Why the Israelites Expelled a Scapegoat into the Wilderness on Yom Kippur

A key moment in the dramatic rites of the Day of Atonement in the ancient Temple was the expulsion into the wilderness of the scapegoat—the sa’ir l’azazel or “goat for Azazel,” as Leviticus 16 calls it—to “bear upon him all [the] iniquities” of the people of Israel. The Bible itself says nothing about what then happened to this goat, whose double was sacrificed upon the altar as a sin-offering. Yet in Tractate Yoma, the Mishnah (dating to the late 2nd century CE) makes its fate clear, at least as enacted in late-Second Temple times. Driven into the badlands between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, it was pushed off an escarpment while tied to a heavy rock and tumbled helplessly to its death.

Such was the practice. But who or what was Azazel or azazel? This mysterious word occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Is it a descriptive term? The name of a place? Of a supernatural being? Each of these alternatives has had its backers. Bible translations have disagreed about them. So have Jewish tradition and the commentaries of the rabbis.

The English word “scapegoat” (“scape” being an abbreviation of “escape”) has ancient, pre-English roots. These go back to two early Bible translations, the 2nd-century-BCE Greek Septuagint and the 4th-century-CE Latin Vulgate, both of which interpreted azazel as a word composed of ez, goat, and azal, to diminish, depart, or vanish. In the Latin Bible this is rendered as capro emissario, “the goat [that is] sent away,” and the 17th-century King James Version’s “scapegoat” is in turn a translation of the Latin. However, this is a dubious reading, in part because ez in the Bible denotes a female goat and should be accompanied by the verbal form azelah, not azel. A he-goat is a sa’ir, the word used by Leviticus, which is clearly talking about a male animal.