The Names of Satan

Scripture almost never hands the adversary a bare personal name. It hands him roles. In the oldest scenes he is ha-satan, "the satan," with the article, a common Hebrew noun meaning "adversary" or "accuser" (BDB), and he functions exactly as the word says: the prosecuting figure in the heavenly court of Job 1:6 and Zechariah 3:1, standing "at his right hand to be his adversary" (Zechariah 3:1). When the Greek Old Testament (the LXX) reached for a word to translate satan, it chose diabolos, "slanderer, false accuser" (Thayer), which English carries as "the devil." Both of his most familiar names, then, are the same accusation in two languages.

Every other title works the same way: it describes an office, not a biography. He is that old serpent (Genesis 3:1; Revelation 12:9), the deceiver named at the beginning of the story, see the fall, and again at its end. He is the great dragon (Revelation 12:9), the sea-monster of the war in heaven. He is Beelzebul, Belial, the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4), the accuser of the brethren (Revelation 12:10).

None of these is a proper noun in the way "Michael" is. Each is a charge, what he claims, what he counterfeits, what he does to those who follow him. To name him rightly is already to know his method: he opposes, he accuses, he deceives, he usurps.

The polemic edge is sharpest in the borrowed idol-names. Beelzebub was "the lord of the flies," the god of Ekron whose oracle Ahaziah consulted (2 Kings 1:2). By the Gospels the Pharisees say Beelzebul, "lord of the dwelling" or "lord of the height", as a name for "the prince of the demons" (Matthew 12:24).

Israel's Scripture takes a rival deity and files it under the one enemy, the full derivation is its own page below. Belial travels the same road in reverse: it begins as the common Hebrew noun bĕliyyaʿal, "worthlessness" or "lawlessness" (Deuteronomy 13:13), a byword for the wicked, and only in the New Testament hardens into a name set opposite Christ himself: "what concord hath Christ with Belial?" (2 Corinthians 6:15).

The Pauline titles name his jurisdiction. He is the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2) and the god of this age who has "blinded the minds of the unbelieving" (2 Corinthians 4:4), never true deity, always a usurper of a throne that is not his, which is why John calls him merely the prince of this world, already "cast out" (John 12:31). Revelation gathers the whole roll into one sentence: "the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world" (Revelation 12:9, ASV). Four names, one enemy, thrown down. The variety is not confusion; it is a portrait built from every angle at once.

One popular name is deliberately absent from the roll: Lucifer. It is not a Hebrew title of Satan, it is a translation history. The word in Isaiah 14:12 is hêlēl ben-shachar, "shining one, son of the dawn" (BDB). Jerome's Latin Vulgate rendered it lucifer, "light-bearer," and the gloss slowly hardened into an English proper name.

Two readings deserve a fair hearing. The near-referent view points to Isaiah 14:4, which states the target outright: "this proverb against the king of Babylon" (Isaiah 14:4, KJV). The taunt-song mocks a human tyrant whose boast to "exalt my throne above the stars of God" (Isaiah 14:13) ends in the pit, and the New Testament never once quotes Isaiah 14 of Satan.

The dual-reference view, held across the patristic tradition (Tertullian, Origen, Jerome, see Schaff), reads Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 as describing, behind the human kings, the pride and fall of Satan himself; its strongest anchor is Jesus' own words, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18, KJV), read with Revelation 12:7-9.

Chuck Missler, whose Cosmic Codes and The Book of Isaiah teaching catalog defends the dual-reference reading at length, treats the pattern as load-bearing: the human king is the near text, the fallen cherub the pattern behind it.

Both readings hold together without flattening either: "Lucifer" is a translation history, not a biblical name of the adversary. Isaiah 14's near-referent is a Babylonian king; the application to Satan is inference by analogy, legitimate as a pattern of the prideful fall, strongest when read with Luke 10:18, weakest when treated as a proper noun. The name is worth using only with that whole account in view.

— John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Bible (1765), on Isaiah 14:12: "Fallen - From the height of thy glory. Lucifer - Which properly is a bright star, that ushers in the morning; but is here metaphorically taken for the mighty king of Babylon."

A handful of titles round out the catalog without carrying the same weight of controversy. Jesus calls him simply the tempter (1 Thessalonians 3:5) and, in the Lord's Prayer, the evil one, "deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13), a title John repeats: "the whole world lieth in the evil one" (1 John 5:19). Peter's picture is animal, not architectural: "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8).

And Revelation supplies one more, this time transliterated rather than translated: the angel of the abyss "whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek tongue he hath the name Apollyon" (Revelation 9:11), "destroyer" in both languages, a title that names an outcome rather than an office. Taken together, the roll is not a list of aliases for one bare name; it is the closest thing Scripture gives to a dossier.