THE REFORMED THEOLOGICAL REVIEW Vol. 78 April 2019 No. 1 Isaiah 14 and the Problem of Baal Worship Longstanding popular opinion has seemingly settled on the conviction that the fall of Satan is described in Isa 14:12–15. However, this is not due to the absence of respected scholars throughout church history disparaging this view. For example, Calvin labelled the belief that Isaiah 14 refers to Satan a ‘useless fable’—the result of someone interpreting the passage without any concern for context. 1 Despite Calvin’s efforts to thwart this interpretation, the belief that Isaiah wrote about Satan in Isaiah 14 continues to hold prominence in popular Christianity. Perhaps the reason for its survival is that the language seems far too exalted to merely refer to the king of Babylon, so that readers intuitively perceive a dual reference or a comparison between the king of 1 John Calvin, Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 442. Cyril of Alexandria (~CE 400) would be an earlier example, although he only implicitly rejected the possibility through not even mentioning Satan in this portion of his commentary. See Cyril, Commentary on Isaiah, ed. Robert C. Hill (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2008), 1:300–301.