Lucifer - How a mistranslation gave the devil another name

Earlier this week I found a comment by Ben Carson very interesting.  Actually it wasn't something that Dr. Carson said but instead in the reaction to a disparaging comment he made about Hillary Clinton.

In 1969, Hillary wrote her undergraduate thesis about Saul Alinsky, a man who in his book Rules for Radicals called Lucifer:

“… the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively he won his own kingdom.”  

Ben Carson saw that as Saul Alinsky praising Lucifer and sees Hillary’s relationship with Saul Alinsky as another reason why America should reject her.  I mostly ignored the comment at the time as politics is filled with half truths but someone made a comment online that did arouse my interest.

The name Lucifer isn’t in the Hebrew Bible.  It’s a mistranslation from when Jerome created the Latin Bible.

As a history junkie, this statement was much more interesting to me than a political jab no one will remember in a week.  Was this person’s claim true?  What is the origin of the name Lucifer?  I spent the next couple of hours investigating it.

The story of how the Bible came to its current form is much too complex for a blog post but for the last 400 years the English speaking world has mostly used the King James Bible.  The King James has had a huge impact on the way we speak today.  Many common sayings such as 'bite the dust', 'fly in the ointment', and 'wit’s end' along with thousands of other common phrases all originate from the King James.  It isn't much of a stretch to state that the King James Bible has had more impact on the English language than any other book.  Yet in this version of the Bible the name of Lucifer is mentioned exactly once.  It occurs in Isaiah 14:12.

 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!

Of course the Bible wasn’t originally written in English.  The main source for the King James Bible was the Latin Vulgate written by Jerome around 400 AD which states.

Quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris? corruisti in terram, qui vulnerabas gentes?

This translates loosely to:

“How art thou fallen from heaven , O Lucifer, son of the morning like the sun? art thou cut down to the ground , you who laid the nations low!”

The confusion occurred when Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin.  Here's the translation of the Hebrew Bible directly into English.

How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!

Notice the change?  The meaning is essentially the same in all version but the original Hebrew referred to a morning star.  What is the Latin word for ‘morning star’?  You’ve probably guessed that it is lucifer.  In defense of Jerome, his wording had nothing to do with Satan as Lucifer was also the proper name for Venus, as known as the morning star.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon
by Maarten van Heemskerck

Isaiah 14:12 was written as a metaphor.  In this case the 'morning star' is (most likely) referring to Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonian who conquered most of today’s Middle East in the late 7th-early 6th century BCE.  After repeated uprisings in today’s Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar took important Jewish families into Babylonian captivity starting in 597 BCE.  It was in this captivity where the Jewish scholars put the final touches on the books that made the Torah while adding further books.  Most of Isaiah 14 speaks about the godlessness of Babylon and how its actions will lead to ruin. 

Cyrus the Great liberating the Jews
 from Babylonian captivity to resettle
 and rebuild Jerusalem.
Painting by Jean Fouquet

It mentions nothing of Satan and while some Christians have argued Satan was working through Nebuchadnezzar, the Bible does not state this explicitly.  All Isaiah states is saying Nebuchadnezzar had risen high and would eventually be struck low.  Later in Daniel 4:28-33, Nebuchadnezzar is shown to have lost his sanity though most history scholars feel this passage is really speaking about a later Babylonian king, Nabonidus, who is known to have had a nasty skin disease.  It fits the narrative as Nabonidus is also known to history as the last of the Babylonian kings.  In 539 BCE he lost his throne to Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, who eventually allowed the captive Judeans to return home to Jerusalem.

How did one mistranslated line about the ‘morning star’ in Isaiah 14:12 get into today’s vocabulary equating the devil with the name Lucifer?

Paradise Lost Illustration
 by Gustave Doré

It took time.  As people stopped using Latin, the meaning behind the words made less sense to future generations.  They began to understand the word Lucifer as a proper name of an individual.  When Dante completed the Divine Comedy in 1320, he referred to Lucifer as sitting in the 9th ring of Hell.  In 1654, Vondel made Lucifer the titular character in his play on the subject of Satan.  In 1667, Milton's Paradise Lost speaks more specifically when he describes the angel Lucifer's fall from Heaven to become Satan in Hell.  As time passed, these popular works meshed into Christian lore and the names of Satan and Lucifer became interchangeable.

So today I learned something from Ben Carson ... indirectly.

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