Azazel sits at two of the most important intersections in the history of religious thought: he is the entity to whom the scapegoat is sent in the ancient Yom Kippur ritual — one of the most significant and mysterious elements of the Day of Atonement — and he is the leader of the Watchers in the Book of Enoch, the fallen angels who descended to earth, took human women as wives, taught forbidden knowledge to humanity and produced the Nephilim. The word "scapegoat" itself — now used to mean anyone made to bear blame for others — derives from the Yom Kippur ritual involving Azazel, making this ancient desert demon's name one of the most consequential in the history of the English language.
Leviticus 16 describes the annual atonement ritual performed by the High Priest on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Two goats are selected: one is sacrificed to YHWH; the other — the scapegoat — has the sins of Israel symbolically transferred to it through the High Priest's laying on of hands and confessing the nation's sins over it. This goat is then sent "to Azazel" in the wilderness — driven off a cliff in later rabbinic practice. The goat carries the nation's sins away from the community into the wilderness.
The identity of "Azazel" in this ritual is one of the most contested questions in biblical scholarship. Interpretations range from a place name (a rocky cliff in the wilderness), to a description of the goat itself (from ez, goat, and azal, to go away — "the goat that departs"), to a supernatural being — a demon of the wilderness to whom Israel's sins are returned in a ritual of cosmic dispatch. The third interpretation, supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the explicit parallels with Mesopotamian ritual practice, has significant backing: sending the sins to their originator (the demon who tempted humanity to them) rather than simply removing them from the community.
The Book of Enoch: in 1 Enoch (particularly the Book of the Watchers, chapters 1-36), Azazel is identified as the leader of the Watchers — the 200 angels described in Genesis 6 who "saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful" and descended to take them as wives. In the Enochic tradition, Azazel's specific transgression is teaching humanity forbidden knowledge: the making of weapons of war and the art of cosmetics (the painting of faces and the adorning of bodies — technologies of seduction and violence). His punishment is to be bound hand and foot, cast into the darkness of the desert, and covered with rocks until the final judgment when he will be cast into the fire. The Enochic Azazel is the origin of much of the fallen angel tradition that developed in Second Temple Judaism and influenced Christian demonology.
The specific knowledge that Azazel imparts in the Book of Enoch is significant: metalworking (weapons, shields, breastplates) and the decorative arts (eye-shadow, bracelets, ornaments, the colouring of eyebrows and lips). These are the technologies of violence and seduction — two of the primary ways in which human beings have harmed each other and themselves throughout history. The attribution of these technologies to a fallen angel encodes a theological observation: the knowledge that makes civilisation possible (metalworking underlies all technology; aesthetic self-presentation underlies all social performance) is also the knowledge that makes civilisation destructive.
This is structurally identical to the Prometheus myth: the being who brings technical knowledge to humanity — fire for Prometheus, metallurgy and cosmetics for Azazel — is punished for the gift. The gift is genuine and beneficial; it is also dangerous; the giver is bound for the transgression. Both myths encode the ambivalence that any reflective civilisation must feel about its own most powerful tools.