Lucifer - Helel Ben Shachar (הילל בן־שׁחר)

"Lucifer" is used by Jerome in the VulgateThe 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 (הילל בן שחר 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.)

Though the site is thought to have been inhabited earlier, Neolithic Ugarit was already important enough to be fortified with a wall early on, perhaps by 6000 BC.

A cuneiform tablet found in 1986 shows that Ugarit was destroyed after the death of Merneptah, that is, before 1190, probably in 1195. It is generally agreed that Ugarit had already been destroyed in the 8th year of Ramses III.

The discovery of the Ugaritic archives has been of great significance to biblical scholarship, as these archives for the first time provided a detailed description of Canaanite religious beliefs during the period directly preceding the Israelite settlement. These texts show significant parallels to Biblical Hebrew literature, particularly in the areas of divine imagery and poetic form. The discoveries at Ugarit have led to a new appraisal of the Old Testament as literature.

Ugaritic religion centered on the chief god, Ilu or El, the "father of mankind", "the creator of the creation". The Court of El or Ilu was refered to as the 'lhm -- titles that were to have counterparts in the Elohim of Israel. The most important of the great gods was Hadad, the king of Heaven, Athirat or Asherah , Yaw and Mot .

Other gods worshipped at Ugarit were Dagon , Tirosch, Horon, Resheph (God of Healing), Kotar Hosis (the craftsman), Shachar (who is the equivalent of Satan), and Shalem (God of peace and the sunset).

The city of Jerusalem (Uru-shalemu, village of Shalem) with its temple facing the east toward the rise of the stars at dusk may be named for this divinity.

(So Shalem and Shachar were half god and half human brothers)

It is clear now that Lucifer is no more than a mistranslation, and not a "fallen angel". The early Christians needed a "Lucifer" as part of their mythos because, in their dualistic, and Zoroastrian-inspired theology could not understand the concept of God purposely creating Satan. This war in heaven with a third of the angels falling and turning into "demons" was also a very convenient explanation for all of the pagan Greek demons that fill the New Testament though are curiously absent from the Old Testament. But the reason should be obvious, when the original Torah was written, Hebrew culture had not been tainted by Greek superstition. The invisible spirit demons that populate the New Testament came to Judea along with the rest of Hellenistic superstition in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquest of Western Asia.

Lucifer Worship. An investigation into origin and historyThe pagans in the most advanced nations, like Egypt and Babylon, did not perceive serpents and dragons as evil, especially as they were portrayed in the Torah (First five books of the Old Testament by Moses) and later in the prophets. Moses was the first person to describe the Archangel Lucifer as the "serpent."

He wrote the book of Genesis as the result of a vision he had atop Mt. Sinai, "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field, which the LORD God had made. … (Gen. 3:1)" Clearly, Moses associated the serpent with Lucifer or the Devil (a fallen angel), created by Elohim ( the Word or Son), as was the rest of the angelic creation.

Isaiah, the prophet, first used the word "Lucifer" in describing the King of Babylon. He wrote, "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 (Isa. 14:12)!" [it should be noted that the word "Lucifer" does not appear in most versions of the Bible, only in the King James Version and the Living Bible. Other versions called him Light bearer, morning star, etc.]

Now the word "dragon" was also associated with a man, for Ezekiel the prophet wrote that Yahweh described the king of Egypt as a "dragon." He wrote: "Speak, and say, Thus saith Yahweh Elohim; Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself (Ezek 29:3)." [ Note: The "dragon" of the ancient world was a "serpent" as the book Secret Doctrine point out.]

Then there are those that study Lucifer as an anthropological presence, a template of the evolution of the human psyche, rather than visualizing it as an anthropomorphic or deistic image. (*The Lucifer Principle is an in-depth study and well worth the effort if interested in expanding one's education on this topic. )The Lucifer Principle

There is also an excellent book I just began to study, that researches Lucifer's history and provides for consideration , evidence that the original aspect of that imagery was feminine. "The Secret History of Lucifer" By:Lynn Picknett

Isaiah 45:7

I form the light,

and create darkness;

I make peace, and create evil;

I the Lord do all these things.

It is a common element of Christian mythology that Lucifer is a fallen angel, who then becomes "Satan" the dragon. In fact, Jews do not recognize a Lucifer, and they believe the Isaiah passage concerns a Babylonian king and has nothing to do with disobedient or fallen angels or Satan.

Christian theology is extremely dualistic and required a "bad god" character to challenge the good one, and to be responsible for the wickedness in the world. It was largely inspired by Persian zorastrianism which had an evil dragon called Ahriman who harms mankind until he is bound in chains by the "good god" and cast into an abyss for 1000 years. If that sounds similar to the fate of Christianity's evil dragon, Satan, you are right, for that is where St. John plagiarized elements of the the book of Revelations from. But rather than admit that the "good God" purposely created the "evil dragon" (which the old Testament plainly states), it was more comfortable to make Satan originally a "good angel" who fell out of pride and becomes more evil. This is why Christians naively groped at the Isaiah passage to create their ficticious Lucifer.