Shemhazai Hung Between Heaven and Earth

The angels had an argument with God, and God let them win it.

When the generation of Enosh arose and worshipped idols, and when the generation of the flood grew wicked beyond reckoning, two angels named Shemhazai and Azael came before God and said what angels have perhaps always wanted to say: we told you so. Did we not say, when You created Your world, do not create man? The proof was right there below them, smoke rising from altars built for stone figures, corruption spreading across the earth like floodwater before the flood.

God heard them out. Then He asked a simple question: what shall become of the world? The angels had an answer ready. We will occupy it. We will go down and live among them, and then You will see how we sanctify Your name. God, according to the ancient account preserved in the Midrash Aggadah, gave them a warning before they descended. He told them plainly: if you were to live in that earthly world, the evil inclination would sway you just as it rules over the sons of man, and you would be more stubborn than they are. The angels brushed the warning aside. Give us Your sanction. Let us descend. You will see.

God let them descend. And He allowed the evil inclination to take hold of them the moment they landed.

What happened next is told in full in the account of Shemhazai and Azael, where every stage of their fall is recorded with a kind of merciless precision. Shemhazai saw a girl named Estirah. He wanted her. She was cleverer than he was: she would listen to him, she said, only if he first taught her the Ineffable Name of God, the Name by which angels ascend to heaven. He taught it to her. She spoke it aloud and rose straight up, leaving Shemhazai standing on the earth he had chosen over heaven. God looked at her and said: since she has departed from sin, set her among the stars. She is the light at the center of the Pleiades, still shining there.

Shemhazai recovered from that humiliation and found other women. So did Azael. The Watchers, that company of two hundred angels who had descended to Mount Hermon with solemn oaths in the days of Jared the father of Enoch, took wives from among the daughters of men. Their children were giants who consumed a thousand camels, a thousand horses, and a thousand oxen every single day. Azael became the chief over all dyes and ornaments, over every tool of beautification that makes men sin, and he pursued that occupation with dedication. He had found his calling.

Then came the warning. God sent the angel Metatron to Shemhazai with a message: the flood is coming. The world will be destroyed. And what Shemhazai did next was extraordinary. He wept. He wept loudly and bitterly, not for himself at first, but for his sons. How will my children live? What will they eat when the world is gone? Each one eats a thousand camels a day. The grief was real even if its cause was monstrous.

His sons, Heyya and Aheyya, had dreams that same night. One dreamed of a great stone spread over the earth like a table, covered with writing, and an angel came down with a knife and obliterated every line except one, which held four words. The other dreamed of a beautiful garden where an angel descended with an axe and felled every tree until only a single stump remained, holding three branches. When the brothers brought their dreams to their father, Shemhazai interpreted them without hesitation. God is bringing a flood. Only one man and his three sons will survive. The sons wept and asked what would become of their names.

Their father told them: every time a person lifts a heavy stone, every time a crew hauls a ship, they sigh aloud and call Heyya and Aheyya. Your names will never leave the mouths of men. With that, his sons were quieted.

Then Shemhazai repented. He hung himself upside down between heaven and earth, head pointing downward, because he dared not appear before God. He remains that way still, suspended in the air, going neither up nor down, belonging fully to neither world. He chose the earth over heaven, then found he could not face either.

Azael did not repent. He is still at work, appointed over all the things that entice men toward sin, still carrying out the assignment he chose for himself when he descended. And because he continues to sin, the ancient atonement ritual assigned to the Day of Atonement was structured around him: one goat for the Lord, one goat for Azazel, sent out into the wilderness bearing Israel's iniquity, back toward the angel who never turned around.

The two of them bracket every possible response to knowing you have done wrong. One hung himself upside down in remorse and stayed there. One kept going and made a career of it. The story in the Midrash does not say which fate is worse, and it does not need to. One angel is suspended in the sky as a monument to regret. The other is still busy. The goat sent to him on Yom Kippur carries Israel's sins each year because somewhere in the ancient reckoning, the accounting of sin still runs through an angel who descended to earth, argued he could do better, and never once admitted he was wrong.