The English word ‘scapegoat’ first surfaced in 1530, as part of William Tyndale’s brilliant, pioneering and illegal translation of the Bible into English. The noun describes the ritual goat that shows up in chapter 16 of Va’Yikra, as the central and strange feature of the Day of Atonement ceremony. Tyndale used Greek precedents to continue doing what the Hebrew Torah already began - covering the tracks of ‘Azazel’ - the ancient pagan concept introduced into the holiest day of the Jewish year as a blatant nod to our primitive origins and continued violently primal urges. Only a few years after this fighter for religious reform privately published the English Bible he was beheaded by King Jame I, who scapegoat’d the translator on behalf of all anti-reforms and then took credit for the new Bible. The word scapegoat officially also became a verb by the early 19th century. Its use in multiple societal settings is as popular as it gets even as its origins are still obscure, fascinating, and important to how we better deal with how we deal with ‘othering’ in our private and public lives.
Who, what, where is Azazel? Mid way through the day of atonement procedures outlined for the first time in this chapter, two identical male-goats, in Hebrew literally called ‘the hairy ones’, are brought before the High Priest where a lottery is performed:
“The goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before YHWH, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel.”(Va 16:11)
Bearing the collective shame of the community, one of the two goats becomes the escape-mechanism, banished to the beyond-human realms of civilization, so that the people can atone, relax, reset and rejoice. The goat is either sent free in the wild or thrown off the cliff, depending on who you ask.
Scholars clearly prove that similar rituals existed all through the near east, using goats, frogs, mice and bulls, all as proxy for human suffering and guilt. Azazel is likely the distortion of a fierce Canaanite Deity - Azal, who is linked to some of these prior rituals. Somehow the Hebrew system incorporated earlier atonement rituals into its own vocabulary, not shaking the past off completely but rebranding it to sort of suit the new theology.
Mary Douglas, whose research on Leviticus is legendary, brings in the mythic aspects. She focuses on the fact that unlike some similar earlier rituals, the scapegoat is not killed, but rather set free in the wild. She suggested we look at the narratives of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. Like the two goats - there’s always one chosen heir and a second destined for exile. ‘If we accept the teaching that guilt transferred is guilt expunged,’ Douglas writes, ‘the scapegoat is guiltless, as were Ishmael and Esau.’
Douglas goes mythic and Aviva Zornberg brings in psycho-spiritual perspective:“The “goat to Azazel” perhaps represents a turning from a generally “healthy-minded” view of evil, in which impurity is banned and requires atonement, to a profound confrontation with the paradoxes of life and death. The mysteries and anomalies of death, disintegration, and human evil become the subject of a “meditation”: at the edge of the ordered world, in the wilderness, at the jut of a cliff, the goat meets a shattering death. By a deliberately arbitrary casting of lots, the community projects their own misgivings about the world of God’s inscrutable will onto the animal...I suggest that this is a moment of tragic irony. “
Ancient and forgotten god, hairy demon, fatal cliff, innocent goat or projected public victim of anxiety - Azazel, alive and well, is roaming our imagination, maybe a reminder that despite our science we are still creatures governed by much deep forces that connect us to the fragile, freaky frontline of the unknown. It’s getting hairier in the next chapter. Stay tuned.
