Azazel is a figure found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and has been featured in multiple forms of media, so will I cover everything there is to know about him? Absolutely fucking not. Contrary to popular belief, I do value my sanity.
To start off, let’s talk about the word/name ‘Azazel’. It is mentioned in the bible, in Leviticus 16, in which Moses’ brother Aaron, the High Priest, takes 2 male goats for a ritual performed during Yom Kippur. He “cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for Yahweh, and the other lot for Azazel.”(16:7) Yahweh, of course, is ‘God’ but the meaning of ‘Azazel’ has been debated. It’s hard to say if myths of Azazel as a demon existed before the ritual, but if there were myths, there isn’t strong evidence of them. Most commonly, the word ‘Azazel’ is translated as something that is to be removed. In terms of the ritual described in Leviticus, the goat marked for Azazel was ceremoniously burdened with the sins of the Israelites and then removed from the village, symbolically removing the sins themselves. In 1530, a scholar named William Tyndale translated ‘Azazel’ as ‘scapegoat’ (a term he coined) and it’s sort of retroactively been applied to this ritual. Leviticus is estimated to have been written anywhere between 1400 - 500 BCE. I want to stress the age of this text because I’ve come across a lot of people saying Azazel is a demon or a god of other ancient Near-Eastern civilizations. And while I can’t say the concept of the demon Azazel didn’t come from a pre-existing mythical figure, Leviticus is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, mentions of ‘Azazel’ in religious text. It’s not the earliest religious text and there are certainly myths from the older civilizations, but those myths don’t include the name Azazel.
Painting: The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt (1854)