Shedim

Uncommon card · No. 134156

Shedim (Hebrew: שֵׁדִים, romanized: šēḏim; singular: שֵׁד šēḏ) are spirits or demons in the Tanakh and Jewish mythology. Shedim do not, however, correspond exactly to the modern conception of demons as evil entities as originated in Christianity. While evil spirits were thought to cause maladies, shedim differed conceptually from evil spirits. Shedim were not considered evil demigods, but the gods of foreigners; further, they were envisaged as evil only in the sense that they were not the Hebrew 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 šwd (Hebrew: שוד shuḏ) that conveys the meaning of "acting with violence" or "laying waste", it was possibly a loanword from Akkadian, in which the word 'shedu' referred to a spirit that could be either protective or malevolent. With the translation...

Read on Wikipedia · Image CC BY 4.0