Around the year 400, Jerome was translating Isaiah into Latin. He came to the Hebrew for “shining one, son of the dawn” and wrote lucifer, the Latin name for the morning star. The King James kept his word in that one verse. Is Lucifer Satan’s name, then? No. It appears once, in a taunt against the king of Babylon, and later readers applied the passage to Satan.
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!
Isaiah 14:12 (KJV)
That is the only place the word is found in the King James. The World English Bible gives the line as a description: “How you have fallen from heaven, shining one, son of the dawn!”
A single word can carry a lot. The whale entered Jonah’s story through a single word too, in one King James verse of Matthew, while the book of Jonah itself says a great fish.
A taunt against a king
Isaiah says, eight verses earlier, whom the poem is for.
That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!
Isaiah 14:4 (KJV)
The taunt lasts until verse 21, and then the LORD speaks in verse 22: “I will rise up against them, saith the LORD of hosts, and cut off from Babylon the name.” The words Satan and devil do not appear anywhere in Isaiah 14.
What the taunt mocks is the king’s boast in verses 13 and 14: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the most High.”
He dies like a man
The poem then shows where the climb ends. People stare at him and ask, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms.” He is “cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword,” “as a carcase trodden under feet,” and he is “not joined with them in burial.”
A grave refused, a body, a funeral that never happens. That is an obituary, written for a man.
How it became a name
In Luke 10:18 Jesus says, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” The picture is close: a bright one falling from heaven. The verse does not quote Isaiah and does not use the word, but the echo is easy to hear. Many Christian readers came to hear Isaiah’s fallen morning star as a picture of Satan’s fall, and once the passage was read that way, the word in it could be taken as his name.
Ezekiel 28 comes closer still, in a lament over the king of Tyre: “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God… Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth.” No ordinary king fits those lines, and many readers see in them a glimpse of a power behind the human throne. Ezekiel’s lament still ends with the king brought “to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee,” and “never shalt thou be any more.” Whatever stands behind those lines, neither Luke nor Ezekiel uses the word Lucifer, and Isaiah uses it only of the king of Babylon.
His names, and the morning star
The Bible does name the devil, plainly. Revelation calls him “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” and “the accuser of our brethren.” Peter calls him “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion.”
Isaiah’s king tried to climb above the stars of God and was brought down to the pit. At the end of the Bible the morning star is something Jesus gives. To the believer who holds on, Jesus promises in Revelation 2:28, “And I will give him the morning star.” In the last chapter he takes the title for himself.
I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.
Revelation 22:16 (KJV)