Azazel

Watcher translates the Aramaic ʿir, the one who is awake: in the Book of Daniel a holy ʿir comes down from heaven to pronounce the sentence upon Nebuchadnezzar, and from that word a whole class of angels takes its name, angels who do not sleep because their office is to look. The Book of Jubilees adds the detail that changes everything: the Watchers did not come down to rebel, but were sent to instruct the children of men in justice and uprightness. Azazel was one of them.

The First Book of Enoch counts them: two hundred, in the days of Jared, descended on the summit of Mount Hermon. Semyaza was their chief, and it was he who feared that the guilt might fall on his head alone, so he made them all bind themselves by a mutual oath. The text plays with the name of the mountain, since the Hebrew herem means anathema, a vow that binds: it is called Hermon, it says, because there they swore and bound themselves with curses. Of the two hundred, twenty were chiefs of ten, and Azazel stands tenth on that list.

That is his exact place in the hierarchy: a captain, not the general. The later confusion has a concrete cause, and it lies in Enoch itself: when judgement comes, the divine voice orders that the whole earth has been corrupted by the works Azazel taught, and that to him all sin be ascribed. Being charged with the entire crime turned him, centuries later, into the leader of a conspiracy he never led.

Not one image of Azazel before the fall survives, and the absence says something: the iconography in circulation, goat horns, bat wings, broken chains, was all manufactured after the sentence and describes the convict, not the Watcher. There are no medieval Kabbalistic illustrations of this angel and no Renaissance cycles devoted to him.

What the sources do describe is the whole class. The Second Book of Enoch places the Grigori in the fifth heaven and paints them with disconcerting sobriety: they had the appearance of men, but their stature was greater than that of great giants, their faces were withered and the silence of their mouths was perpetual. No fire, no monstrosity: height and muteness.

The rest is inferred from what they did. To take wives and father children they must have had a fairly human shape, and Enoch himself makes that the scandal of the matter: they were spirits, living the eternal life, and for that reason neither food nor offspring had been given them. Women were for men, who die, and not for those who do not die. What was broken on Hermon was not a rule of conduct but the border between two natures.

The name appears four times in a single chapter of the Hebrew Bible, the sixteenth of Leviticus, and nowhere else: of the two goats of the Day of Atonement, one is for the Lord and the other for Azazel. What the word means has been debated since antiquity, and the four readings are all still alive. It may be a place, from azaz, rugged, that is, the cliff over which the animal is thrown. It may be an abstract noun, complete removal. It may be a contraction of ez azal, the goat that goes away: that is the reading followed by the Vulgate with its caper emissarius, and from which Tyndale coined the English scapegoat in 1530. And it may simply be a proper name, that of someone who is in the wilderness and receives what is sent to him.

The Book of Enoch chose the fourth reading and gave it a biography. From then on, the recipient of the rite and the Watcher of Hermon are the same figure, although Leviticus says not a word about angels or Nephilim.

Two frequent and false attributions should be cleared away. Azazel is not among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia: he was never a Goetic duke. And the fallen angels of the Qur'an, Harut and Marut, who taught magic in Babylon, are another pair and another story. What Islamic tradition does record is more to the point: several commentators give Azazil as the name Iblis bore while he was still an angel, before he refused to bow to Adam. There too the name belongs to the one who has not yet fallen.