Transcription
Isaiah chapter 14, read through the lens of medieval theology, has often been mistaken as a story about the fall of Satan. In fact, the Latin Vulgate translation of that passage is where the name “Lucifer” comes from. In its original context, that passage has nothing to do with the Devil. There is no character named Lucifer there or anywhere else in the Bible. Instead, Isaiah 14 contains a fascinating set of references to several ancient, pre-Israelite myths that were well known to the Canaanites and other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. These myths were preserved in the literary archives of the Bronze Age kingdom of Ugarit, and similar legends circulated among the ancient Greeks as well. Thanks to modern archaeological discoveries, we can connect some of these dots and gain a new appreciation for the religious and cultural background that produced the Bible.
Isaiah chapters 13 to 27 contain a series of divine taunts aimed at various foreign countries and peoples. Chapter 14 is specifically addressed to “the king of Babylon.” We don’t know exactly when or by whom it was written. We don’t even know which king the author had in mind; Babylon might even be a stand-in for any powerful tyrant or aggressor. Whoever this king is, his oppression has come to an end, and the entire world is reveling in his downfall. Even the cedars of Lebanon are celebrating, since this king formerly used to cut them down. Mythological undertones begin to seep in at verse nine: Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the Rephaim to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations. The king descends into Sheol, the Hebrew realm of the dead. There, he is greeted by ancient kings called the Rephaim; more on them later.
A few verses later, we come to the most interesting part: a brief retelling of what seems to be a Canaanite astral myth: How you are fallen from heaven, O Helel, son of Shahar! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said to yourself, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the Stars of El; I will sit on the Mount of Assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like Elyon.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit.
Early modern Bible scholars recognized that this passage alluded to an older myth, but they had little else to go on. The great German scholar Herman Gunkel was the first to suggest that it had either a Babylonian or Phoenician origin. However, we now know that these peculiar words and phrases – Rephaim, Helel, Shahar, the Stars of El, the Mount of Assembly, and Zaphon – are specifically Syro-Canaanite. This is confirmed by the discovery of the ancient literary and religious texts of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city-state on the Syrian coast just north of Israel. Several of those texts help to illuminate this passage in Isaiah.
Helel, Son of Shahar
The Legend of Athtar
Isaiah appears to treat both Helel and Shahar as the names of divine beings. Shahar means Dawn, and this name appears on Ugaritic tablets as the god of the dawn. He is often paired with Shalim, the god of the dusk after whom Jerusalem is probably named. Helel, meaning Shining One, is understood to be an epithet for the planet Venus, which appears in the sky as a very bright star shortly before the dawn. At Ugarit, Venus was associated with the male deity Athtar. He was equivalent to the Akkadian goddess Ishtar. Veneration of Athtar was widespread among the Amorites, Canaanites, Arameans, Moabites, and Arabs. Isaiah 14 relates the fall of the Babylonian king to a myth in which the morning star tries to enthrone himself on sacred Mount Zaphon, but he is found unworthy and is brought down to the underworld instead.
One of the tablets uncovered at Ugarit that makes up part of the Ba’al cycle contains a myth that follows the same outline. It takes place during the battle between the great storm-god Ba’al and Mot, the god of death. Ba’al, the king of the gods, has been killed by Mot, leaving his throne on Mount Zaphon vacant. The rest of the gods are desperate for a replacement. El, the high god, asks his wife Asherah – or Athirat, as it is pronounced in the Ugaritic language – who should take Ba’al’s place. Athirat says: Shall we not make king someone who possesses wisdom and intelligence? El disagrees, saying that the king of the gods must not be a weakling. Athirat responds: Shall we not then make ‘Athtar the Terrible king? Let ‘Athtar the Terrible reign! With Athirat’s endorsement, ‘Athtar ascends Mount Zaphon, the holy mountain of Ba’al, and sits down on the throne. But in an ironic twist, ‘Athtar is too short for Baal’s throne! His feet don’t reach the footstool, and his head barely reaches the top of the backrest. ‘Athtar then speaks: I cannot be king on the heights of Zaphon. Accordingly, ‘Athtar descends from the throne and becomes ruler of the underworld.
Now, no one is suggesting that the author of Isaiah 14 had this exact text in front of him. Since he lived hundreds of years later, whatever version of the story was known to him probably differed in many details. Some of these differences are quite obvious; for example, ‘Athtar’s failure to assume kingship over the gods is not a result of hubris in the Ugaritic version, and ‘Athtar does not die in it. But enough of the elements are there that some variant of this story likely sits in the background. Michael Fishbane concludes in his book on biblical myth: …enough of a resemblance exists to confirm that the political diatribe in Isa. 14:4-21 has reworked a myth of a pretentious god who undergoes a change of status and leaves the heavenly hierarchy. […] That such a mythic structure existed is confirmed in Canaanite sources from a half-millennium earlier. Here too we read of an astral deity (named Athtar) who ‘ascended’ beyond his station to the recesses of Saphon; and when he sat upon the throne of Aliyan Ba'al he proved inadequate and descended to rule the underworld.
Since the themes of hubris and violent overthrow are lacking in the Ugaritic myth of Athtar, some scholars have suggested that Isaiah 14 was also influenced by a certain Greek myth about Phaethon, son of Helios. Phaethon’s name, meaning ‘radiant’, corresponds perfectly to the Helel of Isaiah. Different versions of Phaethon’s story were preserved by Ovid, Euripides, and Aeschylus, among others. According to one version, Phaethon steals his father’s sun-chariot and brashly attempts to drive it during one of its daily journeys across the sky. Due to his inexperience, Phaethon is unable to handle the horses and veers off course, scorching some parts of the earth and freezing others. After many complaints, Zeus puts an end to Phaethon’s joyride by striking him down with a lightning bolt. So here we have a myth about the foolishness of an astral being who assumed a task for which he was unworthy, leading to his downfall. One obvious dissimilarity is that Phaethon was the son of Helios the sun, not the son of the dawn. However, there was another Phaethon in Greek myth who was in fact the son of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. The famous classics scholar Martin Litchfield West believed that these two Phaethons were originally the same character, and that a shared Canaanite myth lay beneath both the Greek tale and Isaiah 14. He writes: In the Theogony Phaethon too is called the son of the Dawn… In this version he is carried off by Aphrodite to become her temple servant, and the fall from heaven does not appear. But it is hard to believe that Phaethon the son of Dawn and Phaethon the son of Helios were not originally one and the same.
Another expert, W.G.E. Watson, believes that the Phaethon myth influenced the Ugaritic myth of Athtar. It is easy to see why Venus is a natural fit for this kind of rise-and-fall myth. For an hour or so before the sun rises, Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the moon – outshining even Jupiter and Saturn. But as an inner planet, it can never stray far from the sun; it enjoys only a brief period of splendor before the sun rises and makes the morning star fade from view.
One last wrinkle in this mythological puzzle to consider is that Helel actually appears once in the Ugaritic literature as the name of a lunar deity possibly associated with the new moon phase. This Helel is the father of a group of goddesses known as the Kotharat, who were involved in childbirth. Its meaning is the same as in Hebrew – Shining One – since those two languages were closely related. An Arabic cognate, hilalun, apparently referred to the crescent moon as well. However, the exact identity of the Ugaritic Helel is still debated, and it’s not clear whether there is any direct connection to Isaiah 14. It may just be that this epithet is a common one for astral deities.
The translators who produced the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah recognized the astronomical nature of the Helel myth. In Greek Isaiah, Helel is translated as Heosphoros, another son of Eos the dawn goddess who personified Venus as the Morning Star according to Hesiod. Heosphoros is a different son of Eos than the Phaethon previously mentioned, but ancient Greek myths sometimes conflated the two characters. This shows that the ancient Greek-speaking Jews who translated Isaiah still recognized Helel as an astral being related to Venus. In the Latin Vulgate, Helel became Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris – “Venus who used to rise early in the morning” – since Lucifer was the name of Venus the morning star in Latin. Church fathers as early as St. Augustine, however, reinterpreted Isaiah 14 to be about the primordial fall of Satan, which became a topic of much speculation in medieval Christianity. In the process, the original context and meaning of the passage was entirely forgotten, and Lucifer ultimately became a synonym for the Devil.
In the Ugaritic texts, Zaphon is frequently mentioned as the holy mountain of Baal. Scholars unanimously identify Zaphon as the mountain Jebel Aqra on the Syrian-Turkish border – a peak known as Mt. Cassius in antiquity. This mountain was sacred to several cultures, including the Hurrians and the Hittites as well as the Canaanites. Zaphon was Baal’s divine abode, and his palace was believed to be at its cloud-shrouded summit. Zaphon continued to have religious significance in Israelite religion as the abode of Yahweh, who possessed the same attributes of storms and kingship. As a metonym, Zaphon also became the Hebrew word for ‘north’. See Job 37:22 for an example of a biblical text placing Yahweh’s origins at Mt. Zaphon: From Zaphon comes gold; Around God is awful majesty.
The “assembly of the gods” is also something found in the Ugaritic tablets. In earlier texts, the gods assembled at El’s mountain, which was separate from Zaphon. But in later texts, Zaphon took over this role, and the deities venerated at Ugarit became known as the “gods of Zaphon”. Similarly, Isaiah 14 appears to regard Zaphon and the Mount of Assembly as the same mountain. This assembly of gods, the divine council, is sometimes referred to as the “children of El” in the Hebrew Bible. In Job 38:7, the stars are called the “children of Elohim” who shout for joy during the creation of the world. One Ugaritic text refers to these gods as the star-gods, and another calls them the Assembly of the Stars. In another text, KTU 1.23, the stars are El’s divine retinue who attend the momentous occasion of the birth of the deities Shahar and Shalim. It is noteworthy, then, that the “stars of El” are also mentioned here in Isaiah as divinities whom the Morning Star Helel wished to rule over. These all belong to the same constellation of concepts in Canaanite religion, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Although the Hebrew Bible forbids worshipping the stars and other celestial bodies, it does not deny the belief that they were divine beings. As you recall, the king of Babylon in this allegory is greeted by the Rephaim when he descends to Sheol, the Hebrew realm of the dead. Isaiah describes these beings as former kings. They rise from their thrones to greet the newly deceased king of Babylon. The Rephaim make regular appearances in Ugaritic literature. One particularly interesting text in this regard is an incantation text known as KTU 1.161, the “Book of the Sacrifice of the Fallen Ones”. It was probably recited as part of the Kipsu ritual in which food and drink were offered to the spirits of the dead. The opening lines read: I have called the Rephaim of the Underworld. I have summoned the assembly of Didanu. This is followed by the calling of several Rephaim – presumably deceased kings – by name. The purpose of this ritual was apparently to obtain the blessing of the ancestors for the king and the city. A fragmentary text known as the Rephaim Text describes the hero Danil – a character who appears in Ezekiel, incidentally – inviting the Rephaim to his palace for a banquet. This occasion requires the Rephaim to go on a three-day journey from the underworld. Another text, KTU 1.108, describes a ritual for the royal dead that includes a banquet for the Rephaim. It is presided over by one of the Rephaim who is called the “King Everlasting”. The relevance of the Ugaritic texts, for our purposes, is that the authors of the Hebrew Bible were clearly familiar with the legends and mythology of the Rephaim – the ghosts of ancient kings and heroes long dead, now believed to reside in the underworld.