The name appears once in the King James and nowhere else in the Bible. It sits inside a speech the chapter tells you, eight verses earlier, is a taunt against the king of Babylon. And in the New Testament the one title that means the same thing is claimed by Christ.
One occurrence, and the King James flags it itself
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 whole of it. I searched the whole King James for the word, and this is the only verse it stands in.
The Hebrew behind it is helel, and it occurs exactly once in the Hebrew Bible too. A word used one time cannot be shown from its usage to be anybody’s name, because there is nothing to compare it with. What the lexicons give it is a common meaning: shining one, morning star, light-bearer, from a root meaning to shine.
And the King James prints its own alternative in the margin, where it still sits today. Against Lucifer the note reads: or, O day star.
The chapter names its subject
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)
A proverb against the king of Babylon, and the King James margin offers taunting speech for proverb. Everything from there to verse twenty-three is inside that taunt, and verse twenty-two names Babylon again on the way out of it.
The words Satan and devil do not appear anywhere in Isaiah 14.
The subject of the taunt dies like a man
Verses sixteen to twenty settle it, in plain description.
They look at him and say, is this the man that made the earth to tremble. He is cast out of his grave. He is like the raiment of those slain, thrust through with a sword. He is a carcase trodden under feet. He is not joined with the other kings in burial, and the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned.
A grave, a sword wound, a body, a failed funeral, and descendants, which between them make an obituary rather than a cosmology.
Lucifer is a Latin common noun
The word reached English through Jerome, who translated helel with the ordinary Latin lucifer, light-bringer. The King James then kept the Latin instead of translating it, which is why we have a proper noun where the Hebrew has a description.
The same Latin word does other work in the same Bible. At Job 11:17 Zophar tells Job that he shall rise as lucifer, meaning he will shine again. At Job 38:32 God asks who brings out lucifer in his season, meaning a star. In Psalm 110, which the Vulgate numbers 109, the phrase is a time of day, before the morning star.
In the Vulgate it is doing four different ordinary jobs. It became a name in English, because English kept it untranslated in exactly one verse and translated it everywhere else. The apple in Eden arrived the same way, out of a Latin word doing ordinary work and a reader making more of it than the Latin did.
Modern versions have gone back to the description. The World English Bible has morning star, the New International Version has morning star, the English Standard Version has Day Star, the New American Standard has star of the morning. Of the eleven I checked, the New King James is the only one that keeps Lucifer.
In the New Testament the title is claimed
One part of this ought to give a person pause.
We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts
2 Peter 1:19 (KJV)
The Greek for day star there is phosphoros, which is light plus bearing, the exact equivalent of the Latin lucifer. The Vulgate of that verse in fact prints lucifer. Peter is describing something rising in the hearts of believers.
And in the last chapter of the Bible, Jesus says of himself that he is the bright and morning star.
Follow the light-bringer language through the New Testament and it arrives at Christ. We took a description out of a Babylonian king’s obituary, froze it into a name, and assigned it to the adversary, while the same title was being used in the other direction the whole time.
The case on the other side
The sense list printed with helel in the concordances does carry Satan, figuratively and after the Babylon meaning, while the line from the Theological Wordbook beside it gives only Helel describing the king of Babylon. And Jesus does say, in Luke 10:18, that he beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
That verse is real and the image is genuinely close. What it does not have is the word helel, or the word phosphoros, or any formula of quotation. The connection people feel is thematic, and thematic is not the same as textual, and a name cannot be built out of a resemblance.
The stronger case is Ezekiel 28, where a lamentation over the king of Tyre says he was in Eden the garden of God and calls him the anointed cherub that covereth.
Neither of those lines reads like anything said about a mortal king. Then the same lamentation ends the way Isaiah’s taunt ends, at 28:17 to 28:19. I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings. I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. Never shalt thou be any more. The king of Babylon and the king of Tyre both get an obituary, and the same method reads both.
The oracle just before that one, addressed to the prince of Tyre rather than the king, puts it more bluntly still: thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.
Scripture gives the devil plenty of names. This one was borrowed from a dead king, and by the time it reached English it had also been borrowed from a description of Christ.
Which is the ordinary way these things happen. A woman gets a trade she is never accused of, a king gets a name that was a description, and by the third or fourth retelling nobody can remember the sentence anybody actually wrote.