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- The various authors of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh, or Old Testament) have provided various names. Isaiah 14:12 is about one Helel ben Shahar, called the King of Babylon in the text. Helel ("morning star, son of the dawn") is translated as Lucifer in the Vulgate Bible but its meaning is uncertain. Saturn is no less certainly represented by the star Kaiwan (or Chiun), worshipped by the Israelites in the desert (Amos 5:26). The same word (interpreted to mean "steadfast") frequently designates, in the Babylonian inscriptions, the slowest-moving planet; while Sakkuth, the divinity associated with the star by the prophet, is an alternative appellation for Ninurta, who, as a Babylonian planet-god, was merged with Saturn. The ancient Syrians and Arabs, too, called Saturn Kaiwan, the corresponding terms in the Zoroastrian Bundahish being Kevan. The other planets are individualized in the Bible only by implication. The worship of gods connected with them is denounced, but without any manifest intention of referring to the heavenly bodies. Thus, Gad and Meni (Isaiah 65:11) are, no doubt, the "greater and the lesser Fortune" typified throughout the East by Jupiter and Venus; Neba, the tutelary deity of Borsippa (Isaiah 46:1), shone in the sky as Mercury, and Nergal, transplanted from Assyria to Kutha (2 Kings 17:30), as Mars. (en)
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