As with all matters concerning the afterlife and the supernatural – things which cannot be scientifically verified – such things are up to the individual to research and decide; Talmidaism does not impose beliefs about the afterlife on its members. The only thing that we all agree on, is that there is no hell or eternal damnation.
What on earth could Azazel be?
The strange word Azazel in Hebrew is spelt עזאזל ‘-z-’-z-l (‘ayin-zayin-alef-zayin-lamed). Note that the final element of the word is not אל (‘El’, alef-lamed), one of the Hebrew words for ‘God’ or ‘Mighty One’. Therefore in Hebrew, the word cannot be split up into Azaz + El. Given the letters contained in the word itself, the word can only be split up either as Az Azel, or Aza Zel.
Azazel cannot possibly be a demon: In Lev 17:7 it says, “Then they shall no longer offer up their sacrificial-offerings to wilderness-demons (or ‘goat-demons’), with whom they have been prostituting themselves. This shall be a permanent statute for them throughout their generations.” Torah therefore forbids us from making any sacrificial offerings to demons. Furthermore, because the final element in the word is not -el (in the Hebrew), it is therefore not the personal name of anyone or anything.
Azazel cannot be the goat itself: If you split up the word as Az Azel, then many translators interpret it as being read as `eiz azal: ‘the departing goat’, or ‘the goat which departs’. Most translators and theologians have therefore opted to understand the strange term as referring to the actual goat that is sent into the wilderness, and they translate the word Azazel as ‘scapegoat’. However, elsewhere, this same goat is referred to as שעיר sā‘īr, not עז ‘eiz. Sa‘ir specifically means ‘male goat’, and ‘Eiz specifically means ‘female goat’. The two goats used on the Day of Expiations were definitively meant to be identical male goats (Lev 16:5). The term Azazel therefore cannot be referring to the goat either.
The word Azazel is not Hebrew: The millennia-old difficulty with understanding what the word means, even among native Hebrew-speakers, might suggest that the word is actually not a Hebrew word at all.
This may not be such the wild suggestion that you might at first think. We use the words El Shadday as a title of God, and the ongoing difficulty with understanding the meaning of this term is also millennia-old. It sounds nonsensical in Hebrew, because to a native Hebrew-speaker it sounds like, ‘God of my breasts’ or ‘God of my desolations’! I know this with certainty, because I have asked several native Hebrew-speakers (and often got silly giggles accompanied by their explanation).
Scholars now think that the reason why it sounds so strange in Hebrew, is because the term is not a Hebrew one at all, but a Proto-Semitic one, originally meaning, ‘God of the [holy] mountains’. This explanation was suggested by scholars, because in Akkadian, a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, shadû means ‘mountain’. By comparing cognate words in Semitic languages, you can reconstruct what the proto-Semitic word was (just as linguists have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, by comparing cognates in various European, Iranian and Indian languages).
In ancient times, the word shadday came to be used by Hebrew-speakers as if it meant, ‘Almighty’; this is indeed how it was understood in the Book of Job, which is set in northern Mesopotamia (Aramea). This suggests that it was considered to be of foreign origin even then – possibly from the Sinai or Mesopotamia, and was used in ancient Hebrew as if it meant ‘almighty’. However, in my humble opinion as an amateur linguist, because of the Akkadian cognate word for ‘mountain’, I think that El Shadday means, ‘God of the holy mountains’, referring to mountains like Horeb, where YHVH was worshipped by the peoples of the Sinai.
Could the word Azazel also be a similar, Proto-Semitic word?
If Azazel, like El Shadday, is not Hebrew at all but an earlier Proto-Semitic word, we can start looking around for similar words in Hebrew and other related languages. If you split up the word as ‘Aza Zel, then the first element, ‘Aza or ‘Azza, could be cognate with Hebrew ‘Azzāh: ‘Fortress’ or ‘Stronghold’. This is, in fact, where the name of Gaza comes from (compare this with the Arabic غزة Ghazza, and Aramaic עזה or גזה Gazzāh).
The second element, Zel, could be cognate with the Hebrew word for ‘shadow’ – צֵל tzeil (compare this with Arabic ظِلّ Zil, Aramaic טל tel – the consonantal changes between the various Semitic languages are regular and predictable). Put together, the term Azazel could actually mean ‘Fortress of Shadow’ (rendered as `Azza Zeil in Proto-Semitic), and is therefore a place, rather than a thing, an animal or a personal name of a demon or fallen angel. The biblical Hebrew equivalent would have been עזת צל `Azzat Tseil, if the ancients had understood what it meant. It could be that the term was so ancient even to the Israelites, describing a concept that was lost even to them, that they had no idea what Azza Zeil was.
So, what is the ‘shadow’ in ‘Fortress of Shadow’?
If this theory were to have some traction, then we would have to find out what the word ‘shadow’ refers to. In an apocryphal Ebionite work from the 2nd century CE called, ‘The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, in the ‘Book of Levi’, there is mention made of ‘shades’ or ‘spirits’ (צללים tselalim). In the book, the ‘lowest heaven’ is described as a place where the spirits of one’s sins are removed and left behind, before the soul then travels onward to heaven.
Book 2 (Testament of Levi), passage 3, verses 1-2 say: “The lowest [heaven] is for this cause gloomy unto thee, in that it holds all the unrighteous deeds of men. And it has fire, snow, and ice made ready for the day of judgement, in the righteous judgement of God; for in it are all the shadows of the spirits of sin.”
Given the book’s heavy concentration on ethics and morality rather than on christology, it is possible that some of the later edits in the book could have been written by the Jewish Followers of Yeshua` of that time, and could give us an insight into what they believed the afterlife was like. I recall attending a lecture on this book in the late 1980s at the British Museum, given by the pre-eminent Dutch lecturer, Professor Marinus de Jonge, who was deemed the leading expert on the book in the world. Although the earliest material in the book was written in about 109-106 BCE, Prof. de Jonge proposed the hypothesis that some of the latter additions to the book had been written by the Jewish followers of Yeshua.
The Testament of Levi describes a dark, shadowy place where an unrepentant soul first enters after death. There, their sins are removed through trials (almost like dirty clothing being washed). This was a process of reliving one’s past sins in order to feel remorse for them. The sins are like poisons that need to be removed from the soul, before it can then go on to enter the highest heaven, and come before the Glory of God to be finally cleansed and returned to the pristine state it was in at its creation. The shadows of sins left behind in the ‘lowest heaven’ are comparable to sediment in dirty laundry water. These ‘shadows of sin’ are therefore likely to be what the ‘shadow’ in ‘Fortress of Shadow’ refers to.
Azza Zeil may have been a much earlier equivalent of She’ol
The symbolism behind the ritual of the two goats on Yom ha-Kippurim may have entered early Israelite thought with the Levitical priests, earlier than the belief in Sheol. In the time of the early Israelites, it was thought that the soul went to a dark, shadowy place of unknowing called She’ol after death. At that time in the history of the development of Yahwist theology, there was no awareness of a conscious afterlife – they certainly believed in heaven as the dwelling place of God and the angels, but not yet as a resting place for the righteous dead. However, if Azza Zeil is indeed a place where the soul was cleansed of its unrepented sins before entering heaven, then it might suggest that in even earlier times, it was understood that there would actually be some kind of knowing awareness in the afterlife. If this was a place you eventually left behind to go to heaven, it would mean that a Yahwist belief in heaven came before belief in Sheol, was then lost, but re-acquired again.
What were the two goats for?
The symbolism behind the two identical male goats on Yom ha-Kippurim is another thing that has never adequately been explained.
As part of the ritual on the Day of Expiations, two identical, black, male goats were presented in the Temple. Most commentaries interpret these as sin-offerings, and simply leave it at that. However, one was killed, and its blood was used as a kind of a purificatory sin-offering, but the other was released into the wilderness; there may be significant symbolism in all of this, especially in the difference between the different fates of the two goats.
My theory is that the two identical goats represent the individual – one person. The goat that is sent alive into the wilderness (‘for the Azza Zeil’), represents our sins that are separated from our soul in the Outer Darkness after death, and left there (if you are familiar with Superman mythology, this is like being sent to the Phantom Zone)! The goat that is sacrificed (‘for YHVH’) represents the purified human soul that ultimately returns to God in heaven.
The blood of the sacrificed goat was kept for the expiation ritual. However, the body of this goat was not burnt on the altar of burnt-offering; it was burnt outside the city (Lev 16:27). This might represent how, in the vast majority of cases, our dead body does not enter heaven, but instead decays and returns to dust outside heaven, on earth. Notable exceptions would be Enoch, Elijah and Yeshua of Nazareth.
Yeshua’s ‘Outer Darkness’
In Yeshua’s parables, he made repeated mention of a place called, ‘the Outer Darkness’, where an unrepentant soul would go, and that there would be ‘a weeping and gnashing of teeth’ there (which is an Aramaic idiom meaning, “a great lament”). Ps 88:13 (Xtian: 88:12) calls this place of the souls of the dead, ‘the Darkness’. In Luke‘s view (cf Mt 25:41, 46) it is a place of fire and eternal damnation, from which there is no escape or redemption.
However, since neither the Israelite religion nor Judaism believed in eternal hell, this cannot have been a place of eternal damnation. In my humble opinion, I do not believe that Yeshua himself, as a Jew, understood it this way. At least one of his teachings suggests that the soul would not leave until they had paid the full price of their sins (i.e. that they would eventually leave, and not remain there).
The teaching about not making peace with your accuser before going to court, and ending up in jail, may have been an analogy for not repenting before you die. Mt 5:26 and Lk 12:59 say, ‘you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last prutah’. Could this imply that we would not get out of the Outer Darkness until we had paid for the very last of our sins? It furthermore suggests that this place, the Outer Darkness, is somewhere that we eventually leave; it is not an eternal place of punishment.
The author of Luke might not have understood what ‘the Outer Darkness’ truly was, so he transformed it into the Christian idea of an eternal hell. Luke’s vision of the flames of eternal hell for the rich man (Lk 16:19-31) is of Christian origin – it is not Jewish.
Moreover, if indeed Yeshua’s belief in the Outer Darkness was in fact the same as the ancient Yahwist belief in Azza Zeil, then we have a hint of an incredible possibility that yes, Yeshua was trying to restore the ideals and beliefs of the original Israelite faith – even in this matter.
Summary of the Azazel and the two goats
The Azazel (or better, Azza Zeil), in my humble opinion, is the ‘Fortress of Shadow’. I suspect that Yeshua’s name for this place was, ‘the Outer Darkness’. It was the place where the soul of a dead person went to be cleansed of their unrepented sins. Once their ‘spirits/shadows of sin’ (as the Testament of Levi calls them) had been removed, the soul would then go on to heaven, to be finally cleansed and healed by the fire of God’s Glory, since nothing impure can come before the Glory of God (otherwise the enormous power of God’s Glory would automatically obliterate that which is impure).
The blood of the first goat represents the human soul that goes before the Glory of God to be cleansed, and the second goat that is sent into the wilderness represents the journey of the unrepentant soul of the dead person into the Outer Darkness, to have their unrepented sins removed.
Azza Zeil is likely to be the place where a human soul goes to after death, if they have any unrepented sins. In Azza Zeil, the sins are cleansed from the soul – possibly by way of experiencing one’s sins for oneself, in order to feel true remorse for them (as the Book of Levi describes it). Once the soul has reached a point of true remorse, it is forgiven of these unrepented sins. The soul then travels onwards to heaven, where it receives its final purification by the Glory of God.