4. The Shedim were demons from Mesopotamia associated with destruction, illness… and human sacrifice.
From the earliest of times, one man’s god was another man’s devil. To the Mesopotamians, the Lamassu or the Shedu were powerful, human-headed, eagle-winged guardian spirits of the home or the state. The Mesopotamians erected statues of these powerful entities, who had the body of either a bull or lion, at the gates of palaces or cities. There, they were well placed to ward off invading armies and ensure peace to those within the city walls. In ordinary households, images of the Shedu were carved on clay tablets and buried under the threshold to ensure peace and happiness within.
When the Israelites encountered the Shedu, however, they interpreted them in a very different way. Some of them took up the Mesopotamian custom of worshiping them- hence disapproving references in the Old Testament to how such people “sacrificed unto devils, not to God; To gods whom they knew not, To new gods that came newly up, Whom your fathers feared not.” (Deut. 32.17). To the Jewish mainstream, the shedu were false idols that possessed statues and masqueraded as gods. As such, they were evil and so became the Shedim, demons associated with destruction, illness- and human sacrifice.
“They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons,” stated Psalms 106:37, referring to those worshiping the Shedu/Shedim. Jewish myths gave these Mesopotamian demons a variety of different potential origins. In one, they were god’s half-finished creations, left without bodies. In another, they were the demonic descendants of serpents. The final myth, however, made the Shedim the descendants of Adam, the first man, and his original wife, one of the oldest demons: Lilith.