>>> I don't doubt that you found it in a book that St. Jerome
>>> is the first who associated "lucifer" with Satan, but it
>>> seems to me that it is easy to deduce this, since the
>>> passage speaking of him as being Lucifer so easily shows
>>> that this is Satan that is being addressed.
>>
>> If that's the case, you might want to explain it to all those historians,
>> linguists, and theologians, who have thoroughly analyzed the text in
>> Latin and compared it to the original Hebrew, who are familiar with the
>> historical socio-political milieu of that place and time, and who have
>> subsequently concluded that this instance of the "Lucifer" metaphor most
>> likely refers to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon and oppressor of the
>> Jews from 597 to 538 BCE.
>>
> It's really good to consider what great learned
> people do have to say, but from your very words,
> you have limited those scholars only to those that
> say what you are saying. I'm afraid that does not
> cover all the studies that are made, do you think?
Of course. I'm not concerned with starry-eyed Sunday-school "studies" that
don't look beneath the surface. I'm more inclined to take seriously people
who have made in-depth stucy of scripture in the context of the historically
understood socio-political context of the day, than I am those who assume
that whatever is written in the KJV (or the Koran, or any other holy book)
can be taken simply at face value. It's not that I question whether they're
in earnest. I just question whether people with little knowledge of history
are competent to assess the true meaning of literature with such a complex
background, written by people with various axes to grind, selected and
edited by other people with agendas to push, and translated by people who
sometimes mangled metaphors.
In other words, I'm no more likely to accept Pat Robinson's take on
"biblical truth" than I am George W. Bush's take on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. Once it becomes evident to me that some source, or some
category of sources, is as notoriously unreliable as the word of a used-car
salesman, then that source loses any trust I might have had in it, and it
becomes automatically suspect in my estimation. And I simply don't have the
time or patience to sift through tons of junk in the faint hope of
discovering a grain or two of truth.
> Here's the thing, though. The Lord specifies that
> this one he is addressing in the passage, has done
> things no man on earth has ever done. Especially
> not Nebuchadnezzar. Would you actually take
> the time to read what I've written below? It would
> be helpful. You see, if all of the scholars are only
> investigating the name Lucifer and not paying
> attention to the actual text, then they will miss
> that more than the king is being spoken to here.
Of course good scholars pay attention to the whole text--and evaluate it in
terms of what is known of the time and culture in question. They wouldn't
be good scholars if they didn't.
The only reasons I dwell on the Lucifer theme here are (1) that someone on
the thread mentioned a passage "I [Jesus] am the root and the offspring of
David, and the bright and morning star" (morning star = lucifer in Latin),
and (2) that the introduction of Satan into Jewish religion is what
eventually led to Christianity after a few centuries. So I find the topic
important enough to be worth a little investigation, even though I'm not
myself a biblical scholar. And some of what I've learned is not what most
Christians have been routinely taught in Sunday school..
> --
> For example...
> Nebuchadnezzar did NOT fall from Heaven.
> Nebuchadnezzar could not possibly have set his
> throne above God's throne.
Not literally. Metaphorically only. But metaphor is often the stuff of
prophecy--and with good reason. Prophecy is a hazardous profession in times
of oppression. So when the prophet's own neck is on the line, he speaks in
riddles that are decipherable to others of his own culture, but not readily
understandable to the oppressor--or to anyone else, for that matter. It's
not surprising, then, that millennia later people are inclined to interpret
cryptic passages out of context in a variety of ways having nothing to do
with the original intent, and thus to weave them into an intriguing web--not
unlike the folks who like to search for "coded messages" in the phone book,
and (to no one's surprise) "find" just what they're looking for.
> Nebuchadnezzar is
> not going to be going down into the pit.
The pit. "Sheol" in Hebrew. Not "hell," but more akin to the Hades of the
Greeks. That's another interesting bit about the evolution of thought about
afterlife and such. But I've other things to do today, so I won't go into
it.
> The
> Devil is. Then he will be loosed again after the
> thousand years for a time. A real biblical scholar
> would acknowledge the passage in the Revelation.
> You will find yet another passage like this one.
> One addresses the King of Babylon. Another
> addresses the King of Tyre. Same conversation,
> same way. The Lord carries on a running
> conversation with Satan through certain ones in
> the Bible if you put all the passages together.
>>
>>> This is in chapter
>>> 14 of Isaiah, and it prophesies saying that this one, Lucifer,
>>> has fallen from Heaven, which identifies him as being a
>>> fallen angel. It says he endeavers to raise himself above
>>> the throne of God, and that by him the whole earth was
>>> made to tremble. It says that later people will look at him
>>> narrowly, that means that they shall squint their eyes with
>>> contempt in them towards what he's tried to do, I believe.
>>> People reading this in the first century would have poured
>>> over every word of it, discussing what was meant by
>>> Isaiah and how this seems to be referring to none other
>>> than Satan. The king that originally is addressed in the
>>> passage did not do those things listed. The whole earth did
>>> not tremble because of him. Nor was he fallen from Heaven.
>>
>> No, not literally. But this prophecy is metaphorical in nature. The
>> Babylonian Empire "ruled the world" that was known to the Hebrews at the
>> time. Metaphorically, Nebuchadnezzar had made the earth tremble in 597
>> BCE when he crushed the Judean rebellion and exiled the Jews, and again
>> in 586 when he destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem, and thereby "endeavored
>> to rise above the throne of [the Hebrew] God." And he figuratively fell
>> from the "heaven" of great rulers when he was deposed by the Persians in
>> 538. How can we be sure that this reference is metaphorical? Because the
>> planet Venus (Helel / Phosphoros / Lucifer) hasn't fallen from heaven;
>> it's still up there, almost as bright as ever (discounting effects of
>> smog).
>>
> But this Lucifer it says FELL from Heaven. God was
> addressing the devil through the king, just as he does
> through other kings. He is addressing the power
> behind the throne. This Lucifer has the same thing said
> to him by the people with the narrowing of their eyes
> that the devil has in the Revelation. The Lord is addressing
> Satan through the king.
>>
>> A first-century CE reader would never have come across the "Lucifer"
>> reference, since that didn't appear until the Hebrew and Greek scriptures
>> (in which "the morning star" is "helel" and "phosophoros" respectively)
>> were translated intto Latin, in which the morning star is known as
>> "lucifer" (the light-bearer). We know these are not references to the
>> sun, because they are the names given by the ancients to the morning
>> aspect of the planet we call Venus. If they'd been alluding to the sun,
>> they'd have used "helios" (Greek) and "sol" (Latin). Jerome would thus
>> have called Satan "Sol" instead of "Lucifer," and so on.
>>
>>> So Isaiah is prophesying what the Lord is telling him to say,
>>> and the address is straight through the king, and to the one
>>> who pulls the strings that makes the king be evil, which is
>>> Satan who has made his power play trying to take over.
>>
>> Pretty neat trick for a prophet who'd never heard of Satan, since the
>> Hebrews didn't adopt the Satan concept until more than a century and a
>> half after Isaiah's death. Come to think of it, Isaiah's contemporaries
>> wouldn't have heard of Satan either, so they wouldn't have understood
>> such a prophecy if Isaiah had actually made it. Consequently, they
>> likely would have stoned Isaiah as a blasphemer rather than esteemed him
>> as a prophet. As it turns out, though, Isaiah died in 692 BCE, and the
>> second and third prophecies attributed to him weren't made until more
>> than a century and a half later. (Why? Well, there could be various
>> reasons. But the most charitable one I can think of is that prophecy in
>> times of oppressive tyranny can be extremely hazardous to one's health.
>> Perhaps the actual anonymous prophet arranged to have it credited to the
>> long-dead Isaiah as the source, in order to save his own skin.)
>>
> It is NOT the truth that no one heard of Satan.
I don't think anyone made such a statement, let alone claimed it was true.
By the time Jesus came on the scene, Satan was a pretty well developed
concept (particularly in some activist Jewish sects, such as the Essenes).
In fact, we can reasonably infer that the introduction of the Satan concept
into Jewish religion following the Babylonian exile is what led to
Christianity five centuries later. (People believe a powerful spirit drives
them to sin. People fear they'll be condemned for yielding to sin. So
people want to be saved from sin. So they need a savior. So someone comes
along and offers to take all their sins away. So he becomes wildly popular.
It clearly couldn't have happened if the Satan idea hadn't caught on first.)
It's abundantly clear that the introduction of this Jewish remake of a
Persian devil around 500 BCE, and its subsequent development and
incorporation into Jewish demonology and eschatology, have had profound
effects after that time. What we cannot credibly claim is that the concept
of Satan was the subject of any prophecy made before that concept was
conceived. No one is claiming that the idea of Satan hadn't been well
developed during the five centuries before Jesus arrived on the scene. So
the following bit seems rather pointless:
> That's a
> modern invention. In Jesus' day when Jesus spoke of
> Satan, all those Jews that he spoke to had NO trouble
> at all knowing who he was talking about. None! You
> can see this in the Bible. And by the way you CAN
> discern who Satan is in the Old Testament, he's
> mentioned by name there. Especially in the book of
> Job he returns and has an agenda of accusing the
> brethren. But that doesn't matter because if someone
> actually reads what it says is being said in Jesus' day,
> everyone knew what he was saying. Satan is mentioned
> by name 34 times in the New Testament and that is
> written by Jewish writers, except for Luke who was not
> Jewish. None of them had any concept of a Satan being
> absent from their beliefs.
>>
>>> So, I just wanted to make the point that those that claim
>>> that St. Jerome was the first to notice this is really a stretch.
>>
>> It's not that Jerome "noticed" it, because it didn't exist as such until
>> he actually established such a connection. He took what previously--to
>> all the biblical prophets, kings, and apostles--had been nothing more
>> than a metaphorical allusion, and misinterpreted it as a literal name or
>> identity of Satan. In itself it was a subtle change, but it had enormous
>> implications. For it potentially altered--centuries after-the-fact--any
>> prophecy or other biblical allusion to "the morning star," "the coming of
>> day," "angel of light," or any other such expression that might translate
>> into Latin as "lucifer," thereby creating a bogus channel for Lucifer
>> (not Lucifer the morning star, but Lucifer-as-Satan) to be held
>> responsible for all kinds of mischief all the way back to Genesis, 3,500
>> years before he was even conceived. (Ironically, this suggests that
>> Satan is more powerful than God, since the Bible makes no claim that God
>> ever did anything without first being in existence himself.)
>>
>> What Jerome did in effect was to conflate lucifer--the Latin word for the
>> morning star--with the Judaeo-Christian demon Satan, on the sole basis
>> that they are sometimes referred to by the same term, even though they
>> are completely different things. Such an erroneous conflation is called
>> an "equivocation error," a logical fallacy. Great scholars and simple
>> laymen alike have been unwittingly tripping over it ever since.
>>
>>> I think St. Jerome if he could say something about now
>>> would agree with that. I would not want to take away from
>>> his discovery, though, I certainly would credit him with
>>> making that notation and himself prophesying with his
>>> statements he must have made about this.
>>
>> Any changes in prophecy that resulted from Jerome's goof are not new
>> prophecy, but simply distortions of the original. (Fundamentalists
>> categorically condemn "liberal interpretation" of scripture, but
>> apparently it's okay if it happens to suit their agenda.)
>>
> You have something mixed up. The word "Fundamentalist"
> as you are using it is not the right word. What you are
> describing is a person called a "Conservative." That's what
> I am. A Liberal is a person who often insists that the Bible
> is not literal, but metaphorical. A Conservative mostly will
> be looking at what is literally said in the scriptures. But
> an ultra-Liberal is a person who doesn't believe anything
> in the Bible, only the things it teaches. For example, they
> don't believe the Bible speaks of a literal flood of Noah.
> They will say it's a metaphor. But that idea doesn't pan out,
> since God gives great details of the dimensions of the ark.
Which is still another problem, since a mating pair of each of the millions
of non-marine species known today could not have fit into a three-decked
wooden vessel of those dimensions, along with three or four months' supply
of food for all. That's not to say there were no floods in Mesopotamia in
those days--there's geological evidence that there were, not to mention
parallel legends in Sumerian and other traditions. But that's another
story.
>>
>>>>> Jesus IS the morning star.
>>>>>
>>>> Okay, Ike, whatever you say:
>>>>
>>>> Jesus IS the morning star.
>>>> The morning star IS the planet Venus.
>>>> Therefore, Jesus IS the planet Venus.
>>>>
>>>> All in plain English. That's where it leads. Happy?
>>>>
>>> It leads to even more of a metaphor. When Jesus was
>>> resurrected, he promised another like himself which
>>> he called "the Comforter." That is the indwelling
>>> presence (sealed to presence) of the Holy Spirit which
>>> comes to live inside of a man who says he will now
>>> follow Christ and put his trust in him and do what he
>>> tells him to do with his life. The Comforter is himself
>>> the Lord, but in his Spirit form. Because the Lord is
>>> so wonderful, he can be in Heaven and at the same
>>> time dwell in the hearts of men who turn to him, and
>>> look to him for sustainance and salvation. This is that
>>> "Daystar" that shall rise in one's heart every day when
>>> he wakes up and pays attention to the agenda that the
>>> Lord has mapped out for the person that day. This also,
>>> is overlooked as being only the planet Venus. It is not
>>> referring only to that planet, or maybe not at all, because
>>> the most obvious morning star and or daystar is the sun,
>>> which people forget is a star, itself.
>>
>> If the "sun" had been intended, it would have been called "Helios" in
>> Greek and "Sol" in Latin. Phosphoros and Lucifer are the respective
>> names of the morning aspect of the planet Venus.
>>
> Congratulations, you have a feasible sounding argument
> until you see that this Lucifer fell from Heaven, which as
> you observed earlier Venus has never done.
I've already pointed out that reputable scholars interpret this "morning
star" metaphor as applying to Nebuchadnezzar, and the evidence they offer in
favor of that argument is passably, if less than absolutely, convincing. If
you choose to believe something else, that's fine, but your beliefs are not
my concern.
>>
>>> It rises every single
>>> day from our perspective on the earth. The sun is our
>>> daystar, and Jesus is the one that is the SON that is our
>>> Daystar given by Almighy God to us.
>>
>> The "sun"-"son" connection exists only in English, which didn't emerge as
>> a language (from Celtic and Scandinavian roots) until about the ninth
>> century CE. There is no such connection in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. Do
>> you also suppose there's some mystical connection between SATAN and
>> SANTA, or between GOD and DOG? You're welcome, of course, to base your
>> notions on such accidents of language if you like. But if you do, I
>> would caution you that you won't be taken seriously, except by small
>> children, and perhaps by some adults who think like small children.
>>
> Yes the similarity of the words sun and son in English
> are not in the Hebrew. But it's amazing to me that in
> the fulness of time when English is spoken now all
> over the world, that it's in the very time when son and
> sun are similar. Also the street in Jerusalem called
> "Straight." and also the Wilderness of SIN. By the way,
> Jesus said that the way small children think is the way
> in which adults should be in order to receive him and
> also have access to Heaven.
Yes, childlike gullibility is indeed helpful in indoctrinating anyone into
any religion, not just Christianity. In the very young there is no barrier
of critical reasoning skills, or prior knowledge of science, history, and
philosophy, to overcome. On the other hand, we don't usually assign to our
children the responsibility of making life-and-death decisions. For it is
this same lack of knowledge and thinking skills that leaves them unequipped
to deal effectively with serious and complex issues, and susceptible to the
wiles of unscrupulous villains.
> So that's not a bad thing to
> be with the understanding as a child. The Lord lets the
> "wise and prudent" miss things that he tells the babes
> about.
>>
> Even though you don't see things the way that I do,
> you are pleasant to debate with. Thank you for
> offering your ideas. You debate well, and present
> good possiblities. I do believe that most arguments
> like this center on only a few points of a passage,
> but leave out the rest of the passage. Such as that
> Lucifer is fallen from Heaven.
>>
> Suzanne
>
