In the Bible, Lucifer is described as a fallen angel, punished for his pride, but never as “the ruler of Hell”—rather, this is an image developed later in the Christian tradition, especially in medieval literature (e.g., Dante).
In Revelation 20:10, it is Satan who is thrown into the lake of fire; he does not rule over it.
Why, then, is Lucifer so readily associated with a kind of “god of evil” ruling Hell? Is it purely cultural?
Thank you for your answer
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The name Lucifer isn’t in the bible at all
Heaven and hell is an evolving theory created by mankind. The historical Jesus would not recognize our perceptions of the afterlife. Jesus would have believed that, in his generation, God would return and turn earth into a paradise, garden of eden, and all the people who followed the Hebrew law would get to experience it. Those who did not would disappear. Then people began asking things like, what about the people already dead and don’t bad people get punished. These types of questions would start to evolve into what Christians believe today as the afterlife.
Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic poem on the subject, is probably what most people draw from.
Satan, the devil, Lucifer, the king of hell, etc. are all separate cultural concepts ascribed to a general fictional figure. There’s plenty of conflicts and such because they didn’t all come from one consistent source.
Lots of religious canon isn’t in the bible.
For the same reason people think Humpty Dumpty is an egg. Someone took an existing story, added an element that captured people’s imaginations, and that aspect has persisted through subsequent retellings.
It’s mostly from medieval stories and pop culture, not the Bible — people just ran with the idea over time.
Because a horrifying amount of people who base their life around the Bible refuse to read it for some reason. It’s absolutely baffling. They would rather get their ideas from some authoritative figure. He was abusing his position for his personal game, which is funny because these are often the same people who hate authority.
The Bible speaks of Satan as “The Prince of the power of the air”, someone who goes around the Earth “like a roaring lion, seeking anyone whom he may devour”.
Point being, during the books of the New Testament being written, it was expressed that while Satan could not prevent the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus, which provided humanity with true salvation from sin, he likes to go around, tempting people to sin, reject the message of Jesus/the gospel, etc.
The Old Testament has imagery of Satan being a beautiful angel in heaven, pridefully trying to usurp God’s authority, and then being cast out of heaven with one third of all other angels who backed his rebellion. These are demons who continually serve him and hate God.
The new testament describes those who die and believe in Jesus’ message/authority as being with him in paradise, and those who ultimately do not will be separated from God forever. They cannot enter heaven and are described as going to Sheol, or the place of the dead. When Jesus talks about Hell, he uses a term called “Gehenna” which I think is the name of a huge garbage dump outside of Jerusalem at the time where they would burn trash and it stinks and isn’t a safe place to visit. He describes this place as a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth”
So taking all of this into consideration, we have an evil character who opposes God, a couple of places where he is “placed” between the earth and there, and another post saying ultimately he and all other nonbelievers will be thrown into the “lake of fire” to be punished for eternity as the final place, which is where a lot of imagery of “Hell” we get comes from. Combined, that might help paint the picture of these places and misconceptions.
PLEASE NOTE: I am not a Bible scholar so every little detail above might not be perfect, but this is coming from someone raised in a baptist church.
Part may be the translations. I know it says the devil and his fallen angels.
It also talks about him leading the rebellion prior to being cast out. This would infer that he is in charge since h led and others followed.
Lucifer isn’t in the Bible at all. That’s all from Paradise Lost by John Milton. Major parts of modern Christian-ish popular imagery are from a 1667 poem, not from the Bible at all.
It is weird how many Christian and Christian-adjacent people believe things that were written as fiction by Dante and Milton.
Pretty much all of our modern views on Satan/Lucifer/Hell come from pop culture, and there’s relatively little written about him in the Bible itself.
Most of the imagery comes from non cannon sources that were popular as entertainment in their respective times. Dantes Inferno (1341), Paradise Lost (1667), and The Revolt of the Angels (1914), shaped satanic mythology and imagey right up to the modern era where movies like Rosemary’s Baby and the Exorcist have had equally significant cultural impacts!
In short, there is very little in the Bible about Satan/Lusfier/Hell, and most of our modern imagery comes from what amounts to centuries of devil fanfics.
You’d be surprised how much of practicing Christianity is purely cultural and has nothing to do with the religion.
It’s fanon pretending to be Canon.
Milton, mostly.
Bible fanfic got really popular and over time people forgot it wasn’t canon
Because its all made up and people just make up what ever they want about the fantasy.
Christian mythology has more unfinished plot lines than A Song of Ice and Fire lmao
Idk if you have tiktok, but I think he’s on YouTube as well, but please check out Dan McClellan. He has an excellent piece on this specifically and how lucifer, the devil, and Satan are conflated at times.
People aren’t very good at making logical sense when it comes to religious texts. Look at god, for example. People see him as righteous and good. But that guy really likes killing humans and messing with them in some pretty evil ways. Blows my mind how anyone can read the bible and have a good image of god.
The Bible doesn’t actually describe Hell the way people think. That fiery underworld ruled by Lucifer? That’s mostly Dante’s Inferno, not Scripture. In the Bible, “Hell” usually means death, destruction, or the grave. Satan doesn’t rule Hell either — he gets thrown into the lake of fire and punished (Revelation 20:10).
When it comes to what happens to non-believers, the Bible leans heavily toward annihilationism — meaning they’re destroyed, not tortured forever.
Examples:
Matthew 10:28 — God can “destroy both soul and body in Hell.”
John 3:16 — “Whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (Perish = cease to exist.)
Romans 6:23 — “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.”
Malachi 4:1-3 — The wicked will be burned up “leaving them neither root nor branch.”
The contrast in Scripture is usually between life and death, not life and eternal torture. Eternal torment is more of a medieval tradition than something the Bible actually teaches.
It’s definitely from Paradise Lost and not Dante. He’s very clearly a prisoners in Dante’s work.
Because Greek and Roman religions at this time had a god of the underworld. Hades or Pluto are probably more to blame for Lucifer, king of the underworld than biblical stories.
Most people talk about rings of hell and such when the only evidence for it is that very nice fanfic Dante wrote
The real question is how do so many people believe in obviously made up fairy tales?
“Lucifer is described as a fallen angel”
Nope. The only instance of “Lucifer” is in Isaiah, and the speaker is referring to the King of Babylon. See Isaiah 14:4 for “King of Babylon” and Isaiah 14:12 for “Lucifer”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2014&version=KJV
It wasn’t conflated with “Satan” until later.
Because people don’t read the Bible
That’s a long and complex answer, but basically it’s heavily cultural. Lucifer, strictly speaking, isn’t even in the Bible until Jerome’s Vulgate. He translated Hilel which is generally read as “morning star, son of dawn”, a title for the king of Babylon, as Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12. Other apocryphal texts identify a group of fallen angels with a leader (usually referred to as Semyaza or a similar variant) who rebelled against God in the fall described in Genesis 6. Culturally Lucifer was identified with Venus among Romans or figures like Attar in Sumeria, basically everyone had their own version of the fall from heaven. Early church fathers like Origen and Tertullian identified the figure in Isaiah 14 with Satan, a belief echoed by Saint Augustine later on. Authors like Dante and Milton fleshed out these ideas for the general public, providing more descriptive and imaginative accounts than the church, which cemented the view for much of the western world.
He’s obviously a sexy English bloke.
You’ve heard the term “hijacked by Jesus”? Well, thus is kinda “hijacked by Hades”. And for understandable reasons. Most or all if the NT was written in Greek as the main language of the world. The writers wanted to get the message across and used the closest Greek terms they could find. Eventually, this lead to conflating of concepts between Abrahamic mythology and Greek mythology. Throughout the centuries, this weird mixing of concepts continued, as others point out here, no doubt.
The fiction book, Paradise Lost, provides a lot of additional details that are ingrained in western European culture. In it, Lucifer is described as having recruited a third of the angels of heaven, of being cast in Hell before revelations, of being a king of demons, many of whom are named after ancient pagan gods.
If you’ve learned most of your Christianity lore for modern media you’ll likely assume all this is in the Bible but it’s actually from an ancient piece of fan fiction.
Medieval fanfiction.
Seriously.
Christians don’t read the whole book.
A lot of good answers, but there’s a more general one; I’d recommend this book, “The Devil: A Biography”, but the short answer is this…
The way people understood religion itself has changed over time. The earliest we can see, and up until the rise of Christianity, were largely what we define as “Animist”, “the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.” From spirits of the home, of places, luck etc up to Gods; but what set a God apart from a lesser being was simply the level of power. They weren’t even necessarily different from people, they just had more power to do the things humans would do; Turning up as a Swan to get with a beautiful woman? Yeah, Zeus is doing that…
And in turn this means that Evil, the concept and experience, can easily be attributed to spirits too. After all, humans are often evil too. It’s part of the natural world. So natural spirits must be doing that too.
The early Judaic religion, and the Old Testament for Christianity have hints of this, that Yahweh isn’t the only God, but he is the most powerful, or that the Jews are uniquely blessed.
As time passes however both faiths start to become Monotheistic. There is only one God. And he’s responsible for everything, good and evil. The Old Testament god in particular is jealous, violent, often justifying murdering babies. Coming in an Animist background, this still makes sense; everyone else’s gods and spirits are still often arseholes, especially if you’re not of their faith.
There are early struggles with this, such as the Book of Job which tries to explain evil as testing your faith, and the figure that we think of today as Satan/Lucifer/The Devil performing the acts against Job; but he can only do so with Gods permission. He is one of the heavenly court.
As more time passes though, and theology becomes more complex, the idea that God is both unique, and uniquely good only develops in the mainstream European Christian sects. Therefore Evil must have another source. It’s not a new idea by the time of the New Testament, ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus famously argued centuries before that there can’t be a Universal Good God by definition when evil exists;
>Would God be willing to prevent evil but unable? Therefore he is not omnipotent.
>Would he be capable, but without desire? So he is malevolent.
>Would he be both capable and willing? So why is there evil?
But more importantly, over the centuries, as predictions fail again and again, (The return of Jesus was predicted within the lifetime of his disciples, and hoped for at the turn of 1000 years, and…) and events happen which have absolutely no understandable sense; the Black Death in particular shakes the sense of belief in a Good God, because it kills 30-70% of the people no matter how holy they are, or what they do.
So, whilst Islam keeps the idea that “Shaytan” is just a minor nuisance and God is still responsible for all, Christianity develops the idea that God is Good, but someone must be messing with his good plans. And that someone becomes the only identified acceptable name in the Old/New Testament; Lucifer/The Devil. Every other god was false. But he was allowed power by God.
Later you get the narrative of the “Fallen Angel” and all the media mentioned here to explain how he may once have been approved by God, but now isn’t. But for much of early Christianity, he’s just largely treated as a joke; it’s when you start getting community smashing plagues and wars that people start to think he must both be independent, and powerful. An actual opposing force.
And, if God is good… would he really be torturing souls directly? So, Satan must control Hell too. Where God sends you. Wait… what? But when understood that this is primarily trying to balance three conflicting emotional needs, God is Good, Evil Exist, Evil Must Be Punished, it sort of makes sense, to the religious mind at least.
Thus we get to the modern Satan in control of Hell.
I mean, I see people quoting the show Supernatural thinking they got it from a Bible verse, so nothing is really that amazing to me anymore
Christians have twisted the teachings of the church into an unholy mess.
and yes, that wording is intentional
People here just say “it’s Milton” but really, Judeo-Christian demonology is a broader and more complicated subject.
First, about “lucifer”. “lucifer”(lower-case) comes from luux(light) and feroo(to carry, English word “bear” is a descendant of feroo), so it just means “the one who carries light”. It was really just another name for Venus(the planet), because it is very bright compared to other celestial bodies from our perspective; only the Moon and the Sun are brighter. It’s basically Latin for “morningstar”.
Associating it with the devil(what/who the devil is is another really complex topic) is basically a mistranslation or misinterpretation of the source material. The translator thought “lucifer” is supposed to be a proper noun “Lucifer”(bear in mind, they didn’t have capital letters yet, I used them for clarity’s sake) and decided to leave it as is, when it should’ve been simply translated as “morning star” or “the light bearer”. Modern Bibles have gotten rid of this mistake and translate the word into something like what I’ve mentioned.
So Lucifer is never really described in the Bible per se, because it’s not a person, but rather an epithet, and it wasn’t used to describe the fallen angel(who were originally meant to represent angels who had sex with human women – giving birth to giants), but the king of Babylon, who was oppressing the Hebrews. Probably Nebuchadnezzar the Great, but we are not 100% sure.
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Part 2 in the comment below
Original fan fiction. Expanded universe that became canon.
Lucifer is not even his name to begin with.
There are two big fan fiction level pieces of media made during the middle ages era that give us the idea of the 9 levels of hell where Lucifer lords over. Dante’s divine comedy and Paradise Lost. Dante’s inferno is where Dante finds himself in hell and has to go through hell, move through the mountain of purgatory to get to hevean
Lore
It’s fascinating how literature and pop culture have shaped our perception of Lucifer as the “king of Hell.” In the Bible, Lucifer is depicted as a fallen angel, not as Hell’s ruler. However, works like Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost have portrayed him as reigning over Hell, influencing modern interpretations. These narratives have deeply embedded the image of Lucifer as Hell’s monarch in our collective consciousness.
TIL that Lucifer and Satan do not refer to the same person
I thought it was the popes job in that the original bibles were changed to have an enemy when the witch hunts first began they needed a ring leader so satan then deemed the devil would have power in narrative while also saying all these parts in the bible where there is evil the devil had a hand in it, chat-gpt told me.
So when did they get fused into one figure?
The big fusion began in Second Temple Judaism (roughly 500 BCE–70 CE). Here’s how it unfolded:
There was 666 comments so I had to fix it
I’d suggest three major events.
First, there is the conflation of the present age with the age to come caused by the Hebrew language shifting the word /olam/ (age) to mean “world” (which led to Christians translating “the world to come” rather than “the age to come”). This event changed popular views of final redemption and damnation to mean something that happens after death in a parallel world (heaven or hell) rather than something that happens “at the end of the age” and before the age to come begins.
That in turn made the second event, the conflation of Hades and Gehenna into a single place, Hell. Even languages that use different words for the two (like Latin) keep speaking of them as though they’re a single place, even though Biblically they cannot be. Nonetheless, because the sequential ages are being confused with parallel worlds, the two destinations of the wicked were flattened into a single one, a logical move caused by a misinterpretation of Luke 16.
Finally, although Hades is always Biblically depicted as a place of powerlessness with nobody but the prisoners in it, it became conventional (even before the above two events) to picture angels as dealing with the souls in Hades (notice that this doesn’t happen in Luke 16!). As art developed, those angels were seen as ministers of God’s Left Hand, the hand of punishment; as such they were dark angels, not fallen but doing God’s terrible and regrettable will. During this time and into the Roman era the idea also developed that “the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church” was a promise that the church would conquer all of its earthly foes by means of power, instead of the original meaning that Christ would save every person in the church from death and consequent imprisonment in Hades (see Rev 1 where Christ’s comfort to John is precisely that). From that it was a short jump to assuming that those dark angels were in fact satanic, and the gates of hell somehow represented powers of evil (I’ve heard a song that uses the phrase “the powers of hell itself will nevermore prevail against it). Put those together, and you’ve replaced the Biblical description of Hades as a place of waiting in God’s utter control with instead a place administered by rebel angels.
Where do you go to find more conversations like these? Thanks
Bro it’s fiction
It goes back much farther than Milton or Dante to a Jewish document (actually a collection of documents) called The Book of Enoch (or Enoch 1, 2, and 3), written 300-100 years before Christ. Among other things, the Book of Enoch tells the story of the angel’s rebellion and fall from Heaven, and other tales about the origin and hierarchy of demons. Although the Book of Enoch is not considered canonical by Jews or Christians, it had a massive amount of influence during the time of Jesus, Paul and the early Christian church. Theological ideas that originated in the Book of Enoch (including the idea that Satan was a fallen angel) can be discerned in the New Testament Gospels and Epistles, and went on to influence Christianity, even though most Christians (including clergy) have never read the Book of Enoch. Tropes from the Book of Enoch also often appear in movies, pop culture, and modern-day Christian teachings.
Because people are stupid. Religious people even more so.
Like “Whose Line is it Anyway” its all made up and the stories don’t matter.
If you read the Bible you will find how full of crap a lot of people are. It goes to show the difference between religion and religious peoples, and the control that misinformation has.