I. Name

‘Destroyer’ is the designation of a supernatural envoy from God assigned the task of annihilating large numbers of people, typically by means of a plague. The noun is a hiphil participle of the root šḥt which is not attested in the OT in the qal. When the root appears in the hiphil, hophal, piel, and niphal stems, it describes the deterioration, marring, disfiguring, damaging and destruction of people and things, such as textiles (Jer. 13.7), pots (Jer. 18.4), vineyards (Jer. 12.10), trees (Deut. 20.…