azazel

And he said: "This is ungodliness, this is Azazel."

And he said to it: "Disgrace upon thee, Azazel!

Say to him: 'Be thou the burning coal of the Furnace of the earth; go, Azazel, into the inaccessible parts of the earth; [for thy heritage is (to be) over those existing with thee being born with the stars and clouds, with the men whose portion thou art, and (who) through thy being exist; and thine enmity is justification.

And he said to me: "As the number of the stars and their power, (so will) I make thy seed a nation and a people, set apart for me in my heritage with Azazel."

Lo, before Thou leddest me up Azazel inveighed against me.

But these which are on the right side of the picture — they are the people set apart for me of the peoples with Azazel.

And He said: "This is the human world, this is Adam, and this is their desire upon the earth, this is Eve; but he who is between them representeth ungodliness, their beginning (on the way) to perdition, even Azazel."

[And] I saw how these worshipped him, and Azazel ran and worshipped him, and having kissed his face he turned and stood behind him.

Who is the man insulted and beaten, who is worshipped by the heathen with Azazel?"

For they shall putrefy in the body of the evil worm Azazel, and be burnt with the fire of Azazel's tongue; for I hoped that they would come to me, and not have loved and praised the strange god, and not have adhered to him for whom they were not allotted, but instead they have forsaken the mighty Lord."

Mark now, whether he who charges us with having committed errors of the most impious kind, and with having wandered away from the [true meaning] of the divine enigmas, is not himself clearly in error, from not observing that in the writings of Moses, which are much older not merely than Heraclitus and Pherecydes, but even than Homer, mention is made of this wicked one, and of his having fallen from heaven. For the serpent—from whom the Ophioneus spoken of by Pherecydes is derived—having become the cause of man’s expulsion from the divine Paradise, obscurely shadows forth something similar, having deceived the woman by a promise of divinity and of greater blessings; and her example is said to have been followed also by the man. And, further, who else could the destroying angel mentioned in the Exodus of Moses be, than he who was the author of destruction to them that obeyed him, and did not withstand his wicked deeds, nor struggle against them? Moreover, [the goat], which in the book of Leviticus is sent away [into the wilderness], and which in the Hebrew language is named Azazel, was none other than this; and it was necessary to send it away into the desert, and to treat it as an expiatory sacrifice, because on it the lot fell. For all who belong to the “worse” part, on account of their wickedness, being opposed to those who are God’s heritage, are deserted by God. Nay, with respect to the sons of Belial in the book of Judges, whose sons are they said to be, save his, on account of their wickedness? And besides all these instances, in the book of Job, which is older even than Moses himself, the devil is distinctly described as presenting himself before God, and asking for power against Job, that he might involve him in trials of the most painful kind; the first of which consisted in the loss of all his goods and of his children, and the second in afflicting the whole body of Job with the so-called disease of elephantiasis. I pass by what might be quoted from the Gospels regarding the devil who tempted the Saviour, that I may not appear to quote in reply to Celsus from more recent writings on this question. In the last [chapter] also of Job, in which the Lord utters to Job amid tempest and clouds what is recorded in the book which bears his name, there are not a few things referring to the serpent. I have not yet mentioned the passages in Ezekiel, where he speaks, as it were, of Pharaoh, or Nebuchadnezzar, or the prince of Tyre; or those in Isaiah, where lament is made for the king of Babylon, from which not a little might be learned concerning evil, as to the nature of its origin and generation, and as to how it derived its existence from some who had lost their wings, and who had followed him who was the first to lose his own.