The Scapegoat Rite of Yom Kippur

The rite belongs to the Day of Atonement and to no other day in the year. The high priest takes two he-goats from the community, of like appearance, and stands them at the entrance of the sanctuary. Lots are cast over them, one lot marked for the LORD and one for Azazel. The goat on which the first lot falls is slaughtered as a purification offering, and its blood, together with the blood of the bull the high priest has brought for himself and his household, is carried into the innermost chamber and sprinkled there. That entry happens once a year and by one man, and the rest of the day's service is arranged around it.

The second goat is left standing alive through all of that. When the blood rites are finished the high priest lays both hands on its head, which is the only place in the sacrificial legislation where two hands are specified rather than one, and confesses over it the iniquities, transgressions and sins of the people. The goat is then given to a man appointed for the purpose and led away into the wilderness, to a land cut off, and released.

The Mishnah adds a layer of procedure that Leviticus does not have. In its account the goat is taken to a cliff at a place whose name the manuscripts spell several ways, and pushed backwards from it so that it is dismembered before it reaches the bottom. A strip of crimson wool is tied, booths and stations are set along the route for the escort, and a signal is relayed back to the Temple so that the service can proceed once the goat has reached the wilderness. The difference between a goat released and a goat destroyed is not a small one, and the two accounts are not obviously the same rite.

Almost everything about the second goat resists the category of sacrifice. It is not slaughtered. Its blood is not caught, applied or poured out. Nothing of it is burned on the altar and nobody eats any of it. It is not brought near, which is what the Hebrew word for an offering means; it is sent away. The mechanism is not exchange but transport: the confession loads the community's wrongs onto a living animal, and the animal carries them out of inhabited space. This atlas files the rite as purification for that reason, and files the companion goat, which is a purification offering in the ordinary sense, as the sacrifice of the pair.

What or who Azazel is has been argued for two thousand years, and three positions hold the field. The first reads it as a place, a rough or precipitous terrain, which suits the wilderness setting and stands behind several of the older Jewish commentators. The second reads it as a name, a desert power or fallen being, resting on the parallel construction of the two lots, one for the LORD and one for Azazel, and usually calling in the Enochic literature, where Azazel leads the fallen watchers. The third takes the word as an abstract formed on a verb of removal, meaning something like entire disposal, which is the reading that produced the English word scapegoat by way of the Greek and Latin versions.

None of the three is free of difficulty and the Hebrew does not adjudicate between them. What can be said is that the rite does not treat the goat as a gift to anybody. Nothing is offered, no altar is involved and no return is expected, so reading the goat as a payment to a demon imports a transaction the text declines to describe.