Achrei Mot

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Achrei Mot ('After the Death', Leviticus 16:1-18:30) prescribes the service of Yom Kippur, the high priest's entry into the Holy of Holies and the sending of the scapegoat to Azazel, together with the prohibition of consuming blood and a list of forbidden sexual relations. The chapter on the Yom Kippur rite is read on that day.

The Yom Kippur service prescribed in Achrei Mot, the high priest's sole annual entry into the Holy of Holies, wearing plain white linen rather than his usual ornamented garments, and the casting of lots over two goats, one sacrificed, one sent into the wilderness bearing the people's sins to Azazel (Leviticus 16:8-10, 16:21-22), is read by the classical commentary tradition as the most solemn and dangerous rite in the entire priestly calendar, later Mishnaic tractate Yoma describing elaborate precautions taken to ensure the high priest survived the entry. The identity and meaning of Azazel, to whom the second goat is dispatched, has been debated since antiquity, ancient sources including some strands of Second Temple literature reading it as a wilderness demon, classical rabbinic commentary more often reading it simply as a rugged, precipitous place.

Achrei Mot's closing chapter forbids slaughtering any animal for sacrifice outside the sanctuary itself (Leviticus 17:1-9), a demand some biblical scholars read as belonging to a distinct legal voice within Leviticus, often labelled the Holiness Code, making its own case for centralised worship independently of the more famous centralisation demand elsewhere in the Torah requiring worship only 'at the place the Lord will choose.' Whether the Holiness Code represents an older, a contemporary, or a later voice relative to that later centralising program remains genuinely debated among specialists rather than settled.

The scapegoat rite, in which the people's sins are symbolically transferred onto a goat sent away into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:21-22), has long drawn comparison from historians of religion to ritual expulsion practices attested elsewhere in the ancient Near East, including some Hittite ritual texts describing plague or misfortune driven out of a community through an animal or object sent beyond its borders, comparisons offered to illustrate a broader regional pattern of ritual expulsion rather than to claim direct borrowing in either direction.

The prohibition on consuming blood that closes this portion (Leviticus 17:10-14), grounding the kosher requirement that meat be drained and salted before eating, has a notable echo outside Judaism: the council of the apostles in Jerusalem, described in Acts 15:20 and 15:29, required gentile converts to Christianity to abstain from blood and from meat of strangled animals even while releasing them from circumcision and most other Torah law, a rare point where an early Christian ruling retained a specific dietary restriction from this portion's legislation.