The short answer
No. Leviticus says the second goat was “presented alive before the LORD” and then let go in the wilderness. The law prescribes no slaughter of it and no offering of its blood to anyone, and the very next chapter forbids Israel to sacrifice to the goat-demons of the wilderness (Leviticus 17:7). The goat carried Israel’s confessed sins away. Chris White argues that it carried them back to Azazel, to whom they were already charged, so Azazel received nothing he did not already have.
Why People Ask the Question
On the Day of Atonement Aaron took two goats from the congregation, presented them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle, and cast lots over them, “one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat” (Leviticus 16:8). Where the King James Version has “scapegoat,” the Hebrew has a name, Azazel. The name appears four times in the chapter and nowhere else in the Bible. Many modern translations print it.
The phrase “for Azazel” has the same form as “for the LORD,” and most scholars today take Azazel to be the name of a being. Jacob Milgrom, whose commentary on Leviticus is a standard work, concluded that the most likely explanation is the name of a demon. Readers who learn this soon ask the next question. If one goat went to the LORD and the other went to a demon, was Israel offering the second goat to the demon?
It is a fair question, and Leviticus gives enough to answer it. The readings of the name itself are set out in the article on who Azazel is. This article is about what was done with the goat.
What Leviticus Tells Israel to Do with the Goat
After the lot is cast, the goat chosen for Azazel stays alive:
But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.
Leviticus 16:10
It stands at the door of the tabernacle while Aaron kills the other goat and carries its blood behind the veil to cleanse the holy place, the tent, and the altar. Only then does Aaron turn to it:
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.
Leviticus 16:21–22
The instructions for this goat include no slaughter, no altar, no fire, and no blood. Aaron lays both hands on it, confesses Israel’s sins over it, and puts them on its head. A man leads it out to “a land not inhabited,” a Hebrew phrase meaning a land cut off, and lets it go. When that man comes back, he must wash his clothes and bathe before he enters the camp (Leviticus 16:26), as though what the goat carried had touched him.
The verse also says where the goat stood when it was presented: “before the LORD.” Both goats were brought to the LORD at the door of his house. The goat for Azazel was presented to the LORD and then sent out.
Leviticus 17:7 Forbids Sacrifices to Goat-Demons
The chapter right after the Day of Atonement deals with sacrifices to demons. Leviticus 17 tells Israel to bring the animals they slaughter to the door of the tabernacle, to the LORD, and gives this reason:
They shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring.
Leviticus 17:7
The word the King James Version renders “devils” here is the Hebrew word for hairy goats. It is also the ordinary word for the two goats of Leviticus 16. Isaiah uses it for the creatures of a ruined wasteland: of fallen Babylon he says that “satyrs shall dance there” (Isaiah 13:21). Israel knew of goat-demons in the wilderness, and the law that follows the Day of Atonement forbids sacrificing to them at all.
So the law that sends one goat into the wilderness “for Azazel” forbids, in the next chapter, every sacrifice to the demons of the wilderness. The two chapters stand side by side in the same law. Reading the scapegoat as a gift to a demon would set the one against the other.
What Made an Animal a Sacrifice
In Leviticus a sacrifice moved toward God. The worshiper brought the animal to the tabernacle and laid one hand on its head, and the law says it would be “accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Leviticus 1:4). The animal was killed, its blood was put on the altar or carried into the sanctuary, and its fat or its whole body was burned. On the Day of Atonement the goat for the LORD followed that pattern. It was killed, and its blood was carried through the veil to the mercy seat.
The goat for Azazel moved the other way. David Moffitt, a New Testament scholar who has written on Hebrews and Leviticus, points out that the one animal in the law that clearly has sins placed on it is the one that goes away from God’s presence, while every animal offered in sacrifice is brought toward it. The gesture was different too: both hands and a spoken confession, in place of the single hand of the ordinary offerings.
There is a second reason the goat could not serve as a sacrifice to anyone. It carried Israel’s confessed sins. Milgrom observed that an animal loaded with sin would be unacceptable as an offering, whether to God or to a demon. Chris White adds that the goat bearing the sins could not also supply the blood that cleansed the sanctuary, because what cleanses has to be clean. So the goat that carried the sins was kept alive, and its blood was never used.
Was the Live Goat an Offering at All?
Scholars describe the second goat in different ways. Leviticus 16:5 says Aaron took the two goats from the congregation “for a sin offering.” Some scholars, such as Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, take that to mean the live goat was itself part of the sin offering, a living one, and they see no reason a sin offering cannot be kept alive. Others, including Milgrom and David Wright, say the goat was no offering at all, only the vehicle that carried Israel’s sins out to the wilderness. Baruch Levine read the rite another way again: he thought the demon would resist the sin-laden goat and that the rite compelled him to take it in.
These readings disagree about what to call the goat. Each still keeps it from being a gift to a demon. On Kiuchi’s reading the goat belongs to a sin offering presented before the LORD. On Milgrom’s it is no offering. On Levine’s, Azazel is forced to accept what he would refuse. How Atonement Works treats the two goats as one atonement, with the day unfinished until the second goat had been sent away, and it agrees with Milgrom that the second goat was no offering.
The second goat is half of the Day of Atonement. How Atonement Works follows both goats into the work of Christ: the blood brought before God, the sins carried away, and the defeat of the devil.
Get the Paperback on AmazonWhat About the Cliff?
Many readers have heard that the scapegoat was pushed off a cliff. That detail comes from later Jewish practice. The Mishnah describes the man leading the goat to a cliff in the wilderness and pushing it over backward, and the Talmud explains the name Azazel as a rugged mountain, meaning that cliff.
Leviticus gives a different instruction. The goat is presented alive and let go in the wilderness (Leviticus 16:10, 22). The cliff belongs to the later history of how the rite was carried out. Even in the Mishnah’s account nothing is offered to anyone. The book stays with Leviticus, where the goat is released alive.
The Book’s Answer: Sins Sent Back to Their Source
Many scholars explain the goat as a means of removal. On their reading it carried the sins out of the camp, and the wilderness was the natural place to put them because no one lived there. On that view Azazel has nothing to do with why the rite works. Milgrom held that by the time of the priestly laws the name Azazel had been emptied of any real power.
Chris White goes a step further, and this part is his own proposal. He calls it the return-to-sender view. Leviticus gives the goat’s destination a name, set beside “for the LORD,” and Jewish readers before Christ had an answer to who that was. In the Book of Enoch, written around the third century before Christ, Azazel is a fallen angel who taught mankind iniquity, is bound in the wilderness, and has all the sins of the earth written against him. In the older translation of R. H. Charles, the command is “to him ascribe all sin.”
If every sin was already charged to Azazel, then the goat brought him nothing new. Israel’s sins were confessed, laid on the goat, and carried out to the one they were charged to from the beginning. The book puts it this way: “A sacrifice gives something to someone. The goat gives Azazel nothing he did not already have.” If a man dumps his refuse on his neighbor’s land and the neighbor hauls it back, no one calls that a gift. On this reading the goat was no gift to Azazel, no payment to him, and no bargain with him.
Milgrom himself described the goat as returning evil to its source, which for him was the netherworld. Christophe Nihan, another scholar of Leviticus, wrote of transgressions being sent back to Azazel. The book adds that the source has a name. It also identifies Azazel with the one Scripture calls Satan, “that old serpent, called the Devil” (Revelation 12:9). The Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish work from within a generation or two of the apostles, made the same identification. Leviticus gives only the name, so the identification is the book’s conclusion from the roles the texts give him.
The Scapegoat and Christ
Christians have long seen Christ in the second goat. The Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr both related the two goats to Christ. Hebrews says that Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), which is what the live goat did for Israel. Peter writes that he “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and Isaiah says of the servant that “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6), which echoes the sins laid on the goat’s head.
The first goat has its fulfillment too. Hebrews says Christ entered the true holy place “by his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12), a step that came after his resurrection; the article on the resurrection and forgiveness follows that part of the day. The book’s case that Christ also fulfilled the second goat is set out in the article Was Jesus the scapegoat?
On the book’s reading, the live goat was no payment to Azazel, and the sin-bearer it pictures made no payment to the devil. The goat carried sins away, and the people were made clean: “that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD” (Leviticus 16:30).
Where This Understanding Comes From
The answer to the sacrifice question draws on long scholarly study of Leviticus. Jacob Milgrom’s commentary on Leviticus argued that Azazel is a personal name and that the goat was no offering. David Moffitt has written on the difference between sacrifices brought toward God’s presence and the goat sent away from it. David Wright studied the elimination rites of Israel’s neighbors, and Christophe Nihan, Baruch Levine and Nobuyoshi Kiuchi have each written on the meaning of the second goat. Richard Barry’s study of the two goats and Andrei Orlov’s work on the Apocalypse of Abraham trace how Jewish and early Christian readers understood Azazel. Michael Heiser’s work suggested the return-to-sender reading. Among early Christian writers, the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr read the two goats as pictures of Christ. How Atonement Works builds on this scholarship and credits it.