What Does Lucifer Mean in Hebrew? Helel ben Shahar, “Shining One, Son of the Dawn”

In Hebrew the word behind Lucifer is helel (הֵילֵל), the shining one. Isaiah gives the king of Babylon the title helel ben shahar, “shining one, son of the dawn”, and pictures him as the morning star thrown down from the sky (Isaiah 14:12). The word Lucifer never appears in the Hebrew Bible. It is the Latin Bible’s word for helel, and only later did it become a name for the devil.

Isaiah’s song mocks that king with a sharp picture. He had said in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God” (Isaiah 14:13), and so the prophet calls him a star, the brightest one, and shows us the proud king falling.

What does helel ben shahar mean?

The title is made of three plain words. The first, helel, is a noun found nowhere else, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines it as “shining one, epithet of king of Babylon”. Ben is the everyday word for son, and shahar, which you may also see spelled shachar, is dawn, the word Genesis uses when “the morning arose” over Sodom (Genesis 19:15). So the shining one who is the son of the dawn is the morning star, or, as the same lexicon has it, “star of the morning”.

In Hebrew the whole verse reads:

אֵיךְ נָפַלְתָּ מִשָּׁמַיִם, הֵילֵל בֶּן-שָׁחַר; נִגְדַּעְתָּ לָאָרֶץ, חוֹלֵשׁ עַל-גּוֹיִם.

The King James Version of 1611 keeps the Latin word: “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!” The Jewish Publication Society’s translation of 1917 has “How art thou fallen from heaven, O day-star, son of the morning!” The NET Bible, a modern translation, gives the Hebrew word its plain sense: “Look how you have fallen from the sky, O shining one, son of the dawn!” Whether a Bible says Lucifer, day-star or shining one, it is naming the same light in the morning sky.

We know whom the song is about, because two verses earlier the prophet tells Israel to “take up this proverb against the king of Babylon” (Isaiah 14:4). It mocks a ruler who wanted a throne above the stars and went down to the grave like any man.

How is Lucifer written and pronounced in Hebrew?

You write it הֵילֵל, four letters read from right to left: he (ה), yod (י), lamed (ל) and lamed again. The small dots and dashes under them are the vowel signs. Strong’s concordance gives the pronunciation as “hay-lale”, with the stress on the second syllable, and scholars transliterate it hêlēl. The full title is written הֵילֵל בֶּן-שָׁחַר.

If you look for Lucifer in the Hebrew Bible, you will not find it; the word there is always helel. Bibles in other languages that translate the Hebrew, rather than borrow the Latin, leave Lucifer out too. Where the King James Version has Lucifer, Luther’s German Bible has “du schöner Morgenstern”, you beautiful morning star. Most modern English Bibles also choose a word for the morning star, as in the New International Version’s “morning star, son of the dawn”.

Where does the word helel come from?

Brown-Driver-Briggs and Strong’s both trace helel to halal, a root that means to shine. Brown-Driver-Briggs gives shining as that root’s first meaning, and praising and boasting as its later ones, while Strong’s says helel comes from it “in the sense of brightness”. The king in Isaiah’s song went the whole way down that list, from shining to boasting. The Jewish commentators Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra agree on what the word means, though not on its root. Rashi explains helel as “derived from יהל, to shed light”, and Ibn Ezra says the morning star bears the name because “of all the host of heaven there is no star that shines with such brilliancy as this”.

The same Hebrew form can also mean “howl!”. In Zechariah 11:2 the identical word, הֵילֵל, opens the line “Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen”, and Brown-Driver-Briggs lists it there as the command form of yalal, to howl. Some ancient translators heard Isaiah 14:12 that way.

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 tells us that the Syriac version and Aquila’s Greek translation took helel from yalal, to lament, and that Jerome agreed with them in his commentary on Isaiah. There Jerome made Lucifer the chief of the fallen angels, who must lament the loss of a glory once as bright as the morning star. So Jerome kept both senses: in his Bible he gave the word the star’s Latin name, Lucifer, and in his commentary he heard in it the lament of the one who fell. Brown-Driver-Briggs and the modern translations quoted above keep the shining star, which fits the words that follow, son of the dawn.

Who is Helel son of Shahar?

In the Bible he is the king of Babylon, given a star’s title to mock his pride. The song says so at its start, and later, for all his shining, it calls him a man, “the man that made the earth to tremble” (Isaiah 14:16).

Scholars think the picture itself may come from an older story. The NET Bible’s notes observe that verses 12 to 15 “contain several titles and motifs that resemble those of Canaanite mythology”: Helel son of Shachar, the stars of El, the mountain of assembly, the recesses of Zaphon and the title Most High. “Apparently these verses allude to a mythological story about a minor god (Helel son of Shachar) who tried to take over Zaphon, the mountain of the gods.” The notes of the Catholic New American Bible say that son of the dawn “may reflect the name of a pagan deity”, and identify Zaphon as “the sacred mountain of Baal”, a peak north of the ancient city of Ugarit. Kaufmann Kohler, writing in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906), judged that the prophet “borrowed the idea from a popular legend connected with the morning star”, and he compared that story with the Greek legend of Phaethon.

On this view Isaiah takes a story the nations knew, a bright star that tried to climb above the gods and was thrown down, and turns it on a king who thought himself divine. Scripture itself never names a god called Helel; the title appears just once, and it belongs to the king.

How do Jewish interpreters read Isaiah 14:12?

They read it as a verse about the king of Babylon, told in the language of the stars. The Targum, the ancient Aramaic translation of the Prophets, spells the comparison out: “How art thou cast down from on high, who wast shining among the sons of men as the star Venus among the stars”. In the next verse, where the Hebrew has the king set his throne above the stars of God, the Targum has him set it “above the people of God”.

Rashi reads it the same way and names the king, “You, Nebuchadnezzar”, and for him the stars of God are Israel. He also sees a second figure in it, up in heaven, and says the verse is “the lamentation over the heavenly prince of Babylon, who will fall from heaven”. A heavenly prince is the angel set over a nation, the kind Daniel hears of when an angel tells him that “the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me” (Daniel 10:13). So for Rashi, Babylon’s angel falls along with its king. Not one of these commentators reads the verse as Satan’s fall.

How did helel become Lucifer and a name for Satan?

It happened first through translation, and then through reading the verse beside the Gospels. The Greek Septuagint rendered helel as heosphoros, dawn-bringer, and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, translated from the Hebrew, as Lucifer, light-bearer. Both were ordinary names for the morning star, and the name Lucifer comes from the Latin. Then Christian writers such as Tertullian and Origen set the fallen star beside the words of Jesus, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18), and Lucifer became a name for the devil before his fall. Not every Christian reader accepts that link; the NET Bible’s notes say it “seems contextually unwarranted”.

Kohler thought the step was older than Christianity. He wrote that “the Lucifer myth was transferred to Satan in the pre-Christian century”, pointing to the Life of Adam and Eve and the Slavonic Book of Enoch, where Satan is cast down for trying to set his throne above the clouds. That dating is now disputed. Encyclopaedia Britannica says that all surviving stories about Adam and Eve of this kind “are Christian works”, and Marinus de Jonge argued in 2000 for the Christian origin of the Greek Life of Adam and Eve. Whoever first told it of Satan, the story has kept the shape it had in Isaiah’s song, a light that wanted a throne above the stars and fell.

Related reading

• What does the name Lucifer mean?
• Why is Lucifer called the morning star?
• What was Lucifer’s name before the fall?
• What was Lucifer’s job in heaven before he fell?
• Was Lucifer ever an archangel?