Lucifer

Lucifer is not the devil. The name invokes a mental image of a once beautiful and powerful angel that was cast out of heaven because of pride. However, the only place in the entire King James Bible where Lucifer is mentioned, is in the 14th chapter, 12th verse in the writing of Isaiah and Isaiah was actually writing about a fallen Babylonian king. Let's begin with the word actually used by Isaiah. It was the Hebrew word, "heylel" that was translated to the Latin word, "Lucifer" by St. Jerome. One thing people fail to realize, is that Latin was not a spoken language st the time Isaiah wrote about this. The writers of the King James Bible did not use the Hebrew transcripts, but instead used St. Jerome's translation of the Hebrew to Latin and then these writers translated this to English. If one begins to read the 13th chapter of Isaiah, they will see he is writing about Babylon. In the 14th chapter he is writing specifically of a Babylonian king that fell from power. Continue reading past the 12th verse and we see that Isaiah even asks, who is this man. There is no mention of an angel or supernatural being. The Hebrew word heylel was derived from halal, which means in the sense of brightness, bright morning star and son of the dawn. Was Halal Ben (son of) Sharar, the king Isaiah was writing about? We can look into the history of this in another post. But let's concentrate on the fact that St. Jerome used the word Lucifer which derives from lucem ferre, a Latin for bearer of light and in Roman astronomy the word Lucifer was the name given to the morning star, the day star, the bringer of light and is known to us as the planet Venus. In verse 16 of chapter 14 in Isaiah, it reads, "They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, is this the man that made the earth tremble, that did shake kingdoms." If Lucifer was a supernatural being, a fallen angel, why use the word man in this verse? Throughout the chapter Isaiah is writing about a man, so why would he in mid paragraph switch to the idea of a fallen angel? The only thing that saddens me about this is, one of my favorite songs is by the Rolling Stones and it is called, Sympathy for the Devil and it uses the word Lucifer as being the devil. For people to understand this is not true, means many like myself that research this, still have a lot of work to do in conveying the true meaning.