The Phrase Today
"Scapegoat" means a person or group blamed and punished for the failures, sins, or misfortunes of others - typically those who actually bear responsibility. The word functions as both noun and verb: communities scapegoat minorities in times of crisis; a junior employee is made the scapegoat for a company failure. The concept has generated a rich academic literature in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Of all the English words coined directly from a single biblical translation, "scapegoat" may have generated the most scholarly and cultural elaboration.
Biblical Origin
Leviticus 16:8-10, 21-22 (KJV) describes the Day of Atonement ritual: "And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness... And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel... and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness."
Tyndale's Coinage
William Tyndale translated the Pentateuch in 1530 and encountered the Hebrew word Azazel in Leviticus 16:8. The meaning of Azazel has been debated for millennia: it may be a proper name (a demon or divine being to whom the goat was sent), a place name (a cliff from which the goat was pushed), or a descriptive term meaning something like "total removal" or "the one who departs entirely." Tyndale rendered it as "the escapegoat" - the goat that escapes into the wilderness - combining "escape" and "goat" into a new compound. Over time the initial e dropped and "scapegoat" became standard.
Azazel: The Harder Question
Modern translators increasingly render Leviticus 16:8 as "the goat for Azazel" (as in the ESV, NASB, and NIV), treating Azazel as a proper name. Ancient Jewish interpretations (notably in 1 Enoch) identified Azazel as a fallen angel, and the Mishnah describes the goat being pushed from a cliff outside Jerusalem. If Azazel is a supernatural recipient of the sin-laden goat, the ritual has a more complex theological meaning than Tyndale's "escape" rendering suggests - the sins are dispatched to a specific supernatural domain, not merely removed. The KJV follows Tyndale's interpretive choice, shaping the English concept of the scapegoat around removal rather than supernatural transfer.
Semantic Drift
In Leviticus, the scapegoat was ritually innocent - it bore sins that were not its own in order to carry them away - and the act was performed by the legitimate authority (Aaron) in a prescribed ritual. In modern usage, "scapegoating" is almost always a negative act: the blame is unjust, the person blamed is innocent, and the act serves to protect those actually responsible. The word has drifted from a description of a legitimate ritual mechanism of communal atonement to a description of a social injustice. The goat's innocence, however, is preserved: scapegoats are by definition those who do not deserve what they receive.
René Girard's Theory
French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard developed the most influential modern theory of scapegoating in a series of works including Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1986). Girard argued that scapegoating is the foundational mechanism of human social order: communities experiencing internal tension and violence resolve the crisis by collectively identifying and destroying a surrogate victim. The Bible, in Girard's reading, is unique in world literature because it consistently takes the side of the scapegoated victim, exposing the mechanism rather than endorsing it. Girard's theory has influenced theology, philosophy, political theory, and literary criticism.
Historical Usage
The word "scapegoat" entered English prose in the sixteenth century and was fully naturalized as a common noun by the seventeenth. Shakespeare uses the concept without the word in King Lear (Gloucester is made a scapegoat by Cornwall and Regan) and Richard III (Richard scapegoats others systematically). In the eighteenth century the word began appearing in political writing to describe parties blamed for national misfortunes. By the nineteenth century it was standard in social criticism, and by the twentieth it was the key term in psychological and sociological analyses of persecution.
Cross-Linguistic Equivalents
Most European languages borrowed the English word or created direct calques: German Sündenbock (sin-buck/sin-goat), French bouc émissaire (emissary goat), Spanish chivo expiatorio (expiatory goat), Italian capro espiatorio (expiatory he-goat). These terms all date from vernacular Bible translation and carry the same range of meanings. The French bouc émissaire preserves the "emissary" dimension - the goat sent on behalf of the community - which the English word obscures by focusing on escape.
Misconceptions
The most significant misconception is that the scapegoat is a mere symbol of removal and that the ritual is simply a primitive guilt-transfer mechanism. In its original Levitical context the ritual was part of an elaborate two-goat ceremony: one goat was sacrificed to God, the other sent to Azazel. The two actions together constituted the Day of Atonement. The scapegoat component was not the whole atonement but one part of it. A second misconception is that Tyndale's "scapegoat" is the only possible English translation of Azazel; modern scholarship suggests it may be the least accurate, as Azazel is likely a proper name rather than a description.