Diabology

This blog is over the difference between the Judeo-Christian’s ‘Satan,’ ‘Lucifer,’ and ‘the Devil.’ Contrary to what people now believe in the United States, and in Western Civilization as a whole, these three names were not always interchangeable, and actually described 3 different entities. The information comes from these books:

A History of Hell by Alice Turner
The Prince of Darkness by Jeffrey Burton Russel
A Dictionary of Angels by Gustav Davidson
The Holy Bible (King James Version and Revised Standard Version)

Satan derives from the Hebrew word hassatan, which means ‘The adversary,’ and held no official title, it was merely a description of a person. It is generally accepted that ‘Satan’ merely happened over time after a scribe dropped the prefix ‘ha-.’ The first, and only, instance of the entity Satan that exists in the Old Testament is in the Book of Job. In ancient times, this Satan was not an evil entity, even though that’s how most people today perceive it. Instead, he is merely ‘the adversary of God’ when God says that Job is the holiest person on the planet. Satan simply says it is because of what God has done for him. Satan, here, is an angel of the class of ‘Watcher.’ These angels, go figure, watch over humanity, because God does not view the entire planet, does not know what is going on on the entire planet, and so has these angels go to Earth, and then report back to God, telling him what he wants to know about the happenings of humanity.

The word Lucifer appears only once in the entire Bible, and even then it’s a typo. This is because it exists only in the Latin Vulgate (an early translation of the Bible, in which the Greek Septuagint was translated to Latin). The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, which is the most read version of all time, is an English translation of the Latin Vulgate. The KJV gives Isaiah 14:12 as saying “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” It is the only translation that gives the word ‘Lucifer.’ Lucifer was actually the Roman God of the morning star, or Venus, which is so bright that it can sometimes be seen during the day. However, in the original Hebrew, the individual Isaiah 14:12 is talking about is King Nebuchadnezzar, not a fallen angel. But tradition dictates that Lucifer is Satan in Heaven, before the fall, but Lucifer became Satan when he reached Hell (even though, historically speaking, this is incorrect).

It is not until the New Testament that we get the Devil. Out of these three names/entities, the Devil is the only one who is inherently viewed as evil. About one to two centuries before the birth of Jesus, there came a notion of the Devil, an embodiment of evil, whose name was also given as Satan. This is the entity who tempts Christ (although this may or may not have been an evil act in and of itself), and the one spoken of in Revelations.