The Yom Kippur Scapegoat

The Yom Kippur goat selection and blood rites

Leviticus 16 describes the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual in precise detail. Two male goats of identical appearance were presented at the Tabernacle entrance on the tenth day of the seventh month (Tishri). The high priest - on this one day alone permitted to enter the Holy of Holies - first bathed and put on simple white linen garments rather than his ornate high-priestly vestments, symbolizing equality before God in atonement. He then cast lots over the two goats: one lot 'for the LORD,' one lot 'for Azazel.' The goat chosen for the LORD was sacrificed as a sin offering, its blood carried through the veil into the Holy of Holies - the only time blood entered that inner sanctum - and sprinkled on the mercy seat (kapporet) above the Ark of the Covenant. The goat for Azazel was kept alive.

The hand-laying confession and identity of Azazel

The Hand-Laying Confession: After completing the blood rituals for Aaron's family, for the sanctuary, and for the congregation, the high priest returned to the living goat. He placed both hands - not one, as in a typical ordination - on the animal's head and confessed 'all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites - all their sins' (Leviticus 16:21). The use of both hands rather than one signified the full transfer of moral burden, not merely identification. The goat then bore the weight of the community's accumulated wrongdoing and was sent away by a designated man into the wilderness. The Hebrew says it was to be released 'to a remote area' (eretz gezerah - 'a cut-off land'), making clear the goat was to reach a point from which it could never return.

Who Was Azazel? The identity of 'Azazel' has been disputed since antiquity. Four main interpretations have been proposed across the centuries: (1) A place name designating a remote desert location or cliff, translating la-azazel as 'to a rugged place' or 'to the cliff.' (2) A personal name for a desert demon or wilderness spirit to whom the sin-laden goat was sent as a kind of appeasement - an interpretation found in the Second Temple period Book of Enoch (chapters 8-10), where Azazel is a fallen angel bound in a desert pit. (3) An abstract noun from azal ('to remove') meaning 'complete removal' or 'total elimination.' (4) A reference to the goat itself - azza-el meaning 'the goat that goes away,' which William Tyndale rendered in 1530 as 'the escapegoat,' creating our modern English word 'scapegoat.' Modern scholarship generally favors either interpretation (1) or (2); the contrast with 'for the LORD' suggests the destination was being named, making a personal or place name most likely. The Dead Sea Scroll text 4Q180 identifies Azazel explicitly as a fallen angel ruling in the wilderness, showing this reading was established by the Second Temple period (Milgrom, Leviticus AB, pp. 1020-1021).

Second Temple ceremony and parallel cultures

The Second Temple Ceremony: The Mishnah tractate Yoma preserves extraordinarily detailed accounts of the Yom Kippur ceremony as practiced in the Second Temple. Yoma 6:4-8 describes the scapegoat's release: a red thread was tied in three places - to the cliff in the wilderness, to the goat's head, and to the door of the sanctuary vestibule. When the goat was pushed off the cliff, a signal was sent back by waving cloth. When the temple priests received it, the thread on the vestibule door supposedly turned from red to white, announcing atonement to the waiting Jerusalem crowds - a tradition directly linked to Isaiah 1:18 ('though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow'). The Mishnah also records that the thread stopped turning white forty years before the temple's destruction - that is, around 30 CE, a tradition some early Christian writers connected to the crucifixion. The cliff used was reportedly twelve miles from Jerusalem, at a location called Tzuk ('the precipice'), ensuring the goat could not wander back to inhabited areas.

Parallel Cultures: Scapegoat-type rituals - transferring communal guilt or evil onto an animal or person who is then expelled - appear across the ancient world. In Mesopotamia, a practice called the kuppuru ('wiping') ritual involved sending a goat into the steppe as a vehicle for carrying evil away from a king or city. Hittite purification rituals from Anatolia describe sending a goat or other animal into the land of enemies, loaded with the community's sins. Greek cities practiced pharmakos rituals, expelling a human scapegoat at times of plague or crisis. René Girard's influential theory of religion (Violence and the Sacred) analyzes the scapegoat mechanism as universal to human societies, though his reductive reading has been critiqued by scholars who emphasize the unique theological meaning of the Leviticus ritual: it was not about redirecting communal violence but about a divinely prescribed ritual of genuine atonement.

New Testament connections and atonement theology

New Testament Connections: Two aspects of the scapegoat ritual inform New Testament interpretation of Jesus's death. First, the scapegoat was sent 'outside the camp' - expelled from the holy community to carry sin into the wilderness. Hebrews 13:12-13 explicitly draws this parallel: 'Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.' Second, the complete transfer of sin - both hands laid on the goat, all sins confessed over it, then permanently sent away - corresponds to Paul's atonement language in 2 Corinthians 5:21 ('God made him who had no sin to be sin for us') and Isaiah 53:6 ('the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all'), which the New Testament reads as predictive of Christ's sin-bearing role.

The scapegoat's theological function was the visible removal and transportation of sin. The blood sacrifice on the mercy seat made atonement (kipper, 'to cover' or 'to purge'); the scapegoat made the sins physically depart from the community. Together, the two goats portrayed two complementary aspects of forgiveness that required two different acts to represent: reconciliation achieved by blood, and the genuine permanent removal of what had been forgiven. Modern atonement theology continues to use the two-goat imagery as a model for distinguishing the expiation and propitiation dimensions of Christ's death.

Scholarly Sources: Jacob Milgrom's Leviticus in the Anchor Yale Bible (vol. 1, 1991), pages 1009-1084, provides the most thorough critical analysis of the entire Yom Kippur ritual complex, including the two-goat ceremony and the identity of Azazel. Gordon Wenham's The Book of Leviticus in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament (1979) offers a more accessible treatment. For New Testament typological connections, the Epistle of Barnabas chapters 7-8 preserves the earliest Christian interpretation of the two goats as types of Christ's death and resurrection. John Milbank and Simon Oliver's edited volume The Radical Orthodox Reader (2009) includes theological reflection on the scapegoat mechanism and its difference from Girardian social theory.

• ISBE: Scapegoat; Atonement, Day of
• Milgrom, Leviticus (AB), pp.1009-1084
• Freeman, Manners and Customs of the Bible, pp.397-401