The Book of Enoch, that was included in the Dead Sea Scrolls and which forms part of the Ethiopian canonical Bible, gives an account of how a group of angels (benei Elohim, or "sons of God") disobeyed the Hebrew deity in taking wives for themselves among the daughters of men, resulting in the birth of a race of giants who devoured everything, including men, so that Yahweh was forced to send the flood which swept over all the earth in order to drown them.
Among the disobedient angels was one named Azazel who taught many forbidden things to mankind, for which he was singled out for punishment by being bound hand to foot and cast into a pit in the desert where he was to remain concealed until the Day of Judgement when he would be destroyed in an all consuming fire.
While the Book of Enoch was purposely omitted from the European version of the Bible when it was being compiled in the 4th century AD, apocryphal versions of this text were evidently in limited circulation among Christian scholars as the story of the angel Azazel being cast out of heaven and thrown into a subterranean prison to await his fiery destruction for his rebellion against Yahweh, seems to be the source of the Christian concept of hell and the devil, a character wrongly confused with that of another angel, Satan, who obediently serves Yahweh by testing the faithfulness of men's souls, as was related in the Old Testament Book of Job, as well as the New Testament account of Jesus' being tempted by Satan in the New Testament Book of Matthew. Clearly a different entity from the fallen angel Azazel, the Book of Job describes Satan as an angel who is free to wander the earth and to enter heaven and stand in Yahweh's presence along with other angels, and is allowed to test mankind with Yahweh's consent.
According to the doctrines of Judaism, the original religion of the Jews from which Christianity emerged, neither a hell nor a devil exist; these concepts being based on later misunderstandings by Europeans which arose in their efforts to translate the Old Testament into European languages. The Hebrew word sheol meaning "the grave" when translated into Greek and Latin was rendered Hades, the classical pagan underworld where the spirits of the departed live on after death, named for the pagan deity who was believed to rule over it. When this same word was later translated into the Old English language of the Anglo-Saxons, Hades was replaced with the word Hell, which was the name of the underworld in Germanic pagan mythology ruled over by the goddess Hel who was the guardian over the realm of ghosts and the spirits of the dead. This misunderstanding seems to have been further perpetuated by John Milton's poem Paradise Lost and by Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia, both of which seem to have been enormously influential on the imaginations of impressionable European adherents of Christianity.
Similarly Christian folklore misappropriates the Latin name Lucifer ("light bringer") as a name for the fallen angel who rebelled against Yahweh and was cast out of heaven. Instead, the name Lucifer (which is a translation of the original Hebrew word heylel and appears only once in the Book of Isaiah) was applied to the morning star (Venus) that shines brightly in the sky and is the last celestial body to fade with the approach of dawn. In this sense it was included in a psalm mocking the king of Babylon who is compared to the morning star (heylel or "Lucifer") in that he was once a mighty ruler but was brought down from his greatness by death:
In their attempts to convert the pagans of Europe to Christianity, the proselytizers of the cult often drew comparisons between elements of Christianity and those of the pagan religions they were seeking to replace. Pagan deities like Pan and Hades were conflated with the Christian concept of the devil. The image of the horned devil of Christian folklore apparently stems from the fact that the Hebrew word se'irim, "hairy ones," (from sa'ir or "goat") was translated as "satyrs" in Isaiah 13:21 and 34:14 and as "devils" in Leviticus 17:7; beings whom the Israelites were forbidden from offering sacrifices to."thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, and the sceptre of the rulers....Sheol [the grave] from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations....How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
The association between goats and the "fallen angel" (Azazel) cast out of heaven as related in the Book of Enoch was further emphasized in Leviticus 16:8-10 which reads:
"And Aaron shall place lots upon the two he-goats: one lot "For the Lord," and the other lot, "For Azazel." And Aaron shall bring the he-goat upon which the lot, "For the Lord," came up, and designate it as a sin offering. And the he-goat upon which the lot "For Azazel" came up, shall be placed while still alive, before the Lord, to [initiate] atonement upon it, and to send it away to Azazel, into the desert."
The ancient Greek belief that satyrs lived in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa, as related by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History may also explain why the devil of Christian folklore was invariably portrayed as being black. In European pagan mythology, black was the color associated with the Greek god, Hades and his Roman counterpart Pluto or Dis Pater. The ancient Greeks were said to have offered sacrifices of black sheep to Hades, turning their faces away out of dread in respect to his role as ruler of the subterranean abode of the dead, not unlike the Christian folk-belief in the Devil as the ruler of hell.
