys’s works that have survived to the present day complete, the later Christian writer Ioannes of Antioch quotes a passage from a lost work by Ioustinos Martys in which he interprets the story of the fall of “Shining One, son of Dawn” in Isaiah 14:12 as an allegory for the eventual downfall of Satan on the Day of Judgement. The passage in question reads as follows, as translated by Kelly from the Patrologia Graeca 6:1592–1593:

“Isaiah, fashioning a tragedy, revealed the whole dramatic working-out prepared for the Devil under the mask of the Assyrian.”

Ioustinos Martys, however, is not solely to blame for the equation of the “Shining One, son of Dawn” mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 with Satan. The slightly later western Christian apologist and heresiologist Tertullianus of Carthage (lived c. 155 – c. 220 CE) also identifies the “Shining One, son of Dawn” as Satan in his anti-heretical treatise Adversus Marcionem 5.11 and 5.17.

ABOVE: Engraving by the French engraver André Thevet, originally published in 1575 in the book Illvstree de diverses figvres des choses plvs remarqvables veves, depicting what the artist imagined Ioustinos Martys might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

The later Christian scholar, theologian, and apologist Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE) greatly elaborated on this equation at seemingly much greater length and played a vastly important role in popularizing it. As I discuss in much greater depth in this article I wrote back in September 2020 about the Book of Genesis and its ancient and medieval interpretations, Origenes was an ardent proponent of the view that many passages in the Jewish and Christian scriptures contain hidden allegorical messages about the nature of God, the cosmos, and salvation.

Origenes also held some theological views that are now considered unorthodox by most mainstream Christian denominations. He believed that God created the souls of all demons, all humans, and all angels at once at the very beginning of time. Over time, however, he believed that all these souls gradually fell away from God due to weakness to varying degrees. He held that Satan and his demons fell the furthest from God, that humans fell a middling distance, and that angels fell away the least.

In around the 220s CE, when he was still a fairly young man, Origenes wrote a theological treatise titled On First Principles, in which he attempts to systematically lay out the foundational principles of his theology. Portions of this work have survived in the original Greek through quotation in the Philokalia (an anthology of extracts from Origenes’s various writings that was compiled in around the late 350s or early 360s CE) and Justinian I’s Letter to Mennas.

Most of the work, however, only survives through a heavily abridged Latin translation that the monk Tyrannius Rufinus made in around 397 CE. Rufinus also explicitly states in his introduction that he censored some parts of the work that he considered theologically unorthodox, believing that these parts were not Origenes’s own work, but rather the work of later interpolators.

In any case, Origenes tries to support his view that Satan fell from God at the beginning of time in On First Principles 1.5.4–5 by quoting the full Greek Septuagint translation of Isaiah 14:12–22. He interprets the passage as an allegory about the fall of Satan at the beginning of time and explicitly quotes gLuke 10:18 as evidence to support this interpretation. Origenes writes, as translated by Frederick Crombie from Rufinus’s Latin text (with some minor edits of my own):

“Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Heosphoros, and who used to arise in the morning. For if, as some think, he was a nature of darkness, how is Heosphoros said to have existed before? Or how could he arise in the morning, who had in himself nothing of the light?”

“Nay, even the Saviour Himself teaches us, saying of the devil, ‘Behold, I see Satan fallen from heaven like lightning.’ For at one time he was light. Moreover our Lord, who is the truth, compared the power of His own glorious advent to lightning, in the words, ‘For as the lightning shines from the height of heaven even to its height again, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.’”

“And notwithstanding he compares him to lightning, and says that he fell from heaven, that he might show by this that he had been at one time in heaven, and had had a place among the saints, and had enjoyed a share in that light in which all the saints participate, by which they are made angels of light, and by which the apostles are termed by the Lord the light of the world. In this manner, then, did that being once exist as light before he went astray, and fell to this place, and had his glory turned into dust.”

According to Kelly, Origenes is the earliest person who is known to have claimed that Satan fell from God at the beginning of time before the creation of Adam and the earliest person who is known to have interpreted Isaiah 14:12 as evidence for this belief.

Kelly calls this story of Satan as the supremely evil enemy of God who fell from heaven near the beginning of time “the new biography of Satan,” contrasting it with the older view of the satan in the Hebrew Bible as a relatively minor angelic figure who works for Yahweh.

ABOVE: Illustration by the French artist André Thevet depicting what he imagined Origenes of Alexandria might have looked like. (No one knows what Origenes really looked like.)

Jerome’s Latin translation

None of the authors I have discussed until this point ever applied the name Lucifer to Satan. Ioustinos Martys and Origenes both wrote exclusively in Greek and they both relied on the Greek Septuagint translation of Isaiah 14:12, which, as I noted earlier, uses the Greek name Ἑωσφόρος. The name Lucifer, however, comes from Latin, not Greek. Tertullianus did write in Latin, but he never applies the name Lucifer to Satan in any of his extant writings.

Between c. 382 and c. 405 CE, however, the western Christian priest Hieronymus of Stridon, who is better known in English as “Jerome,” produced a complete translation of all the Biblical writings into Latin. Jerome’s Latin translation became the most widely used version of the Bible in western Europe in any language throughout the entire Middle Ages and into the Early Modern Period. Today, it is known as the Vulgate—a name which is derived from the Latin first/second-declension perfect passive participle vulgātus, which means “having been made common.”

Very few early Christian scholars ever learned to read Hebrew. Origenes is said to have learned to read Hebrew, but modern scholars doubt how much Hebrew he actually learned, since he does not show much knowledge of it in his surviving writings. Jerome is one of the extremely tiny number of early Christian intellectuals who we know for certain actually learned to read Hebrew. He made a translation of the writings of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew into Latin.

Jerome seems to have been torn between the two different translations for the word הֵילֵל in Isaiah 14:12. In his actual translation, he follows the Septuagint and renders the word into Latin as Lucifer, which literally means “Light-Bearer” and is the most common name in Latin for Venus as the morning star, the exact Latin equivalent to the Greek word Ἑωσφόρος. Jerome also, however, wrote a commentary on his translation and he notes in his commentary on his translation of Isaiah 14:12:

“in Hebraico, ut verbum exprimamus ad verbum, legitur: Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, ulula fili diluculi.”

This means, in English:

“In Hebrew, so that we may express it word-for-word, it is read: ‘How have you fallen from heaven? Howl, son of Dawn!’”

Needless to say, Jerome’s rendering of the word as Lucifer in his actual translation has taken off and gotten far more attention than this alternate translation he supplies in his commentary.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, painted in c. 1480 by Domenico Ghirlandaio

Lucifer in John Wycliffe’s English Bible

Because Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria had already identified Ἑωσφόρος as an allegorical stand-in for Satan and Jerome chose to translate the Hebrew word הֵילֵל into Latin as Lucifer, medieval Christians living in western Europe who knew the Hebrew Bible only from Jerome’s Latin translation came to see Lucifer as a name for Satan.

In the Late Middle Ages, the English scholar and theologian John Wycliffe (lived c. 1328 – 1384) advocated the translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate into the English language. A group of scholars working under his direction between c. 1382 and c. 1395 produced several closely-related English translations of the Latin Vulgate that are known collectively today as “Wycliffe’s Bible.” One version of Wycliffe’s Bible renders Isaiah 14:12 as follows:

“A! Lucifer, that risedest early, how fellest thou down from heaven; thou that woundedest folks, felledest down (al)together into [the] earth.”

Another version renders the verse slightly differently:

“O! Lucifer, who risedest up early, how thou hast fallen down from heaven; thou who hast wounded the nations, fell down to the ground.”

Wycliffe’s Bible became widely used by the Proto-Protestant Lollard movement, which the Roman Catholic Church deemed heretical. The church therefore banned Wycliffe’s Bible, but it did not ban English translations of the Bible in general.

Despite being officially banned, Wycliffe’s Bible began to circulate in anonymous manuscripts. The translation itself did not contain any material that was obviously heterodox, so, by the late fifteenth century, most people reading it had no idea that they were reading a banned translation. Consequently, Wycliffe’s Bible remained in widespread use for over two centuries and greatly influenced subsequent English Bible translations, including the Geneva Bible (published 1557 – 1560) and the Bishop’s Bible (published 1568).

ABOVE: Woodcut from John Bale’s Scriptor Majoris Britanniæ, printed in 1548, depicting what the artist imagined John Wycliffe might have looked like

Lucifer in the King James Bible

In 1604, King James VI and I of Scotland and England commissioned the creation of a new English translation of the Bible—the version that is known today as the King James Version (KJV). Unlike earlier translators of the Bible into English, such as Wycliffe, the translators of the KJV relied on the actual Hebrew texts of the Hebrew Bible. Nonetheless, they saw themselves as guided by tradition and chose to follow earlier English translations of the Book of Isaiah in rendering the word הֵילֵל as “Lucifer.” The KJV’s version of Isaiah 14:12 reads as follows:

“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!”

The KJV swiftly gained authority among readers of the Bible and, by the early eighteenth century, it was almost universally seen as the definitive English translation of the Bible. Christians continued to identify the “Lucifer” mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 with Satan and therefore continued to regard Lucifer as a name for Satan, even though it’s actually just the Latin name for the morning star.

ABOVE: Title page of the first edition of the King James Version (KJV), printed in 1611

The triumph of Lucifer

The idea that Lucifer is not just one of many names for Satan, but, in fact, his true and preferred name is hard to trace, but it has become more popular quite recently. Most films and television shows featuring Satan that were made in the twentieth century primarily refer to him as “Satan,” “the Devil,” or “Mephistopheles.” A major shift, however, seems to have occurred over the course of the past thirty years, where the use of the name Lucifer has exploded in popular culture so that the name is now, if anything, more commonly used than any of the names I have just listed.

This shift seems to have begun with the introduction of the DC Comics character Lucifer Morningstar by Neil Gaiman in The Sandman #4 in 1989. This character is the canonical DC Comics universe version of Satan and most of the film and television portrayals of Satan over the past two decades are nominally based on him.

The first live-action portrayal of a version of Lucifer nominally based on the DC Comics character occurs in the 2005 superhero horror film Constantine, which is based on the DC Comics comic book Hellblazer. In the film, the Swedish actor Peter Stormare portrays Lucifer as a hideous cosmic villain with sickly pale skin and red sores underneath his eyes who wagers with God over human souls and hates the protagonist John Constantine with a vengeance. The film was a critical failure, but is noteworthy for its use of the name Lucifer throughout.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the character Lucifer from the 2005 movie Constantine

The long-running American dark fantasy television series Supernatural (originally released 2005 – 2020) includes Lucifer as a major recurring antagonist from season four onwards. Lucifer is first introduced in seasons four and five as a world-ending cosmic villain. He is generally referred to as “Lucifer” from the beginning and, although he is occasionally called “Satan” or “the Devil,” Lucifer is treated as his true and preferred name.

In later seasons, as more powerful villains are introduced, Lucifer becomes a somewhat less threatening figure and is instead portrayed as more of a nuisance or even sometimes a figure of outright comic relief. In season seven, after having been banished to “the Pit,” he taunts the main character Sam Winchester through hallucinations, but he is unable to physically harm him. In season twelve, he memorably possesses the body of the aging rock star Vince Vincente, who is played by none other than Rick Springfield and is therefore portrayed by Springfield for the bulk of the season.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Rick Springfield as Lucifer in Supernatural, season twelve, episode seven “Rock Never Dies”

The urban fantasy television series Lucifer (originally released 2016 – 2021) stars the British actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar, who is nominally based on the DC Comics character introduced by Neil Gaiman, but is, in reality, a drastically different character.

At the beginning of the series, Lucifer is portrayed as having left his job as the king of Hell to become the charming and dashingly handsome, but amoral, owner of a high-end nightclub called Lux in Los Angeles, California. (The name of the club is a pun on the name Lucifer, since Lucifer means “Light-Bearer” and lūx is the Latin third-declension feminine noun meaning “light.”) Over the course of the series, he befriends (and eventually falls in love with) an LAPD detective named Chloe Decker and helps her to solve crimes.

The depiction of Lucifer in the series stands in stark contrast to how Satan is portrayed in the Bible and how he is usually portrayed in contemporary popular media. Rather than being a villain or antagonist, Lucifer is portrayed as an anti-hero. Also, contrary to the explicit description of Satan in the Gospel of John 8:44 as “a liar and the father of lies,” the character Lucifer in the television series has a strict rule that he never outright lies. He is almost exclusively referred to as “Lucifer” or “Lucifer Morningstar” throughout the series and is only rarely referred to as “Satan” or “the Devil.”

ABOVE: Promotional image for the final season of the television series Lucifer (2016 – 2021), starring Tom Ellis (pictured) as the eponymous Prince of Darkness

The supernatural horror television series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (originally released 2018 – 2020) portrays a coven of witches who worship Lucifer, who is the primary antagonist for parts one and two and a recurring character for parts three and four. Much like Constantine and Lucifer, this portrayal is nominally based on the DC Comics character.

At first, in part one and for most of part two, Lucifer appears only in a menacing goat-headed form and characters in the series primarily refer to him as “the Dark Lord.” Starting near the end of part two, however, he appears in his “angelic form,” portrayed by the Australian actor Nick Cook, who bears a somewhat noticeable resemblance to Tom Ellis. Subsequently, the euphemistic title “Dark Lord” is dropped and he becomes almost exclusively referenced as “Lucifer,” which is treated as his true and proper name.

Interestingly, “the Dark Lord” is actually not a traditional title of Satan in Christianity, but rather a common title that is applied to villains in works of modern fantasy, including Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954 – 1955) and Lord Voldemort in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (published 1997 – 2007). The title seems to be increasingly applied to Satan due to conflation with Satan’s traditional title “Prince of Darkness,” which is first attested in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, also known as the Acts of Pilate, which was probably written in around the fourth century CE.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Lucifer, portrayed by Australian actor Nick Cook, in the supernatural horror series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Part 3, “Chapter Twenty: The Mephisto Waltz”

Conclusion

We’ve come all the way from the prophet Isaiah writing about the king of Babylon in the eighth century BCE to modern television shows like Lucifer and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina—the former of which released its series finale just shy of a couple months ago—with bits and pieces of mythology being recombined, conflated, and added all along the way.

This article is not meant to be a comprehensive history of Satan in general, but rather a specific explanation of how so many people have come to think that the Latin name for the morning star is the true name of the Devil himself. I may write a more general article about the historical development of Satan at some point in the future, but, for now, if you want to learn more, you can consult some of the resources I listed near the beginning.