Why Is Lucifer Called the Morning Star? Isaiah 14:12 and the Latin Name for Venus

Lucifer is called the morning star because that is what the word means: lucifer is the Latin name for the morning star, the planet Venus as we see it before sunrise. When the Latin Bible came to Isaiah 14:12, it used that word for the Hebrew helel ben shachar, “shining one, son of the dawn,” in a taunt the prophet aims at the king of Babylon. Christians later read the same verse as the fall of Satan.

In the King James Version the verse reads:

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)

Isaiah tells us plainly whom the song is about. Israel is to “take up this proverb against the king of Babylon” (Isaiah 14:4), and the song mocks a ruler who said in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God,” and “I will be like the most High.” The very next verse answers him: “Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:13–15).

The Hebrew word behind “Lucifer” is helel, and it occurs only here in the Old Testament. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines it as “shining one, epithet of king of Babylon,” and explains the phrase as “star of the morning,” comparing an Assyrian title of Venus as the morning star. The second half of the name, ben shachar, means “son of dawn,” shachar being the ordinary Hebrew word for dawn. So Isaiah pictures the king as the morning star, the brightest light before sunrise, thrown down out of the sky.

The name reaches us through the Latin Bible. Before Jerome, the Greek Septuagint had rendered helel as Heosphoros, “dawn-bringer”: “Πῶς ἐξέπεσεν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ὁ Ἑωσφόρος ὁ πρωὶ ἀνατέλλων,” which Lancelot Brenton translated as “How has Lucifer, that rose in the morning, fallen from heaven!” Jerome’s Latin Vulgate then gave the verse as “Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris?”, “How have you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, who used to rise in the morning?”

In Latin, lucifer is an adjective meaning “light-bringing,” made from lux, light, and ferre, to carry, and used as a noun it meant the morning star. Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary defines it as “the morning-star, the planet Venus.” It cites Cicero, who wrote in On the Nature of the Gods (2.20) that when the star of Venus rises before the sun it is called Phosphoros in Greek and Lucifer in Latin, and when it follows the sun, Hesperos. The Roman poets went further and made Lucifer a person, the son of Aurora, the dawn.

When the King James Version of 1611 came to the verse, it kept Jerome’s word rather than translating it, and so English readers met “Lucifer” as though it were a name. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the belief that it is Satan’s proper name back to this verse.

A morning star, in Merriam-Webster’s words, is “a bright planet (such as Venus) seen in the eastern sky before or at sunrise.” After the Moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky. Its orbit lies inside the Earth’s, so it never appears far from the sun, and we see it either shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset. NASA notes that ancient observers, the Egyptians and the Greeks among them, took it for two objects, a morning star and an evening star. The Greeks named the morning appearance Phosphoros and the evening one Hesperos, and that is why Cicero gave Venus two names.

Christian readers heard in the fallen star of Isaiah 14 the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” When they read of a ruler who falls from heaven after trying to set his throne “above the stars of God,” they saw the devil.

Tertullian applied Isaiah 14:13–14 to the devil twice in his work Against Marcion. In Book 5, chapter 11, he calls the devil the one “who once said, as the prophet describes him: I will be like the Most High,” and in chapter 17 he says of the same words, “This must mean the devil.” Origen of Alexandria tied the devil to the morning star itself. In On First Principles (Book 1, chapter 5) he quotes Isaiah 14:12 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.” Then he quotes Luke 10:18 and adds, “For at one time he was light.” It was through readings like these that Lucifer became a name for the devil before his fall.

Some Christian readers never accepted the link, and John Calvin was one of them. In his commentary on Isaiah he wrote that the reading “as if it referred to Satan, has arisen from ignorance; for the context plainly shows that these statements must be understood in reference to the king of the Babylonians.” The Catholic New American Bible Revised Edition translates the title as “Morning Star,” notes that the term is addressed to the king of Babylon, and says the Vulgate’s “Lucifer” is “a name applied by the church Fathers to Satan.” So some readers take the passage as the king’s fall alone, and others as a picture of Satan’s fall behind the king’s.

Yes, and he gives himself the title in the last chapter of the Bible:

I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. (Revelation 22:16)

In the Greek it is ho astēr ho lampros ho prōinos, “the bright, the morning star” (the Greek text the King James translators used reads ho lampros kai orthrinos, “the bright and early”). Earlier in Revelation, in the letter to the church at Thyatira, Christ promises “him that overcometh”: “And I will give him the morning star” (Revelation 2:26–28).

Second Peter uses the Greek word phosphoros, “light-bearer,” the same word that named Venus: “until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19). Blue Letter Bible’s outline of the word lists its senses as “the planet Venus, the morning star, day star,” and, as a figure, Christ. Jerome’s Vulgate translated this verse with the same word it used in Isaiah, “donec dies elucescat, et lucifer oriatur in cordibus vestris,” so that in Latin lucifer names both the fallen king of Isaiah 14 and the light that rises in our hearts.

The Latin Church went on using the word in its good sense. In the Exsultet, the proclamation sung over the Easter candle at the Easter Vigil, the Church asks that the morning star find the candle still burning: “Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat: ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum,” “may the morning star find its flame: that morning star, I say, which never sets.” The current Roman Missal names that star in the very next words, “Christus Filius tuus,” Christ your Son.

Two Old Testament verses speak of morning stars too, though one of them does so only in Latin. In Job 38:7, at the creation of the earth, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” In Psalm 110:3 the Latin Bible reads “ex utero ante luciferum genui te,” and Tertullian, quoting it as “Before the morning star did I beget you from the womb,” applied it to Christ, born at night before the morning star rose (Against Marcion, Book 5, chapter 9). The King James Version translates the Hebrew of that verse differently, as “from the womb of the morning.”

The morning star is the brightest light before sunrise, and Scripture looks at it from two sides. Isaiah uses it to mock a king who claimed a place above the stars of God and fell out of the sky, and Revelation and 2 Peter use it for Christ, the light that comes before the full day. The Hebrew and Greek words are different (helel in Isaiah, astēr prōinos and phosphoros in the New Testament). It is translation that brings them together: the Latin Bible uses lucifer in Isaiah 14:12 and 2 Peter 1:19, and Luther’s German uses Morgenstern in Isaiah 14:12 and Revelation 22:16.

Some English Bibles keep the Latin name and others translate the Hebrew. Other languages split the same way, and some of them use one word for both the fallen king and Christ.

Translation	Isaiah 14:12	Revelation 22:16
King James Version (1611)	“O Lucifer, son of the morning”	“the bright and morning star”
New King James Version	“O Lucifer, son of the morning,” with the footnote “Lit. Day Star”	“the Bright and Morning Star”
New American Standard Bible (1995)	“O star of the morning, son of the dawn,” with the footnote “Heb Helel; i.e. shining one”	“the bright morning star”
New International Version	“morning star, son of the dawn”	“the bright Morning Star”
English Standard Version	“O Day Star, son of Dawn”	“the bright morning star”
Latin Vulgate	“Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris”	“stella splendida et matutina”
Spanish, Reina-Valera 1960	“oh Lucero, hijo de la mañana”	“la estrella resplandeciente de la mañana”
German, Luther 1545	“du schöner Morgenstern”	“der helle Morgenstern”
French, Louis Segond	“Astre brillant, fils de l’aurore”	“l’étoile brillante du matin”
Russian Synodal	“денница, сын зари”	“звезда светлая и утренняя”

In Japanese, the Colloquial Bible of 1955 reads “黎明の子、明けの明星よ,” “son of the dawn, morning star.” Spanish lucero, Russian dennitsa (денница) and Japanese ake no myōjō (明けの明星) are all names for the morning star, Venus. The Japanese Living Bible writes the Latin name in Japanese script, ルシファー (Rushifā).

The Bible gives Lucifer no surname, and none of the translations above uses “Morningstar” as a name for Satan. In our English Bibles “morning star” is a title, given to the king of Babylon in modern translations of Isaiah 14:12 and to Christ in Revelation 22:16.

The full name Lucifer Morningstar is best known from comic books and television. DC Comics’ Lucifer Morningstar was created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg. He first appeared in The Sandman #4 in 1989 and later had his own series, Lucifer. The television series Lucifer, which ran from 2016 to 2021 on Fox and then Netflix, starred Tom Ellis as an alternate version of the same character.

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• Lucifer’s Name Before the Fall: The Bible Never Gives One
• How and Why Did Satan Fall?
• Bible Verses About Stars
• The Star of Bethlehem in the Bible