Azazel

Also Known As: Hebrew עֲזָאזֵל ʿAzaʾzel; also Azael, Asael, Azazael; Greek and Latin renderings treat it as “the one sent away”, while the Hebrew is most often read as ʿazaz “rough, fierce, strong” plus ʾel
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He is the recipient of what a people cannot carry, and the teacher of the crafts that let them kill each other efficiently.
Role in Mythos: He takes the sins of Israel out of the camp on the back of a goat, and in the apocalyptic literature he is the Watcher blamed for corrupting the whole earth.
Relation to Humans: Everything he gives humanity is useful and everything he gives humanity is ruinous, which is the point the texts keep making about him. Once a year the priesthood sent him a living animal loaded with a nation’s guilt, and the escort walked it into the desert rather than let it wander back.

The goat went out through the eastern gate with a strip of crimson wool tied between its horns, and it went out alive. Everything else on that day was blood and smoke and a priest washing his hands, but this one animal walked away from the altar under its own power, and the crowd stood back to let it pass. It was not being spared. It was being addressed to someone.

Leviticus is unusually blunt about it. Two goats, lots drawn over them, one lot marked for the LORD and the other marked for Azazel, and the grammar of that sentence does most of the damage. Whatever Azazel is, the text sets him in the same slot a god occupies, which is why the passage has kept translators uneasy for two thousand years. The Greek and Latin versions dodged it and turned the name into a description of the goat itself, the one that goes away, which is where the English word scapegoat comes from. Later rabbis read it as a place, a cliff so jagged the name simply meant rough ground. Ibn Ezra hinted, in the careful way a medieval commentator hints at something he does not want to say plainly, that Azazel belonged to the seʿirim, the shaggy goat-spirits people used to leave offerings for out in the waste. Nahmanides went further and said the name meant Samael. None of them agreed, and all of them understood that the plain reading was worse than any of their alternatives.

The Mishnah, describing the ritual as it was actually performed, has no interest in the theology and a great deal of interest in the logistics. A man was appointed to lead the goat out. Booths were built along the road, ten of them, and at each one people offered the escort food and water that he was not obliged to take. From the last booth they watched him go on alone across the glare. At a ravine called Beit Hadudo he divided the crimson wool, tied half to a rock and half back between the horns, and pushed the animal backwards off the edge. It did not reach the bottom whole. The tradition adds, almost as an afterthought, that in the days of the high priest Shimon HaTzaddik the crimson thread would turn white, and that later it stopped doing so.

That ravine matters, because the apocalyptic literature puts a prisoner in it. In the Book of the Watchers, the oldest section of 1 Enoch, Azazel is one of the angels who came down and did not go back up. His crime is not lust, which belongs to Shemihazah and his two hundred. His crime is instruction. He showed men how to make swords and knives and shields and breastplates, opened up the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and then turned to the women and taught them antimony for the eyes, bracelets and ornaments, the dyeing of hair, the whole apparatus of appearance. The text does not treat these as separate offences. Ore comes out of the ground and becomes a blade or a bangle depending on what you want that day, and the Watcher who taught the one taught the other.

Picture him at the forge, then, because the text almost lets you: the heat coming off a stone hearth in the hills, a man’s hands guiding another man’s hands, the first bronze edge drawn out of a lump that had been rock an hour earlier and now catches the light. Nobody in that scene believes they are being ruined.

The verdict arrives as a single line, and it is the most damning sentence anyone in the Enochic corpus receives. The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin. God gives the sentence to Raphael. Bind Azazel hand and foot, cast him into the darkness, make an opening in the desert which is in Dudael and cast him there, place upon him rough and jagged rocks, cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever until the great day of judgement, when he will be thrown into the fire. Dudael and Beit Hadudo are close enough in sound that the connection is hard to miss. The pit where the angel is chained and the cliff where the goat is thrown may be the same hole in the ground.

He never fights back.

The Qumran community knew this Azazel. A fragmentary text catalogued as 4Q180 sets him alongside the angels who went in to the daughters of men, and puts the corruption of the world on his account. The Apocalypse of Abraham, written after the Temple fell, gives him the only body he has in the tradition: behind a tree in the garden stands a thing shaped like a serpent, with human hands and human feet, and wings growing from its shoulders, six on the right and six on the left. Twelve, against the six of the cherubim standing elsewhere in the same vision. It is holding grapes and feeding them to the first man and the first woman. In that book Abraham is told that the heavenly garment once set aside for Azazel is now reserved for him instead, which is a quiet way of saying the exchange runs both directions: what he loses, someone else puts on.

His power is transmission, and it has no off switch. He does not need to be present for the sword to still cut. Set against that, his limitations are almost comically total. One archangel handles him. He is bound at the extremities, buried under stone, and left in the dark for the length of history, and no text gives him an escape, a rebellion, or a following. The wilderness he is associated with is not a kingdom he rules but a place he was put, which is the difference between an exile and a king. In Islamic tradition the name ʿAzāzīl surfaces again as the angelic name Iblis carried before his refusal, though that is a separate line of story with its own logic and its own ending.

What survives of him in ordinary speech is the goat. A crimson thread, a shove at the edge of a ravine, and a word that now means anyone a group has decided to load and send away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Azazel?

Azazel is a figure from Jewish tradition who appears first in Leviticus 16 as the recipient of the Yom Kippur scapegoat, and later in apocalyptic literature as a fallen angel of the Watcher group. The Hebrew Bible never explains what he is, which is why interpreters have variously read him as a desert demon, a rugged cliff, or simply a term for the goat that is sent away. In 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham he is unambiguously a rebel angel blamed for corrupting humanity.

Why was a goat sent to Azazel on Yom Kippur?

Leviticus 16 prescribes two goats chosen by lot, one sacrificed to God and one sent alive into the wilderness bearing Israel’s sins, and the second is designated “for Azazel”. The ritual removes collective guilt from the community by physically carrying it out of the camp. The Mishnah records that by the Second Temple period the goat was not merely released but pushed backwards off a cliff at a place called Beit Hadudo.

What did Azazel teach humanity in the Book of Enoch?

According to 1 Enoch, Azazel taught men to make swords, knives, shields and breastplates, revealed the metals of the earth and how to work them, and taught women cosmetics, ornaments and the dyeing of hair. The text holds these responsible for the violence and corruption that follow, and states that the whole earth was corrupted through his teaching. This makes his offence one of forbidden knowledge rather than the sexual transgression attributed to the Watcher leader Shemihazah.

Is Azazel the same as Satan?

They are distinct figures with separate origins, though later tradition repeatedly pulls them together. Azazel begins as a name in a priestly ritual text and becomes a named fallen angel in Second Temple apocalyptic writing, while Satan begins as an accusing figure in the divine court. The medieval commentator Nahmanides identified Azazel with Samael, and some later Christian demonology treats him as an aspect or lieutenant of the devil, but the earliest sources keep them apart.

What happened to Azazel?

In 1 Enoch, God orders the archangel Raphael to bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into a pit in the desert at a place called Dudael, cover him with rough and jagged rocks, and leave him in darkness until the day of judgement, when he is to be thrown into the fire. He is given no escape and no later rebellion in the surviving texts. The name Dudael closely resembles Beit Hadudo, the ravine where the Mishnah says the scapegoat was thrown.