This was not the post I was planning (that one’s still in draft mode, about halfway done), but in the vein of exploring spiritual beings of the Bible, a new one caught my attention this morning as I was reading through Leviticus: goat demons.
What now?
Here is Leviticus 17:7, which is in the context of forbidding the Israelites to kill animals outside the camp unless they then bring the animal to the Tabernacle and present it to the Lord as a peace offering. Emphasis mine:
So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore. This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.
So apparently there was a problem with people sneaking off to sacrifice animals to goat demons?
What’s really interesting is that this passage immediately follows the instructions for the Day of Atonement, in which the Jews were instructed to bring two goats before the Lord. One was to be sacrificed for a sin offering. As for the other, the priest would symbolically place upon its head all the sins of the people, and then they would take it outside the camp and release it into the wilderness, “to Azazel.”
Nobody really knows for sure what, or who, Azazel is. Some say it’s a name for Satan. Some say it’s the name of a demon. Others say it’s just a word that means scapegoat. Now I’m wondering — could it be the name of a goat demon? Perhaps the one the Israelites were making sacrifices to?
The phrase “goat demon” also puts me in mind of Pan, a half-goat, half-man pagan deity and nature spirit, as well as Baphomet, the goat-headed hermaphrodite who is a symbol for Satan in all kinds of devil worship.
So goat demons definitely seem to be a thing that exists. My question is, where did they come from?
If demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, the offspring of humans and fallen angels, then how on earth did we get goat demons?
Jesus said the last days would be as it was in the days of Noah — the days when fallen angels were mixing their DNA with humans and, according to Enoch, also instructing us in effective and creative ways to defile and destroy ourselves. It’s the DNA tampering that springs to my mind. In our own time, as I write this there are labs both here in the US and around the world that are combining human and animal DNA. In Arizona they’ve created humanized mice. In China they’ve been experimenting with humanizing the brains of monkeys, because they either haven’t seen Planet of the Apes, or it struck them as a brilliant idea.
It makes sense, in light of both the moral and genetic corruption wrought by the Watchers, why God had to wipe out humanity in the flood and start over. But why the animals? Could it be that the fallen Sons of God also played around with animal DNA? Could some of the Nephilim also have been part animal?
And could that be how we got goat demons?
And could this explain certain cryptid sightings?
Or maybe these all fall under the category of elemental spirits and have nothing to do with the Nephilim?
These are just some thoughts and observations from this morning’s Bible study, and I thought I’d submit it to you for discussion. So what do you think? Am I onto something? Am I overthinking this and taking it all way too literally? What’s your theory? Let’s hash this weirdness out together in the comments.
Canaanites were into beastiality and incest. God prewarned then 400 years prior . They were the beginnings of zoonotic diseases as we know of (bubonic) . They certainly had strange Chimera type of worship and influenced other nations in all the wrong ways.
That’s true. No doubt there was a lot of goat demon worship going on there. I hate to think about how our own culture is so quickly becoming so much like theirs.