Concept
Shedim
- And they mingled with the nations and learned their deeds. 36. They worshipped their idols, which became a snare for them. 37. They slaughtered their sons and daughters to the demons [(shedim)]. 38. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters whom they slaughtered to the idols of Canaan, and the land became polluted with the blood. 39. And they became unclean through their deeds, and they went astray with their acts.
- They sacrificed to demons [(shedim)], which have no power, deities they did not know, new things that only recently came, which your forefathers did not fear. Shedim (שֵׁדִים; singular: שֵׁד Sheyd) are spirits or demons in the Tanakh and Jewish mythology. They do not, however, correspond exactly to the modern conception of demons as evil entities, originated from Christianity. Evil spirits were thought to be the cause of maladies; differing conceptually from the shedim, who were, not evil demigods, but the gods of foreigners. Shedim are not necessarily evil - i.e. inherently evil only in the sense that they are not God. They appear only twice (and in both instances in the plural) in the Tanakh, at Psalm 106:37 and Deuteronomy 32:17. In both instances, the text deals with child sacrifice or animal sacrifice. Although the word is traditionally derived from the root (שוד shûd) that conveys the meaning of "acting with violence" or "laying waste," it was possibly a loan-word from Akkadian in which the word shedu referred to a spirit which could be either protective or malevolent. With the translation of Hebrew texts into Greek, under the influence of Zoroastrian dualism, the term shedim was translated into Greek as daimonia with implicit connotations of negativity. Later, in Judeo-Islamic culture, shedim became the Hebrew word for Jinn conveying the morally ambivalent attitude of these beings. According to one legend, the shedim are the descendants of serpents, or of demons in serpent form, in allusion to the story of the serpent in Eden, as related in Genesis.
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