Why Were There Two Goats on the Day of Atonement?

The Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16

Once a year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, Israel fasted and rested from work, and the high priest went into the holy of holies, the inner room of the tabernacle where the Ark of the Covenant stood. On no other day did anyone enter it. Leviticus 16 gives the instructions for that day and closes with their purpose:

And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.

Leviticus 16:34

The chapter opens with a warning. Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu had died before the LORD (Leviticus 10:1–2), and God told Moses that Aaron must not come into the holy place within the veil at all times, “that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat” (Leviticus 16:2). Everything that follows gives the terms on which he could go in.

Aaron washed and put on plain linen garments in place of his usual robes of gold, blue, purple and scarlet (Leviticus 16:4). Then the animals were brought. For himself and his household he brought a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. From the congregation he took two goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering (Leviticus 16:3, 5). So the two goats began as a single offering for the people. The rest of the day used them in two very different ways.

Casting Lots: One for the LORD, One for Azazel

Aaron set the two goats before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle and cast lots over them (Leviticus 16:7–8). Until the lot fell, nothing set them apart. Later Jewish tradition, recorded in the Mishnah, held that the two goats should be as alike as possible in appearance, height and value. The lot made one goat “for the LORD” and the other “for the scapegoat.”

“Scapegoat” is William Tyndale’s word, meaning the goat that goes away, and the King James translators kept it. The Hebrew says la-azazel, “for Azazel,” a word found nowhere else in the Bible. Some ancient translators took it to describe the goat that departs. The rabbis took it as the name of a rugged place. Most scholars today read it as the name of a being, because “for Azazel” has the same form as “for the LORD” and stands beside it as the other lot. The page Who is Azazel? takes up that question.

From the start Leviticus gives the second goat a part in the atonement:

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

Aaron’s Bull and the LORD’s Goat

Aaron dealt with his own sin first. He killed the bull for himself and his household. He took a censer of coals and two handfuls of incense through the veil, so that the cloud of incense would cover the mercy seat, “that he die not” (Leviticus 16:11–13). Then he brought in the bull’s blood and sprinkled it with his finger on the mercy seat and seven times before it (Leviticus 16:14). The mercy seat was the gold lid of the Ark, the place where God said he would appear.

Next he killed the goat on which the LORD’s lot fell, brought its blood within the veil, and did with it as he had done with the bull’s blood (Leviticus 16:15). The text then says what this blood was for:

And he shall make an atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation, that remaineth among them in the midst of their uncleanness.

Leviticus 16:16

No one else could be in the tent while he did this (Leviticus 16:17). The blood went to every part of God’s house, from the inside out: the holy of holies, then the outer room of the tent, then the altar in the court, which Aaron touched with the blood of the bull and of the goat to “cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel” (Leviticus 16:18–19).

The killing of the goat takes half a verse. The chapter follows the blood step by step, and the atonement for the holy place is made when the blood reaches its place. God’s dwelling stood among a people whose uncleanness and sins reached it, and once a year the blood cleansed it so that he could go on living among them. The page Why did the sanctuary need cleansing? explains that problem more fully.

The Live Goat

Only “when he hath made an end of reconciling the holy place” (Leviticus 16:20) did Aaron turn to the second goat. It had stood alive at the door of the tabernacle through all of this.

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

Aaron laid both hands on the goat’s head and confessed the people’s sins out loud. The confession uses three words, iniquities, transgressions and sins, and covers deliberate wrongdoing and rebellion as well as lesser faults. The text says he put them on the goat’s head. A man appointed for the task led the goat out of the camp and let it go. “A land not inhabited” translates a Hebrew phrase meaning a land cut off, a place with no road back to the camp. The man washed his clothes and bathed before he came back in (Leviticus 16:26).

When the goat was gone, Aaron changed back into his own garments and offered the burnt offerings for himself and the people. The bodies of the bull and the LORD’s goat were burned outside the camp (Leviticus 16:23–28). The statute for the people states what the whole day did for them:

For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD.

Leviticus 16:30

Two Goats, Two Directions

The two goats moved in opposite directions. The blood of the first went in, through the veil, to the place where God appeared, and it cleansed his house of the uncleanness and sins that had reached it. The second went out, away from God’s presence and out of the camp to a land cut off, carrying the people’s sins on its head.

Baruch Schwartz, a scholar of the priestly writings, explains the difference this way: the blood purges the sanctuary, and the sins, once removed from the sanctuary, still have to be driven away. The first goat dealt with the defilement of God’s house. The second dealt with the burden on the people. Leviticus names the people’s transgressions twice in the day’s instructions, first as what defiled the sanctuary (16:16) and then as what was confessed over the live goat (16:21).

So the live goat belongs to the atonement itself. Leviticus 16:10 says it was presented alive “to make an atonement with him.” The day was finished only when both goats had done their work: the house cleansed by the blood, and the sins carried out of the camp. How Atonement Works describes the two goats as one atonement with two movements, one toward God and one away from him.

This page covers one day in Leviticus. How Atonement Works follows both goats through the work of Christ: the blood brought into heaven by the risen high priest, and the sins Christ bore away, through to the defeat of the devil.

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Why Was the Scapegoat Kept Alive?

Many readers assume that every animal in Leviticus had the worshiper’s sins placed on it before it died. In the ordinary offerings the worshiper laid one hand on the animal’s head, and the law says the offering would be “accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Leviticus 1:4). Those laws describe no transfer of sins, and scholars have long debated what the one hand meant. Jacob Milgrom read it as the owner’s declaration that the animal was his to give.

Leviticus 16:21 is the one place where the law describes sins being confessed over an animal and put on it. There the gesture is different, with both hands and a spoken confession. And that animal is the one that was not killed.

Chris White proposes a reason, which he offers as his own inference from the rite. The blood of the LORD’s goat was carried into God’s house to cleanse it, and what cleanses has to be clean. A goat whose life had been loaded with the people’s sins could not also supply the blood that was meant to remove them. So the goat that carried the sins was never slaughtered, and its blood was never used. It was sent away.

Milgrom reached a similar judgment from another direction. He held that an animal laden with impurities would not be acceptable as an offering, whether to God or to a demon. The law also required the man who led the goat out to wash before he came back into the camp, as if what the goat carried had touched him (Leviticus 16:26).

The same facts answer an old worry, that a goat sent “for Azazel” was a sacrifice to a demon. The live goat was never killed, and none of its blood was offered to anyone. The very next chapter forbids Israel to offer sacrifices “unto devils” (Leviticus 17:7). The page Was the scapegoat a sacrifice to a demon? covers that question in full.

How Others Have Read the Two Goats

The most common view among scholars of Leviticus treats the live goat as a means of disposal. Milgrom and David Wright, who studied the elimination rites of Israel’s neighbors, held that the goat was the vehicle that took Israel’s sins out to the wilderness, away from human habitation. On their reading the name Azazel had been emptied of any power, and Azazel himself plays no part in why the rite works. Careful scholars hold this view, and it gets the main thing right: the sins had to leave the camp.

Scholars also differ over whether the live goat was a sacrifice at all. Some resist the word. Others note that Leviticus 16:5 calls both goats a sin offering and see no reason a sin offering cannot be a living one.

Later Jewish practice added details that Leviticus lacks. The Mishnah says the man who led the goat out pushed it backward over a cliff. Leviticus says the goat was let go in the wilderness alive, and the book follows Leviticus.

Christian readers have often built on one goat or the other. Many sermons see Christ in the goat whose blood was shed and pass over the second, while some readers focus on the scapegoat alone. The earliest Christian writers who discussed the day saw him in both.

One Savior, Two Goats

Hebrews explains Christ’s work by the Day of Atonement. It describes the high priest going into the second room “alone once every year, not without blood” (Hebrews 9:7), and then says of Christ:

Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

Hebrews 9:12

That is the work of the LORD’s goat, carried into heaven itself, “now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24). A few verses later Hebrews adds a line that belongs to the other goat: “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28). Bearing the sins is what the live goat did. Isaiah uses the same language of the servant of the LORD: “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6), and “he bare the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12). Peter says that Christ “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). The page Was Jesus the scapegoat? follows that line of texts in detail.

The Epistle of Barnabas, from around the end of the first century, and Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second, both took the slain goat and the sent-away goat as two pictures of the one Lord. How Atonement Works stands with that early reading.

The book argues that Christ fulfilled the first goat as the living high priest. He laid down his life on the cross, rose from the dead, and entered the true sanctuary with his own blood. Through that offering God’s people are cleansed, reconciled, and given access to the Father. He fulfilled the second goat as the sin-bearer. Our sins were laid on him, though he had none of his own, and he carried them out of the gate (Hebrews 13:12) and down to the realm of the dead.

Chris White then goes a step further, and this part is his own synthesis. He reads Azazel as Satan and proposes that the sins Christ carried were returned to Satan, who first led humanity into sin, so that the accuser was left without a charge against those whose sins God forgave. The book sets out each step of that argument so that a reader can test it.

In the book’s own words, the law showed Christ in two animals “because no one animal could die and also carry sins away alive.” One Savior did both. His blood brings his people near to God, and their sins have been carried away from them.

Where This Understanding Comes From

The two goats have been studied closely. Jacob Milgrom’s commentary on Leviticus showed that the blood of the Day of Atonement cleansed God’s sanctuary, and he described the live goat as returning evil to its source. Baruch Schwartz distinguished the purging of the sanctuary from the carrying away of sins. David M. Moffitt’s work on Hebrews contrasts the animals brought into God’s presence with the one animal that carried sins away from it. Richard Barry’s study of the two goats argues that Christ fulfills the work of both, and Andrei Orlov has traced how ancient Jewish writers read the pair. Among early Christians, the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr read both goats as Christ. How Atonement Works builds on this work and credits it. Its own contribution is an account of how the two goats fit together in one Savior, and of how the live goat’s journey explains Christ’s victory over the devil.