Who Was Azazel, and What Did He Teach Humankind?
The angel who taught people to forge swords and paint their eyes, and was bound in the desert until judgment day. And what does he have to do with the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement?
Even the first person to hold a sword needed someone to show him how to smelt metal, how to sharpen a blade, and above all what to do with it afterwards. We are used to telling this story as a story of progress: stone, copper, iron. The Book of Enoch tells it differently. According to the book, this craft had a teacher, and the teacher had a name.
In modern Hebrew, “go to Azazel” is an everyday curse, roughly “go to hell.” English speakers use the name too, without knowing it: the word “scapegoat” was coined to translate it. Very few of the people who say either one know that they are invoking a figure with a whole biography.
Who Azazel was according to the Book of Enoch
According to 1 Enoch, Azazel was one of the leaders of the Watchers, the two hundred angels who came down from heaven on Mount Hermon. His companions sinned mainly by taking wives from among the daughters of men. Azazel’s sin was different: he taught.
Azazel taught people to make swords and knives, shields and breastplates, and showed them what came after: fine craftsmanship, bracelets and jewelry, eye paint and the beautifying of eyelids, precious stones, the finest of all stones, and every kind of dye and the metals of the earth. Wickedness grew great and lewdness spread. They sinned and corrupted all their ways.
1 Enoch 8:1–2
Swords and cosmetics
At first glance the list is strange. What are swords and breastplates doing next to bracelets and eye paint? To the ancient author the connection was obvious. Weapons are the means by which a person imposes his will on others by force. Jewelry and cosmetics are the means by which he does it through seduction. These are two ways of gaining power, and both of them, according to the book, reached humankind in the same delivery.
We tend to think that every invention is neutral, and that everything depends on who uses it. The Book of Enoch does not share this optimism. In its view there is knowledge that corrupts whoever receives it, even when it looks useful, and especially when it is given before its time. Anyone following today’s debates about new technologies will find the argument surprisingly familiar.
The secret stolen from heaven
The Book of Enoch returns to Azazel later on as well, always with the same accusation: he revealed a secret. When Enoch is sent to deliver the verdict to the angels who sinned, they are told that not all the mysteries had been revealed to them in heaven. What they knew was a small and worthless secret, and yet it was enough to multiply evil on the earth.
There is a subtle idea here. The problem, according to the book, is not that humans received the whole wisdom of heaven. The problem is that they received a fragment of it, cut off from everything else, without the understanding that should have come with it. Someone who knows how to make a sword and knows nothing about what lies beyond the sword holds half a piece of knowledge, and nothing is more dangerous.
Azazel also reappears in the later parts of the book. In the Book of Parables, Enoch sees the chains being prepared for the hosts of Azazel on the day of judgment. In the Animal Apocalypse, where all of history is told as a fable about animals, he appears as the first star to fall from heaven.
“Write all the sin upon him”
The book does not stop at description. When the faithful angels bring the cry of the earth before God, they name Azazel explicitly: he taught all the violence on the earth, and revealed to the world secrets that are kept in heaven. The verdict that follows is harsher than anything decreed against his companions. God declares that the whole earth has been corrupted by what Azazel taught, and commands that all the sin be written upon him. The angel Raphael is sent to carry out the sentence:
And God said to Raphael: Bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness. Open the desert that is in Dudael and throw him in there. Lay rough, sharp stones on him and cover him with darkness, and let him stay there for ever. Cover his face, so that he may not see the light.
1 Enoch 10:4–5
It is worth noticing that the story has two leaders. Semyaza heads the oath on Mount Hermon, and Azazel heads the list of teachers. Many scholars believe that two separate traditions have been woven together here into one story: one about angels who took wives, and another about an angel who revealed secrets. In the Aramaic fragments of the book found at Qumran his name is written Asael, and in the later versions he has already become Azazel.
The Azazel of the Day of Atonement
Anyone who has read the Book of Leviticus knows the name Azazel. Chapter 16 describes the ritual of the Day of Atonement: the high priest sets two goats before him and casts lots over them, one lot “for the LORD” and the other “for Azazel.” The King James Version has “for the scapegoat,” following William Tyndale, who in 1530 read the word as “the goat that escapes” and coined a new English word. The first goat is sacrificed. The second carries the sins of the people upon it and is sent away into the wilderness.
So who is this Azazel? The Torah does not explain, and the commentators disagreed. The Talmud, in tractate Yoma, cites an opinion that it is the name of a place, a strong and hard cliff. The same passage also records another opinion, from the school of Rabbi Ishmael: Azazel is so called because it atones for the deeds of Uzza and Azael, names that sound very much like the angels of the Book of Enoch. Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on the Torah, hinted that there is a secret here, and promised the reader that he would understand it when he turned thirty-three. He explained no further.
The resemblance between the two sources is hard to ignore. In Leviticus a goat is sent into the wilderness carrying all the sins. In the Book of Enoch an angel is thrown into the desert, and all the sin is written upon him. According to the Mishnah, the goat was pushed off a cliff. According to the Book of Enoch, Azazel is covered with rough, sharp stones. Some scholars have proposed identifying the Dudael of the Book of Enoch with the place in the Judean Desert to which the goat was led. Nobody knows for certain which tradition came first, but both seem to tell, each in its own way, the same idea: evil is sent away into the desert.
From a figure to a place
Over the generations Azazel went through a strange transformation. In spoken Hebrew, the angel who taught humankind war and beauty became an address: a remote, unpleasant place where you send someone who has annoyed you. In English he became a role: the scapegoat, the one who is blamed for everyone else’s sins. Few figures have had such a career, from a prince of angels to a curse for weekdays.
Who is to blame, the teacher or the student?
The Book of Enoch puts all the blame on the teacher. Humans, in this story, are students who received a lesson they never asked for. It is a rather comfortable position, when you think about it: the swords are not our fault, someone showed us how to make them.
And yet the story also carries a warning that does not flatter us. Azazel was bound in the desert a very long time ago, according to the book. The swords remained. Nobody forgot what they had learned, and nobody proposed returning the knowledge to where it came from. You can chain the teacher. It is much harder to undo the lesson.
