show_no_mercy

So Isaiah 14:12 has the word "helel" which translates into "day star" in most translation. The letters in Hebrew (http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1014.htm) are HYLL. In my naive reading of Hebrew, I would pronounce this as "Hilel", but isn't that the name of one of the most famous Jewish philosophers? On Wikipedia, they write Hillel in Hebrew with the letters HLL.

Also, this other person who commented on one of my blog posts said that some translations of Isaiah translate this verse as "howled". WTF? It looks like "YLL" would be "howled" so HYLL would be some oddly worded "the howled" (HaYLL).

So can some people fluent in Hebrew explain this? Thanks.

semiopen

I'm not fluent in Hebrew but the word is written as Heylal or Hilal (as in hey or hi), the yud makes the "a" sound more like eye.

http://strongsnumbers.com/hebrew/1966.htm

This is apparently the only time it is used in the bible. My impression is that day star is not correct, probably just star.

The web page suggests Lucifer, but only a few guys are nutty enough to use this in a translation. I haven't seen howled.

Hillel is said to mean "He who praises." It maybe possible that this is a defective spelling of Heylal but I doubt it... Interesting possibilities if heylal means Lucifer though.

show_no_mercy

Well Lucifer was the old Latin term for what's now Venus. So Lucifer would actually be a valid Latin translation of "day star" or "morning star". It's only later Christians who made Lucifer into Satan.

semiopen

Lucifer is an interesting subject in itself.

Many translations say "morning star" but I don't see how that can be derived from the name; maybe heylal was a proper name, like Venus, that wasn't written in anything else that survived.

show_no_mercy

Lucifer seems to come from the Latin lucem fer which means "light bringer". The same term is used for Jesus in 2 Peter 1:19. The Greek used in 2 Peter is "phosphoros", which comes from the Greek phos (φως - light) and phoros (from φέρω - I bring).

In antiquity, it was tradition that the "morning star" (Venus, personified as Eosphoros in the LXX of Isa. 14:12) was a herald of the sun, thus got the title "light bringer". A "lucifer".

edit: It's not hard to see how Christians equated the "Lucifer" of Isa. 14:12 with the Satan in 2 Cor 11:14 (even Satan masquerades as an angel of light) and Luke 10:18 (I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven).