Let's not forget the goat god Pan in the Greek mythology...Pan as in "panic" and "pandemonium". The goat has qualities, as an animal, that suggest a kind of lusty whackiness---"you old goat" and a vulnerability ("get your goat") Pan is also associated with tragedy in the Greek aesthetic imagination. I also connect the goat to the lost nomadic (ambiguous) history of Genesis, and its sacrifice may stand for to the eventual transition from a herding people to an agricultural and then settlement culture. The substitute of the goat for Isaac surely stirs whenever this animal and its sacrifice is mentioned.
Let's not forget the goat god Pan in the Greek mythology...Pan as in "panic" and "pandemonium". The goat has qualities, as an animal, that suggest a kind of lusty whackiness---"you old goat" and a vulnerability ("get your goat") Pan is also associated with tragedy in the Greek aesthetic imagination. I also connect the goat to the lost nomadic (ambiguous) history of Genesis, and its sacrifice may stand for to the eventual transition from a herding people to an agricultural and then settlement culture. The substitute of the goat for Isaac surely stirs whenever this animal and its sacrifice is mentioned.