Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 16-18.

As with the previous several days’ passages, when I began this passage I thought I would have nothing.  However, when I came to the part about the scapegoat, I was reminded of research I did a few years ago because so many people now say “escape goat” instead of “scapegoat”.  When I did that research I discovered two interesting things.  The first is that “scapegoat” does indeed derive from “escape goat”, so substituting “escape goat” for “scapegoat” is not really wrong.  The second is that the word translated as “scapegoat” is “Azazel” (or, as close to that as transliteration of Hebrew allows).  Now the Hebrew word Azazel is not used anywhere else in the Bible, so we don’t really know what it means, or even to what it refers.  I am not a Hebrew scholar, but after reading multiple commentaries on this, it seems that Hebrew allows for several different understandings of the script which would be translated as azazel.  The most common of those understandings would be that it is a name (probably of an individual, but possibly of a place).  The only other place that Hebrew word is used is in ANY ancient manuscript is the Book of Enoch, where it refers to a demon.  The problem with saying that is what it means here is that it appears that the writer of the Book of Enoch was inspired by his understanding of this passage to make that designation, rather than using the word as the name of a demon of which he was otherwise aware.  Nevertheless, it appears that a literal translation of the passage is that one of the goats is chosen for YHWH and the other is chosen for Azazel.  Then the goat chosen for YHWH was to be sacrificed before the Lord as a sin offering.  The goat chosen for Azazel was to be presented alive before the Lord.  Then Aaron, and his successors as high priest, was to lay his hands upon the head of this goat and confess all of Israel’s sins, placing them upon the goat.  The goat was then to be sent into the wilderness to Azazel (or perhaps sent into the wilderness of Azazel).

All of the above set me to thinking about what the commands regarding the scapegoat would mean if we translated the goat we call the scapegoat as being the “goat for Azazel” where Azazel is a proper name.  Dualists (those who believe that there is are two Divine Beings, one good and one evil) would take this as support for their position.  I am not a Dualist.  However, perhaps Azazel was a name for Satan, the Adversary.  Satan is the one who stands before God and tells Him that in order to be a just God He must condemn us for our sin.  Looking at it this way, I see this ritual as the High Priest offering the blood of the first goat to cover the sins, then loading them onto the head of the second goat and sending them to Satan, saying, “These sins have been covered by the blood of the sacrifice.  I am sending them to you as the people of God no longer need to carry them.  They have been forgiven.”  This foreshadows the way in which Jesus covered our sins completely.  In a manner, He covered both roles by offering His blood as the sacrifice while taking our sins upon Himself.  Then going into the country of the dead and delivering those sins unto Satan, to be burned in the eternal fire alongside Satan.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.