I’m currently pursuing new research into popular depictions of the supernatural in video games and today my theological reflections turn me to one of the more tantalizes verses in the Bible. That reflection is on the person of Lucifer, a treasure chest of creative interpretation in video game storylines.
It had been my understanding growing up that the figure of evil Jesus is referring to was the same one found in the Isaiah 14:12. Here, Lucifer, the morning star was cast from heaven and in Luke 10, Jesus appears to be confirming this when he talks about seeing Satan fall from heaven.
Many scholars have wrote off the comparison, saying that the being falling from heaven in Isaiah is a Canaanite deity known as Helel ben Shahar, which was translated by Saint Jerome as “Lucifer.” It is argued that Helel was a Canaanite deity who is the son of Shahar (the dawn) and appears in the sky as a star (or technically the planet Venus).
The fact of the matter is that nowhere is there any mention of Satan in this OT verse. There are a couple possibilities than as to what may be happening here. First, the writer of Luke (10:18) might have been trying to make a statement about Jesus’ pre-existence. In finding this verse, he includes a first person account put on the lips of Jesus who is witness to the actual event and reinterprets it as the figure of Satan since Helel ben Shahar was not a popular subject during the Inter-Testamental Period. This may speak to an early tradition in the church in which Christian writers were vigorously attempting to prove Jesus through the Old Testament whether by theophanies or prophecy. We have good evidence from the Post-Apostolic Fathers that this was true, and Jesus himself on the road to Emmaus chastens the two men for not believing what was written about him by the prophets. On the other hand, Jesus’ testament of seeing Satan fall from the heavens may not at all have been an attempt to rework Isaiah 14 and may have referred to something entirely different. Here then, it would lack the apologetic effect that it could have had if it were a reinterpretation of Isaiah 14. But we have to at least allow for that possibility.
Of course, this may have been a primitive scientific attempt to make sense of a cosmic event. While the “morning star” itself is not a shooting star, the movement described in Luke 10:18 as lightning and Isaiah 14:12 as falling may have simply used the impetus to account for the repeating event of meteorites entering the earth’s atmosphere, which gave rise to the myth.
What remains interesting is that those who assert Helel and Shahar are Canaanite deities have trouble showing any myth in which this may have occurred, which has led commentators like James Dunn to suggest that the reenactment was most likely the product of early Israelite imagination and not an actual Babylonian mythology carried over into their own texts. I have to admit that this seems like the best gamble until archaeologists have any information otherwise. This of course does not solve whether Jesus was speaking of the event in Isaiah or speaking of something similar. Given however the re-imaginative working of Christian thinkers and the effect of Christian apologetics, I am more persuaded that this was precisely an attempt to do something like that.
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