The Angel Who Learned the Secret Name and Watched Her Ascend

Before the flood, two angels appeared before God with a complaint. The generations of men had grown corrupt, worshipping idols and straying from every good way, and God had expressed regret at having made them at all. Shemhazai and Azazel, whose names appear in the ancient texts among the watchers who stood before the divine throne, pressed their case: had they not warned God against creating man in the first place? And was not the evidence now fully in?

God asked them what they would do in human form, subject to the evil inclination that drove human beings to destruction. They said they would sanctify His name. Descend then, God said, and dwell among them. And He allowed the evil inclination to sway them. This detail, from the midrash collected in the fifth century CE and drawing on the tradition of the Book of the Watchers within 1 Enoch, composed between the third and first centuries BCE, is not presented as a trick. It is presented as a demonstration: God knew what would happen and permitted it, because the angels had argued they were better than human beings and they needed to discover they were not.

Shemhazai descended and saw a maiden named Istehar, and he lost himself completely. He told her what he wanted. She said she would not agree until he taught her the Ineffable Name, the divine name by which angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth. He agreed. He taught her the Name. She pronounced it, rose into the sky, and ascended to heaven, leaving him on the ground with nothing.

God looked at what Istehar had done and said: because she kept herself aloof from sin, we will place her among the seven stars, that men may never forget her. She was set in the Pleiades, the constellation of seven stars, where she shines to this day. The angel who had bargained for her was left below, empty-handed and changed. He had come to earth to demonstrate his superiority to the human beings he had criticized. The first human woman he approached outmaneuvered him completely.

Shemhazai did not return to heaven. Instead he took a human wife, as did Azazel and the other fallen watchers, and from these unions came the Nephilim, the giants the tradition describes in terrifying detail: the Rephaim, the Emim, the Anakim, creatures so enormous their thighs measured eighteen ells, who touched the sun with their necks and inspired fear in every living thing. The Nephilim ate a thousand camels, a thousand horses, and a thousand oxen each day. When the food ran out they ate each other. They were a catastrophe walking, and they were Shemhazai's children. Azazel meanwhile devoted himself to teaching humanity the arts of seduction and vanity, the cosmetics and ornaments by which women lured men toward sin, and in this work he persisted without remorse until the world ended in the flood.

Shemhazai's two sons, Heyya and Aheyya, each dreamed the same night before the flood came. One dreamed of a great stone spread over the earth like a table, covered in writing, and an angel descending from heaven with a knife obliterating all the lines except four words. The other dreamed of a garden with all kinds of trees, and an angel descending with an axe and cutting down everything except one tree with three branches. They told their father. He told them what it meant: God is about to bring a flood. Only one man and his three sons will survive. Their names, Heyya and Aheyya, would not be preserved in texts or genealogies. But they would survive in a different form. Every time men would strain to lift heavy stones or great ships or any burden too large for one person, they would cry out involuntarily, calling the names of those sons. The effort groan, the universal sound of human beings pushing beyond their limit, would carry the memory of Shemhazai's children into every generation.

Shemhazai repented. He suspended himself between heaven and earth, head downward, in a position of permanent penance, because he could not appear before God and would not return to the earth he had corrupted. The Legends of the Jews and the midrashic tradition leave him there, hanging in that intermediate space, neither ascending nor descending, the angel who demanded permission to be tested, was tested, failed, and chose the only response available to him that was not complete obduracy. Azazel felt nothing and continued his work of leading humanity astray, and for this reason, the tradition records, on the Day of Atonement one goat was sent to God to atone for Israel's sins and one was sent into the wilderness for Azazel, to acknowledge that some portion of human sin has been cultivated by a force that will not repent. Istehar had already risen past both of them, fixed in the Pleiades, the woman who had the wit to extract the Name before she committed herself to anything at all, and who looked down from seven stars on the angel still hanging between worlds, and the world that was about to be washed clean.