Scapegoat

Scape-goat (Hebrews עֲזָאזֵל Azazel) is the name given in the A.V. to one of the two goats used in the sin offering for the entire community of Israel on the great day of atonement, the goat which was to be sent away into the wilderness. To determine which of the two goats was to be slain, and which sent alive into the wilderness, it was ordered that the priest should "cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord [Jehovah], and the other lot for the scapegoat" (Le 16:8), but literally for Azazel (לִעֲזָאזֵל), a word nowhere else used. There can be no doubt that this has the appearance of being some sort of personage, or interest personified, standing over against Jehovah, or somehow contradistinguished from him. But opinions have from early times been divided on the subject.

1. The one followed by our translators, which regards it as a name for the goat itself, is of great antiquity, and has numbers on its side — Symmachus (τράγος ἀπερχόμενος), Aquila (τράγος ἀπολελυμμένος), the Vulgate (hircus emissarius), Luther, and many moderns, also recently Hoffmann. The term so understood is viewed as a compound of עֵז,goat and אָזִל, to go away. The chief objections to it are that עֵז is never used precisely of a goat; in the plural it bears the sense of goats generally, but in the singular it designates only she goat; and in Le 16:10,26, the goat and Azazel are expressly distinguished from each other, "the goat. (הִשָּׂעַיר) for Azazel." These are fatal objections, and have led to the general abandonment of the view.

2. By others it has been taken as the name of a place, either some mountain in the desert (Pseudo-Jonathan, Aben-Ezra, Jarchi), or a lonely and desolate region (Bochart, Deyling, Carpzov, Jahn). But this, also, is at variance with the natural import of the statements, especially with the expression in ver. 10, "to let him go for Azazel into the wilderness," which would then mean, for the wilderness into the wilderness. Nor could Jehovah on the one side, and a place on the other, form a proper antithesis.