Satan Reconstructed

Part 3, Lucifer

You likely use a modern translation of the Bible. And if you do, were you to read the Bible from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, you’d never come across the name “Lucifer.”

And if that is so, where did the name Lucifer come from?

The name Lucifer comes from a single passage, Isaiah 14.12. Here it is in the NRSV:

How you are fallen from heaven,
O Morning Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!

Can you spot the name “Lucifer” in the text? It’s “Morning Star.” That’s what Lucifer means, Morning Star. The proper name Lucifer comes down to us because of how the King James Version translates this passage:

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!

How did this translation come about? In Hebrew the phrase is helel ben shachar, which means “shining one” or “morning star.” When St. Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin he rendered this phrase as lucifer, from lux (light) and ferre (to carry or bring), meaning “light bearer” or “morning star.” In Latin this was a common noun, not a proper name, and it referred to the morning star, the appearance of Venus. The next step was the King James translators choosing to transliterate the Latin lucifer into a proper name rather than translate it as “morning star.” That is how the proper name “Lucifer” entered English-speaking Christianity.

Interestingly, the Lucifer of Isaiah 14 isn’t Satan. The original Lucifer was the king of Babylon. And what we find in Isaiah 14 is the people of Israel taunting the king of Babylon and rejoicing in his downfall:

How you are fallen from heaven,
O Morning Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said to yourself,
“I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of 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.

The thing to underline here is the political origin of the name Lucifer. Lucifer names an oppressive ruler, the king of Babylon. This ruler also has a semi-divine status, and he aspires to an even higher position, wanting to make himself equal to God. The same sin we see at work at the Tower of Babel. For this hubris, the king/lucifer is humbled and “brought down.”

All this imagery gets carried forward into the New Testament. Satan appears to us as an “angel of light” (2 Cor. 11.14). Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven like lightning, just like the Morning Star falls in Isaiah 14. And in the book of Revelation we see Satan portrayed as the ruler of Babylon.

This last is important because this association--Satan as Lucifer, the King of Babylon--is a window onto the political implications of spiritual warfare.

Satan is described as “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). And this power over the world is political. Satan offers Jesus this political power in the temptation narrative: “The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.” And in Revelation, Babylon, the city ruled by Lucifer, is described as “the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth.” Note also that, when Babylon falls in Revelation 18, the kings of the earth and the merchants are those who weep for her. Notice here that the grief is political (kings) and economic (merchants).

A lot more could be said, but this is enough to make the point. In the Biblical imagination, the spiritual is the political. Spiritual warfare is the pursuit of social justice. We’ve made a grave mistake in splitting the spiritual from the political. In rejecting the Biblical vision of spiritual warfare, we’ve exiled the Devil to ghost stories and Pentecostal hysteria. But Lucifer is the King of Babylon, the oppressive power now at work in every nation and economy. Lucifer is the lord of the United States of America. Lucifer is the king of Wall Street. Scripture makes this plain. Our failure to see it only reveals our Biblical illiteracy and our spiritual idiocy.