Heilel ben Shahar
{14:12} 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!
"Lucifer" is used by Jerome in the Vulgate.
The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century translation of the Bible into Latin made by
St. Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I.
It takes its name from the phrase versio vulgata,
"the common (i.e., popular) version" (cf. Vulgar Latin),
and was written in an everyday Latin used in conscious distinction to the elegant
Ciceronian Latin of which Jerome was a master.
The Vulgate was designed to be both more accurate and easier to understand
than its predecessors.
The Hebrew text refers to heilel ben-shachar (???? ?? ??? in Hebrew).
Heilel signifies the planet Venus, and ben-shachar means "the brilliant one,
son of the morning", to whose mythical fate that of the King of Babylon is compared in the prophetic vision.
The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that "it is obvious that the prophet in attributing to the Babylonian king boastful pride,
followed by a fall, borrowed the idea from a popular legend connected with the morning star".
The Helel-Lucifer story was transferred to Satan in the Slavonic Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch is a pseudepigraphal apocryphal work attributed to Enoch,
the great-grandfather of Noah.
Scholars date its composition to Maccabean times (ca. 160s BC).
"How art thou fallen from heaven Helel Ben Shachar (accurate Hebrew)
How art thou cast down to the ground, That didst cast lots over the nations!
And thou saidst in thy heart:
'I will ascend into heaven,
Above the stars of God (El)
Will I exalt my throne; And I will sit upon the mount of meeting,
In the uttermost parts of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will be like the Most High (Elyon).
' Yet thou shalt be brought dow to the nether-world,
To the uttermost parts of the pit."
- Isaiah 14:12-15 It may be that this passage is an allusion to a Canaantie or Phoenician myth about Helel,
who is the son of the god Shahar.
Helel sought the throne of the chief god and was cast down into the abyss because of this.
El, Elyon, and Shahar are members of the Canaanite pantheon.
There is a Ugaritic poem about two divine children, Shachar (dawn) and Shalim (dusk),
who were born as the result of the intercourse of the god El with mortal women.
There are, however, no Canaanite sources that tell about Helel ben Shahar or a revolt against Elyon.
(So the oldest directly traceable term for Lucifer is Son of Shachar, Sumerian.)
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