DEMONS — a rare, specifically dark word, and one of only two places in the whole Hebrew Bible the bare form stands: this verse and Psalm 106:37, which echoes it almost word for word centuries later of the same sacrifice. Distinct from the ordinary Hebrew words for foreign gods or idols, shedim names something the text treats as genuinely malevolent — sacrificed to, but explicitly ‘no-god’, unknown even to the worshippers' own ancestors. The bare consonants also spell ‘Chaldeans’ and ‘breasts’, unrelated words caught only by shared letters, which is why any count of the word has to be read rather than matched. → first discussed at Deut 32:17