Helel Ben Shahar

Helel ben Shahar means in Hebrew the shining one, son of the Dawn, and it denotes the morning star: the planet Venus glowing above the horizon shortly before daybreak. The expression occurs only once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah, and the text itself says whom it is about. The passage opens with an explicit instruction, to take up this taunt against the king of Babylon, and a few verses later comes the famous line: how you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the Dawn.

Behind it lies an older Canaanite motif. The texts of Ugarit know Shahar, the divinised Dawn, and Athtar the Terrible, the planet Venus, who climbs the mount of assembly to take the throne of Baal and finds it too large for him: he does not fill the seat, and he comes down. The image of the star that rises and cannot hold the summit was available, and the prophet used it as one uses a metaphor, to tell a king that power had gone to his head.

At its origin, then, Helel is neither a demon nor an angel. He is a star, and he is a political insult.

The passage puts into the fallen star's mouth five declarations of pride that all begin the same way: I will ascend to heaven, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, I will sit on the mount of assembly, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High. For that excess he is cast down to Sheol, the realm of the dead.

The conversion happened in two steps, and both can be documented. The first is linguistic: when Jerome translated the passage into Latin, he rendered helel as lucifer, light-bearer, which was simply the Latin word for the morning Venus. He did not invent a proper name; he used a common noun. The second is exegetical: Origen and other Fathers read the verse alongside two further texts, the saying of Jesus in Luke about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, and Ezekiel's lament against the king of Tyre. Out of the sum came a full biography: the highest angel wanted to be like God and was cast out.

One detail was left behind by later tradition. Ezekiel 28, the only one of the three passages that assigns the figure an angelic order, does not say seraph: it says guardian cherub with outspread wings. If Western iconography ended by making Lucifer the highest of the seraphim, that came from the celestial hierarchy of Dionysius and from Milton, not from the text.

And one last point, the most surprising of all: Judaism never made this identification. Isaiah 14 was always read as what it says it is, a poem against a king. Lucifer is a Christian figure, and he is far younger than the passage he came from.

There is a fact that is almost never told and that unsettles anyone who hears it for the first time: in the very Vulgate in which Jerome wrote lucifer for the fallen star of Isaiah, the word is also applied to Christ. The Second Letter of Peter asks that prophecy be heeded as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the lucifer rises in your hearts. And Revelation closes with Jesus saying of himself that he is the root and offspring of David, the bright morning star.

This is no contradiction and no wordplay. It is the proof that lucifer was not a proper name but an available epithet: the one who brings the light, the one who announces the day. The planet Venus bore it, Latin deities of the dawn bore it, and the Christ of the New Testament bore it, all before exegesis assigned it exclusively to the angel of the fall.

That the same title should designate both the one who rises and the one who crashes down is probably the oldest irony in the business. And it explains why for centuries there were bishops named Lucifer without anyone finding it odd: one of them, Lucifer of Cagliari, died in the year 370 and is venerated as a saint on his island.

The figure, once turned into Lucifer, has had an enormous influence on Western culture, and almost all of it is later than the seventeenth century. John Milton fixed him in Paradise Lost as the fallen angel of tragic grandeur who would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, a line that is in no ancient source and that nonetheless defines the character today better than any verse.

Romanticism took the next step. Blake, Byron and Shelley read him as a symbol of creative rebellion against authority, and from there comes the likeable Lucifer that popular culture still uses: the one who asks the awkward questions, not the one who devours the damned. The esoteric currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries paired him with Prometheus, the titan who steals fire to give it to men, and with them are born Luciferianism and its reading of the character as a bearer of knowledge rather than an embodiment of evil.

This too should be dated, because it is usually sold as ancient: the association with Prometheus is modern and appears in no patristic text. As an archetype, Helel condenses the aspiration to what is not one's due, the price of pride and the beauty of glorious failure. That all of it comes from two verses about a king of Babylon is the best demonstration of what a well-placed translation can do.