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Japanese The Bible never tells us what Lucifer was called as an angel. The name “Lucifer” itself comes from Isaiah 14:12, where the Latin Bible translated the Hebrew helel ben shachar, “shining one, son of the dawn,” in a taunt against the king of Babylon. When Christian writers later applied the verse to Satan, its Latin word became his name.
What was Lucifer’s name before he fell?
No verse of Scripture gives a personal name to the angel who became the devil, and none says that his name changed when he fell. Each of the names people offer for him, Lucifer, Helel, Samael and Satanael, comes from a translation or from a later tradition.
The verse behind “Lucifer” reads, in the King James Version:
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)
The Hebrew word there is helel, found nowhere else in the Old Testament, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines it as “shining one, epithet of king of Babylon.” The chapter tells us plainly whom it addresses, because the prophet tells Israel to “take up this proverb against the king of Babylon” (Isaiah 14:4). The Greek Septuagint translated helel as heosphoros, “the dawn-bringer,” and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate wrote Lucifer: “Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris?”
In Latin lucifer means “light-bringing,” from lux (light) and ferre (to carry), and it was the ordinary name for the morning star, the planet Venus seen before sunrise. The King James translators kept the Latin word, and so “Lucifer” in their Bible is the Latin name of a star, used to describe a proud king. Some people offer Helel (or Heylel) as the angel’s “true” Hebrew name, but it is the same word in the same verse.
Is Lucifer in the Bible?
The name appears once in the King James Version, at Isaiah 14:12. Many modern English Bibles translate the Hebrew word there instead of borrowing the Latin one: the New International Version has “morning star, son of the dawn,” the English Standard Version “Day Star, son of Dawn,” and the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition “Morning Star, son of Dawn.”
The Latin Vulgate uses lucifer in other places too, and not always of anything evil. In 2 Peter 1:19 the Greek phosphoros, “light-bearer,” becomes “lucifer oriatur in cordibus vestris,” which the King James Version gives as “until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts.” In Revelation 22:16 Jesus calls himself “the bright and morning star.” The Latin word was an ordinary personal name as well, and one Lucifer, bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia (died about 370), was a fierce opponent of the Arian heresy.
How did Lucifer become a name for Satan?
Christian readers set Isaiah 14 beside the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” Isaiah’s king boasts, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God” and “I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14). A figure who falls from heaven for wanting God’s place looked to these readers like the devil.
Origen of Alexandria made the connection outright in the third century. In On First Principles (Book 1, chapter 5) he quotes Isaiah 14:12–14 as spoken of an “opposing power” and concludes, “Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Lucifer, and who used to arise in the morning.” He then cites Luke 10:18 as the Savior’s own teaching about the devil. What mattered to Origen was that the devil was not evil by nature: “For at one time he was light.”
Out of readings like this grew the later tradition in which “Lucifer” is the devil’s name before his fall and “Satan” his name afterward. As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes, Christians read the verse “spiritually” as a reference to Satan “even though it is literally a reference to the King of Babylon.”
Was Lucifer an archangel?
Scripture never calls him an archangel. The word “archangel” appears only twice in the King James Version. First Thessalonians 4:16 speaks of “the voice of the archangel” and Jude 9 names “Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil,” so the one archangel the Bible names is the devil’s opponent.
When people speak of Lucifer’s rank, the verse they cite is Ezekiel 28:14: “Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God.” Like Isaiah 14, this chapter is addressed to a king, here “the king of Tyrus” (Ezekiel 28:12), who was “in Eden the garden of God” and “perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee” (28:13, 15). Origen read the passage as spoken to “a certain angel who had received the office of governing the nation of the Tyrians,” and Thomas Aquinas read it the same way. Read like that, the verse makes him a cherub, not an archangel.
No verse tells us how high he stood among the angels, so that is a question for theology. Thomas Aquinas asked whether the highest angel who sinned was the highest of them all (Summa Theologiae I, question 63, article 7). He cited Gregory the Great, who said that the chief angel who sinned, “being set over all the hosts of angels, surpassed them in brightness,” and he judged this “the more probable view,” because the motive of pride is excellence. He also left room for John of Damascus’s view that the fallen angels came from a lower order. And he explained why Ezekiel says “cherub” and not “seraph”. The name cherub comes from knowledge, which a sinner can keep, while seraph comes from the fire of charity, “which is incompatible with mortal sin.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that Scripture and Tradition see a fallen angel “called ‘Satan’ or the ‘devil’,” and that “Satan was at first a good angel, made by God,” quoting the Fourth Lateran Council: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing” (paragraph 391). There, too, he is given no angelic name.
Was Lucifer’s angel name Michael?
Michael was never his name, because Michael is the angel who fights him. Revelation 12:7 says, “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon,” and verse 9 tells us who the dragon is: “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” Jewish tradition, too, makes Michael the opponent of Samael, the chief of the fallen angels.
Is Samael Lucifer?
Samael never appears in the Bible; he belongs to the Jewish writings that came after it. The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) calls him “prince of the demons” and “an important figure both in Talmudic and in post-Talmudic literature, where he appears as accuser, seducer, and destroyer.” The Targum Yerushalmi to Genesis 3:6 treats him as the angel of death, and for that reason his name was explained as “the venom of God.” The encyclopedia also notes that it may come from the name of a Syrian god. The midrash Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (chapter 13) calls him “the great prince in heaven,” with twelve wings, and has him lead the demons who seduced Adam and Eve. Deuteronomy Rabbah calls him the “chief of Satans.”
In Jewish tradition, then, Samael plays much the part that Lucifer plays in Christian tradition, and the encyclopedia sums him up with the same image: “Even at the creation of the world he was Lucifer.” But that likeness is a comparison between two traditions, since the Bible never uses the name Samael, and neither does the Catholic Catechism’s teaching on the fall of the angels (paragraphs 391–395).
Where does the name Satanael come from?
Satanael is sometimes described as the Eastern Orthodox name for Lucifer, but the name comes from the Slavonic Book of Enoch and from a medieval dualist movement, the Bogomils.
The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, or 2 Enoch, is in no Bible. It survives mainly in Slavonic manuscripts, along with Coptic fragments about five hundred years older than the earliest Slavonic copy. Scholars disagree about whether it was first written in the first century or much later. It speaks of the Grigori “who with their prince Satanail rejected the Lord of light” (18:3), and in chapter 31 it says that as a fugitive from heaven the devil became “Sotona,” “as his name was Satanail.” So this book does name the devil before his fall, but it is not Scripture.
The Byzantine Bogomils of the eleventh and twelfth centuries built a whole myth on the name. Euthymius Zigabenus, a Byzantine theologian who wrote against them at the beginning of the twelfth century, set out their teaching in order to refute it. Satan, they taught, was the first-born son of God and the elder brother of the Son, and his original name was Satanael. When he was defeated he lost the last syllable of his name, “el,” and became Satan. In Hebrew el means God, and it ends angelic names such as Michael and Gabriel, so the lost syllable stood for the divine attributes he had lost. As the historian Dimitri Obolensky notes, the Bogomils held that Satanael “was not an angel, but the elder Son of God and the creator of the visible world.”
What does the name Satan mean?
“Satan” is Hebrew for “adversary.” Seven times the King James Version translates the word satan as “adversary,” for example of a human enemy in 1 Kings 11:14. With the article, “the satan” is the accuser who comes among the angels in Job 1:6 (“the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them”) and who stands at the right hand of Joshua the high priest “to resist him” in Zechariah 3:1. In 1 Chronicles 21:1 the word is used as a proper name. The New Testament uses the Greek form Satanas more than thirty times.
So the name the Bible itself gives the devil is Satan. Scripture never presents it as a new name given after a fall, and it never calls him Lucifer.
Do any churches teach a name for Lucifer before the fall?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a scripture of its own on the question. Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–26 describes “an angel of God who was in authority in the presence of God,” who rebelled against the Son and “was called Perdition, for the heavens wept over him—he was Lucifer, a son of the morning.” That revelation gives him two names, Perdition and Lucifer. The Catholic Catechism’s teaching on the fallen angels (paragraphs 391–395) calls him only “Satan” or the “devil” and gives him no other name.
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