Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Se'irim
Goat demons, banned as objects of sacrifice and pictured haunting ruins.
Leviticus 17:7, in every translation this tool compares.
Goat demons. Leviticus forbids sacrificing to them, which is an odd law to write about livestock. Isaiah has them in ruined cities calling to each other, which is the other half of the picture.
Goat demons. Leviticus 17:7 forbids sacrificing to them, an odd law to write about an animal. Isaiah puts them in ruined cities beside Lilith, dancing and calling to one another, while elsewhere they are plainly objects of worship. They were possibly pictured as mixed goat and demon beings standing for a wrecked, inhospitable world, and the Leviticus ban looks like real polemic, likely postexilic, against an actual cult. DDD (B. Janowski) notes that the LXX and later Jewish sources read the se'irim straightforwardly as demons: the Septuagint renders them daimonia, and Sifre on Leviticus 17:7 glosses the word as shedim. The Leviticus 17:7 ban sits one chapter after the Day of Atonement's scapegoat, where a live goat is sent out to Azazel in the wilderness (Leviticus 16:8-28), and Heiser reads the desert, more than the animal, as what both texts turn on, since the wilderness was understood as the place such beings lived.
H8163 (שָׂעִיר), 59 occ, nearly all ordinary goats
Goats or demons. Most current English versions give wild goats at Isaiah 13:21 (NIV, ESV, CSB, NLT, NET), and the word is an ordinary goat in nearly all of its 59 uses. The demon reading rests on Leviticus 17:7's sacrifice ban, the Septuagint's daimonia and Sifre's shedim. The KJV and JPS 1917 split the difference with satyrs.
- Leviticus 17:7
- 2 Chronicles 11:15
- Isaiah 13:21
- Isaiah 34:14
- B. Janowski, "Satyrs," DDD, 732
- Bible Hub, Isaiah 13:21 parallel versions
- Heiser, *Unseen Realm*, 176-178 (on Azazel and the wilderness)
