dEmon_Scribbles

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Shedim (Hebrew: שֵׁדִים‎) are spirits or demons in Jewish mythology. However, they are not necessarily equivalent to the modern connotation of demons as evil entities. Evil spirits were thought as the cause of maladies; conceptual differing from the shedim, who are not evil demigods, but the foreign gods themselves. Shedim are just evil in the sense that they are not God. They appear only twice (always plural) in the Tanakh, at Psalm 106:37 and Deuteronomy 32:17. Both times it deals with child or animal sacrifices. Although the word is traditionally derived from the root ŠWD (Hebrew: שוד‎ shûd) that conveys the meaning of "acting with violence" or "laying waste" it was possibly a loan-word from Akkadian in which the word shedu referred to a spirit which could be either protective or malevolent. With the translation of Hebrew texts into Greek, under influence of Zoroastrian dualism, shedim were translated into daimonia with implicit negativity. Otherwise, later in Judeo-Islamic culture, shedim became the Hebrew word for Jinn with a morally ambivalent attitude.