Was Lucifer an Archangel? Only Michael Has the Title in the Bible’s 66 Books

No verse calls Lucifer an archangel. The only angel the Bible calls an archangel is Michael, and the passage most often read as describing the devil before his fall calls its subject “the anointed cherub that covereth” (Ezekiel 28:14). The title came later: Tertullian used it about 207, and John Milton made it famous in Paradise Lost.

There is an irony in the question. In the old order of angels, archangel is one of the lowest ranks. Christians have long held that the angel who fell was among the highest, perhaps the very highest. And the one angel Scripture does call an archangel is the one who stood firm and won. Height of rank saved no one. What mattered was whom each angel served.

Where does the Bible tell the story of Lucifer?

Christians use Lucifer as a name for the devil as he was before his fall: an angel, made good, who turned against God and became Satan. The Fathers, as the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 records, took the name to denote “only the state from which he has fallen.”

The name itself comes once, in Isaiah 14:12, and only in some Bibles. The King James Version reads, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” The Douay-Rheims and the New King James Version keep the name too, which comes from the Latin Vulgate. The English Standard Version has “O Day Star, son of Dawn,” the New International Version “morning star, son of the dawn,” and Luther’s German Bible of 1545 calls him the beautiful morning star. The Hebrew behind these words is explained in what Lucifer means in Hebrew.

Christians read the story of the devil’s fall in a handful of passages. Two are prophecies spoken to kings; the others speak of Satan or of angels who sinned.

Isaiah and Ezekiel each name the man they are speaking to. Isaiah’s poem is “this proverb against the king of Babylon” (Isaiah 14:4), and Ezekiel’s lament is “upon the king of Tyrus” (Ezekiel 28:12). Reading them as the story of Satan is an old Christian interpretation, and it goes beyond the plain sense of either text. Origen, early in the third century, said of Isaiah’s lines, “Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Lucifer,” and judged Ezekiel’s lament to be of a kind that “cannot be at all understood of a man.” Tertullian read Ezekiel the same way: “in the person of the prince of Tyre it is said in reference to the devil.” Other readers keep each poem with its king. John Calvin wrote of Isaiah 14 that “the context plainly shows that these statements must be understood in reference to the king of the Babylonians.” Both readings, and what each makes of Lucifer’s work in heaven, are set out in what Lucifer’s job in heaven was.

Either way, the words at the centre are the same. “I will be like the most High,” says the one who falls (Isaiah 14:14). Every reading of these chapters turns on that wish.

Which angels does the Bible call archangels?

The word archangel comes in two verses of the King James Old and New Testaments. Jude names Michael: “Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 9). Paul’s verse names no one: the Lord will come down “with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). Daniel gives Michael the same standing in other words, calling him “one of the chief princes” (Daniel 10:13) and “the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people” (Daniel 12:1).

The Second Book of Esdras, printed among the Apocrypha of the King James Bible, names a second archangel: “Uriel the archangel gave them answer” (2 Esdras 4:36). Tradition adds more names. The Orthodox Church keeps a feast on 8 November for Michael with “Archangels Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Selaphiel, Jehudiel, Barachiel, and Jeremiel.” Lucifer is on no such list, and no verse gives him the title.

Was Lucifer a seraph, a cherub or an archangel?

All three answers have been given, and the choice matters more than it looks, because in the classic order of angels an archangel ranks near the bottom. Around the year 500 a writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite arranged the angels in nine orders and three groups. He set “the most Holy Thrones, and the many-eyed and many-winged hosts, named in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim” nearest to God, and put “the Order of the Angels and Archangels and Principalities” in the lowest group. The Orthodox Church in America still lists the nine from the top: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels and angels. Archangels come eighth of nine.

Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, met the difficulty head on. If the first angel to sin was the greatest, why does Ezekiel call him a cherub, which ranks below the seraphim? Because, he answered, “the first angel who sinned is called, not a Seraph, but a Cherub”: cherub means “fulness of knowledge,” which can live alongside sin, while seraph comes from “the heat of charity, which is incompatible with mortal sin.” That is worth sitting with. You can know a great deal and still fall; you cannot burn with love for God and turn against him. In the same article Aquinas still judged it “the more probable view” that the angel who sinned was the highest of all. He took that from Pope Gregory the Great, who said the chief angel who sinned, “being set over all the hosts of angels, surpassed them in brightness.” Aquinas recorded a second opinion too, from John of Damascus, that “the highest of those who sinned was set over the terrestrial order.” John’s own words are that the devil was the angel “set over the earthly realm, and into whose hands God committed the guardianship of the earth.”

Dante’s Lucifer comes closest to a fallen seraph. In the Paradiso he calls Lucifer “the first proud being, Who was the paragon of every creature” (Paradiso 19.46–47). In the last canto of the Inferno, Lucifer has three faces, and “Underneath each came forth two mighty wings” (Inferno 34.46): six wings in all, the number Isaiah gives the seraphim, of whom “each one had six wings” (Isaiah 6:2). Dante never uses the word seraph for him in the Inferno. The six wings make the link.

Why is Lucifer called an archangel?

Tertullian used the title early. In his books against Marcion, the first of which he finished in 207, he commented on Ezekiel’s “full of wisdom, perfect in beauty” and added: “this belongs to him as the highest of the angels, the archangel, the wisest of all.” Tertullian wrote nearly three centuries before Dionysius drew up the nine orders, so his “archangel” means the chief of the angels, not the eighth rank.

The title is best known from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in 1667. Milton calls Satan an archangel again and again. In the first book he is “the lost Archangel,” and as he stands before the fallen angels his form has not “appeared Less than Archangel ruined.” In the fifth book, telling of the time before the fall, Milton places him among the first in heaven: “he of the first, If not the first Arch-Angel, great in power.” Milton made the rank part of his poem. Scripture never gave it.

Was Lucifer the strongest angel?

Scripture never ranks him. The idea that he was the most powerful angel comes from two places. One is Ezekiel’s lament, read as a portrait of Satan, with its subject “full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty” (Ezekiel 28:12). The other is the opinion of Gregory and Aquinas that the first to sin was the highest of all, an opinion Aquinas called probable, not certain.

The Bible names no strongest angel, but it does show who wins. “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven” (Revelation 12:7–8). Tradition puts Michael at the head of all the angels. The Orthodox Church in America, for his feast on 8 November, says, “Over all the Nine Ranks, the Lord appointed the Holy Archangel Michael,” and that Michael “cast down from Heaven the arrogantly proud Lucifer and the other fallen spirits when they rebelled against God.” So Michael, whose title is the name of the eighth rank, commands all nine. In that tradition his title and his command are two different things, and the angel with the humbler name holds the field.

Nor is Satan ever God’s rival. Paul writes that by Christ “were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers” (Colossians 1:16). The Catholic Catechism says of Satan, “He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature.” Whatever he was, he was made, and the one who made him has not lost control of him.

How are Michael and Lucifer connected in the Bible?

They meet in two scenes. In Jude, Michael argues with the devil over the body of Moses and will not pass judgment himself. He leaves it to God: “The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 9). In Revelation he leads the battle after which the dragon “was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:9). Daniel’s verses about Michael, the prince who stands for Daniel’s people, do not mention Satan.

The Bible never makes Michael and Lucifer brothers or equals, and it gives Lucifer no father, mother or sibling. The stories that do are traced in whether Lucifer had a twin brother.

What do the churches teach about Lucifer’s rank?

The churches agree that the devil was made good and fell by his own choice, and none of them defines his rank. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “Satan was at first a good angel, made by God,” and quotes 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” (Catechism 391). The Orthodox Church in America calls the devil “an angel created by God for His service and praise,” and quotes Isaiah 14:12 in its teaching on him. The Westminster Larger Catechism, the Reformed statement of 1647, says that God created all the angels “holy” and “permitted some of the angels, willfully and irrecoverably, to fall into sin and damnation.”

Seraph, cherub, archangel in Tertullian’s sense, or guardian of the earth: Christians have held each view, and no church has settled it. The Bible gives us less, and enough. Michael bears the title archangel, and he answered the devil with “The Lord rebuke thee.” The angels who sinned, whatever their rank, “kept not their first estate” (Jude 6).

Related reading

• Archangels vs Angels: What Is the Difference?
• How and Why Did Satan Fall?
• Lucifer’s Name Before the Fall
• How Many Angels Fell With Satan?
• Lucifer vs Satan: What Is the Difference?
• Is Michael in the Bible?