A Scapegoat

And he [Aaron] shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering.
... And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.
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.

-- Leviticus 16: 5, 7-10 (KJV)

The Priestly Author of Leviticus (whose title means "priestly matters") details the rituals to be observed on the annual Jewish "Day of Atonement," or Yom Kippur. (Though P claims such rites were handed down to Moses by God, in actuality Yom Kippur was not celebrated before the sixth century B.C.) Among these is the ritual sacrifice of a bullock, two rams, and a goat as "sin offerings," in symbolic atonement for the people's sins.

The poor bullock and rams never had a chance, but the goat was chosen from two candidates, so had a fifty-fifty chance of escaping the blade. Which of the two wound up a "sin offering" was determined by lottery, with the high priest (here, Aaron) casting the lots -- "one for the Lord," as the text says, "and the other lot for the scapegoat (Azazel)."

The word "scapegoat" is a piece of patchwork by William Tyndale, who translated this passage in 1530. The Hebrew Azazel confused him; following the Latin (Vulgate) Bible, he figured that it must refer to the goat that "lost" the lottery and so was let loose the wilderness. For Azazel, therefore, Tyndale forged a compound from "goat" and the Renaissance word "scape," an obsolete form of "escape."

But it turns out that Azazel is no goat; Tyndale and later translators missed the whole point. In fact, Azazel is an evil demon or "angry god," which is approximately what the Hebrew name means. And the losing goat was not really permitted to "scape"; rather, it was sent, bearing the communal sins, into the wilderness to meet an unknown fate at Azazel's hands. (This demon and his devices are never again mentioned in the Bible.)

Though the translation was botched, the basic idea of the ritual is clear. The burning of offerings was meant to solicit God's forgiveness and to symbolically cleanse the holy places of Israel. Afterward, the high priest laid hands on the "scapegoat" to transfer to it all the people's sins and thus banish them from the community.

The idea that sins or crimes can be collectively cast onto an innocent animal lies behind modern usage of "scapegoat." The metaphorical sense dates to 1824, when Mary Russell Mitford asserted, in a series entitled Our Village, that "Country-boys are patient ... and bear their fate as scape-goats (for all sins whatsoever are laid as matters of course to their door ...) with amazing reservation." That Mitford had to explain what she meant by "scape-goat" implies its novelty. The indefatigable correspondent and fourth earl of Oxford, Horace Walpole, however, had already exploited Tyndale's mistake some fifty-nine years earlier when in a letter to the Earl of Hertford he referred to the apparently feckless Lord Halifax as a "scape-goose."

 
Index  |  Next:  Love Thy Neighbor

Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!