What Isaiah’s Oracle Against Babylon Is Really Doing
How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn.
Fourteen Hebrew words. Two thousand years of interpretive history. One of the most misread passages in the entire Old Testament. And the source of Christian theology’s most influential but textually questionable tradition about the origin of Satan.
Isaiah 14:12 has been read since the third century AD as describing Lucifer’s primordial fall from heaven. That reading has generated centuries of elaboration. The tradition is rich, influential, and given specific narrative content through the Book of Moses that the Isaiah passage itself never supplies.
Isaiah 14:12 is about the king of Babylon.
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