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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The destroyer
The killing figure of the Passover night, later seen again with a drawn sword over Jerusalem.
Exodus 12:23, in every translation this tool compares.
On the Passover night something moves through Egypt killing, and blood on the doorframe is what stops it at the door. The same figure appears again standing over Jerusalem with a drawn sword. Paul mentions it centuries later without explaining it, as though his readers already knew.
Mashchit, "Destroyer," a Hiphil participle of sh-ch-t, "ruin, mar, destroy," a root used elsewhere of cloth, pots, vineyards, and cities. It passes through Egypt, is held back by the blood, and halts at the threshing floor of Araunah, and Paul mentions it as a known figure without explaining it. DDD files it under "Destroyer," separate from the angel of death who takes individuals at their natural end, and draws the line by function: the Destroyer kills in numbers and before their time, always on Yahweh's specific order and never on its own, and is always checked by a cultic act. The fuller account in 1 Chronicles 21 gives it a visible, gigantic form with a drawn sword it sheathes when Yahweh calls it off (vv. 16, 27, 30), matching "the angel who was destroying" in 2 Samuel 24:16. Ezekiel 9 has a further scene that usually gets missed, where unnamed executioners are commissioned "to destroy" (lemashit, v. 6) Jerusalem's guilty and are stopped only where a mark has been set on the innocent, the same restrained slaughter as Exodus 12 and 1 Chronicles 21.
The wilderness plague of Numbers 17 never uses mashit, but it was read as the Destroyer's work by the time of 1 Corinthians 10:10 ("they were destroyed by the Destroyer," with the same Greek root the LXX uses for Exodus 12 and 1 Chronicles 21) and Wisdom of Solomon 18:25, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan writes the Aramaic equivalent of "Destroyer" straight into Numbers 17:11. Revelation 9:11 gives "Destroyer" (Apollyon) as the Greek name of the angel of the abyss, which ties the figure to Abaddon.
- Exodus 12:23
- 2 Samuel 24:16
- 2 Kings 19:35
- 1 Corinthians 10:10
- 1 Chronicles 21:12,15-16,27,30
- Numbers 17:11-15
- Ezekiel 9:1-7
- Revelation 9:11
- Hebrews 11:28
- DDD s.v. "Destroyer," 240
