Semjaza: Who Led the 200 Fallen Watchers?
The leader of the two hundred Watchers, who made his followers swear an oath so none could back out of the descent.
Semjaza, called Shemihazah in the Aramaic Qumran fragments, is the chief of the fallen Watchers in 1 Enoch. He has the others swear an oath before all two hundred descend on Mount Hermon.
Semjaza is the chief of the fallen Watchers in 1 Enoch. When the angels decide to take human wives, he hesitates first: "I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin." The others answer by swearing an oath and binding themselves "by mutual imprecations" not to abandon the plan. Then all two hundred descend on Mount Hermon.
According to 1 Enoch 8, "Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings," meaning magic and herbal lore. In chapter 10 the archangel Michael is ordered to bind Semjaza and his associates "for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth" until the final judgment, after they have watched their own sons kill each other. The Aramaic form of his name, Shemihazah, appears in the Qumran fragments, and it is often explained as "my name has seen" or "the Name has seen," though the meaning is uncertain.
The Book of Giants from Qumran gives him two sons, the giants Ohyah and Hahyah, who have ominous dreams before the Flood. A later Hebrew tale, the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, has him fall in love with a maiden who tricks him into revealing the secret Name of God, which she uses to rise to heaven and become a star. In that version Shemhazai repents and hangs himself upside down between heaven and earth. Semjaza fascinates because he is the reluctant ringleader: the one who sees the danger clearly and goes ahead anyway, after locking everyone into a pact.
In one medieval Jewish retelling, Semjaza repents and hangs himself head down between heaven and earth, where he is said to hang still.
Semjaza is a figure of Second Temple Jewish storytelling; his name and role vary between manuscripts, and scholars see the list of Watcher chiefs as a literary device rather than tradition preserved from an earlier age.
