Alan Dale Gross
Active Member
That's why I was talking about looking mostly before this Reformation idea.
The OED gives five instances of Lucifer being used as a proper noun before the KJV was written:
The earliest citation there, Christ & Satan, is an Old English poem which could date from as early as the seventh century.
I don't know when Lucifer was first used as a proper noun in other languages, but as just one pre-KJV example, it's used in Dante's Inferno.
So, when the Reformation-era English translations were produced, the translators, in keeping with the common (though not universal) interpretation that Isaiah 14:12 used a proper noun for Satan, translated it with the existing common translation: Lucifer.
This is the best that could be suggested in my mind, by implication. And my mind won't take that journey along with some others.
I think they are two entirely different animals. One is a carrier of a light source,
while the other is the magnificent source of its self-generated brilliance. That's just me.
An unfortunate afterthought, looks like to me.
'The shining one' isn't under dispute. Whether the light bearer is depicted as a proper noun or not is the issue, i.e., 'Lucifer'.
To find a Latin word in an English edition of the Old Testament of the Bible is an anomaly, to say the least.
We would expect to find two things in an English edition of the Hebrew Old Testament:
- English translations of essentially any Hebrew part of speech except proper nouns (names), including but not limited to adjectives, adverbs, common nouns, pronouns, and verbs; but,
- English transliterations of Hebrew proper nouns (names).
translated the Hebrew text of Isa. 14:12 into English as follows:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O *Lucifer, sonne of the morning: how art thou cut downe to the ground, which didst weaken the nations:
*sidenote: Or, a day-starre.
The Hebrew text of Isa. 14:12, according to the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) reads:
Thus, the Hebrew word הֵילֵ֣ל was considered to be a proper noun (a name). But, instead of being transliterated into English as Heilel, it was actually translated into Latin as lucifer, and then that word was written as a proper noun (name) by capitalization of its initial letter, i.e. Lucifer.
Lucifer is a Latin word, not a Hebrew word. It is formed from the Latin suffix -fer, meaning “bearing” or “bearer”,1 joined to the root luc-/lux- meaning “light”. It means “light-bearer” or “light-bearing”. It should not occur in the King James Version English translation of the Old Testament since the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, not Latin. So, either הֵילֵל should have been translated into English as “light-bearer” (if it is a common noun) or transliterated as Heilel (if it is a proper noun), but certainly not Lucifer.
Some might believe that. St. Jerome thought so. After all, when he produced the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, he translated הֵילֵל into Latin as lucifer. And, it’s because of St. Jerome and his Vulgate that lucifer ultimately ended up in the KJV. Well, that answers that question, doesn’t it?
Names are always tough to translate. Many of our current forms are two or three steps removed from the Bible.
Every name could be transliterated directly, but that would mean that almost none of the Biblical characters' names would be recognisable!
When it comes to names, accessibility is usually judged to trump accuracy.
No one bats an eyelid at translations which say Xerxes rather than Ahasuerus, and no common English translation uses Jacob rather than James!
The reason modern translations don't say Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12 isn't because it's a Latin name,
but because it's no longer thought of as a proper noun. If the proper noun interpretation was more dominant,
then I'd have no doubt at all that our translations would still use Lucifer rather than Heilel!
