Editing Azazel (section)

====Medieval Jewish commentators====
The medieval scholar [[Nachmanides]] (1194–1270) identified the Hebrew text as also referring to a demon, and identified this "Azazel" with [[Samael]].<ref>Israel Drazin, Stanley M. Wagner, {{Google books|id=4s5cLrx_n8gC|page=PA122|title=Onkelos on the Torah: Understanding the Bible Text Vol.3}}. Gefen, 2008. p. 122. {{ISBN|978-965-229-425-8}}.</ref> However, he did not see the sending of the goat as honoring Azazel as a deity, but as a symbolic expression of the idea that the people's sins and their evil consequences were to be sent back to the spirit of desolation and ruin, the source of all impurity. The very fact that the two goats were presented before God, before the one was sacrificed and the other sent into the wilderness, was proof that Azazel was not ranked alongside God, but regarded simply as the personification of wickedness in contrast with the righteous government of God.<ref name="Jewish" />

[[Maimonides]] (1134–1204) says that as sins cannot be taken off one's head and transferred elsewhere, the ritual is symbolic, enabling the penitent to discard his sins: “These ceremonies are of a symbolic character and serve to impress man with a certain idea and to lead him to repent, as if to say, ‘We have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, cast them behind our backs and removed them from us as far as possible’.”<ref>[http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/gfp/gfp182.htm#page_366 Guide to the Perplexed 3:46], featured on the [[Internet Sacred Text Archive]]</ref>

The rite, resembling, on one hand, the sending off of the basket with the woman embodying wickedness to the land of [[Shinar]] in the vision of [[Book of Zechariah|Zechariah]] ({{bibleverse-nb||Zechariah|5:6-11|HE}}), and, on the other, the letting loose of the living bird into the open field in the case of the leper healed from the plague ({{bibleverse||Lev|14:7|HE}}), was, indeed, viewed by the people of Jerusalem as a means of ridding themselves of the sins of the year. So would the crowd, called Babylonians or Alexandrians, pull the goat's hair to make it hasten forth, carrying the burden of sins away with it (Yoma vi. 4, 66b; "Epistle of Barnabas," vii.), and the arrival of the shattered animal at the bottom of the valley of the rock of Bet Ḥadudo, twelve miles away from the city, was signalized by the waving of shawls to the people of Jerusalem, who celebrated the event with boisterous hilarity and amid dancing on the hills (Yoma vi. 6, 8; Ta'an. iv. 8). Evidently the figure of Azazel was an object of general fear and awe rather than, as has been conjectured, a foreign product or the invention of a late lawgiver. More as a demon of the desert, it seems to have been closely interwoven with the mountainous region of Jerusalem.<ref name="Jewish" />