Who Is Azazel in Leviticus 16?

Where Azazel Appears in the Bible

The Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 used two goats. Aaron brought them to the door of the tabernacle and cast lots over them. The first goat was killed as a sin offering, and its blood was carried behind the veil to cleanse the holy place. Hebrews applies that part of the day to Christ, who entered heaven “by his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12; see why the resurrection is part of forgiveness).

The second goat was kept alive. It stood at the door of the tabernacle while the blood was used, and then Aaron turned 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 Hebrew text names this goat’s destination four times. The lot falls “for Azazel” (16:8). The goat is presented alive and sent “to Azazel” into the wilderness (16:10). The man who leads it out is the one who “let go the goat to Azazel” (16:26). The King James Version prints “scapegoat” in each of these places. Modern versions such as the English Standard Version print the name.

The word Azazel occurs nowhere else in the Bible, and Leviticus gives the name without describing who or what Azazel is. Readers have asked what it means since ancient times.

The Goat Itself, or a Place

The goat that goes away

The oldest translation took the word as a description of the goat. The Greek translators of the Septuagint, in the centuries before Christ, wrote that the goat was for “sending away,” and in verse 26 they called it the goat set apart for release. Their word for release, aphesis, is the word the New Testament uses for the forgiveness of sins. The Latin Bible called the animal the emissary goat, the goat that is sent out. When William Tyndale translated Leviticus from the Hebrew in 1530, he coined the English word “scapegoat,” the goat that goes away, and the King James translators kept it.

This reading has one serious difficulty. Verse 10 sends the goat “to Azazel.” If the word only describes the goat, it cannot also name the place or the person the goat is sent to.

A rugged cliff

The rabbis favored a second answer: Azazel is a place. The Talmud explains the name as a rugged, hard mountain, the cliff from which, in later Jewish practice, the goat was pushed. Leviticus describes the goat being let go alive in the wilderness, in “a land not inhabited,” with no cliff in the rite.

Removal: The Most Common Explanation of the Rite

Some older Hebrew dictionaries took Azazel as an abstract noun meaning “removal” or “complete removal.” A related and much more widely held view leaves the name to one side and explains what the rite accomplished. The sins had to be taken out of the camp, away from the people and away from God’s house. The wilderness was the natural place to take them, because nothing lived there and no one went there. On this view the goat is a means of disposal.

Jacob Milgrom, author of a major modern commentary on Leviticus, held this view. He described the goat as a vehicle that carried Israel’s impurities and sins out to the wilderness and away from human habitation, and he denied that it was an offering or a substitute. David Wright, who studied the elimination rites of Israel’s neighbors, agreed that the goat is a vehicle and nothing else. On this reading, the fact that Azazel lived in the wilderness has no part in why the rite worked.

How Atonement Works calls this, informally, the trashcan view. The book grants that careful scholars hold it, and that they are right on the central point: Israel’s sins had to leave the camp. Leviticus says as much. The goat bore the people’s iniquities “unto a land not inhabited,” and the result was that they were “clean from all your sins before the LORD” (Leviticus 16:22, 30).

A Being in the Wilderness

The third answer is that Azazel is the name of a being. Jewish readers in the Second Temple period held it, and most scholars hold it today. The main argument comes from the grammar of verse 8. The phrase “for Azazel” has the same form as “for the LORD,” and the two phrases stand side by side as the two lots. Since the LORD is a person, the parallel suggests that Azazel is a person as well. Milgrom himself concluded from this that Azazel is a personal name, most plausibly the name of a demon.

Milgrom also pointed to the place where the goat was sent. Scripture associates the wilderness with demons. In Isaiah’s oracle against Babylon, “satyrs shall dance there” among the ruins (Isaiah 13:21). Jesus describes an unclean spirit, once it has left a man, walking “through dry places, seeking rest” (Matthew 12:43). Fallen Babylon in Revelation becomes “the habitation of devils” (Revelation 18:2).

The Hebrew word that the King James Version renders “satyrs” in Isaiah means hairy goats. It is the ordinary word for the two goats of Leviticus 16, and in the very next chapter it is rendered “devils”:

They shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring.

Leviticus 17:7

The law that follows the Day of Atonement knew of goat-demons in the wilderness and forbade Israel to sacrifice to them.

Scholars who read Azazel as a demon disagree about his power. Milgrom held that by the time the priestly laws were written, Israel’s faith in one God had left Azazel as a name emptied of power, a marker for the wasteland who neither received the goat nor attacked it. Baruch Levine thought the reverse: the demon would have resisted a goat laden with sin, and the rite had to compel him to take it in.

Azazel in the Book of Enoch

Jewish readers in the centuries before Christ said who Azazel was, and their answer is preserved in the Book of Enoch, also called 1 Enoch. Its oldest part, the Book of the Watchers, was written around the third century before Christ. It retells the story of Genesis 6, in which “the sons of God” took wives from among men.

In this retelling the fallen angels have two leaders. One leads the angels into the sin with women. The other, named Asael or Azazel, teaches mankind to make weapons and ornaments and reveals heavenly secrets, and the holy angels complain to God that he has taught all iniquity on the earth.

God’s judgment on him resembles Leviticus 16. An angel is told to bind him hand and foot and throw him into darkness, through an opening in the wilderness at a place called Dudael, onto sharp and jagged stones, to stay there a very long time (1 Enoch 10:4–6). Two verses later the angel is told to write all the sins of the earth against him, and then the earth is cleansed and restored. The name Dudael resembles the name later Jewish sources gave to the ravine where the scapegoat was taken.

Scholars debate how deliberate the link with Leviticus is. Paul Hanson suggested that the name Asael, which already stood in a list of fallen angels, reminded the author of the Azazel of Leviticus 16 and drew the scapegoat into the story. Other scholars play the connection down, and several recent studies defend it. Either way, Jews reading Leviticus two or three centuries before Christ took Azazel to be a fallen angel, bound in the desert, to whom the sin of the whole earth was charged.

The New Testament knows this tradition. Jude quotes a prophecy found in 1 Enoch 1:9 and attributes it to “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam” (Jude 14). Jude and Peter both describe angels who sinned and are kept “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6; compare 2 Peter 2:4). That is the fate of Asael and his companions in the Book of the Watchers. Neither apostle names Azazel. The book uses 1 Enoch as a witness to how ancient Jews read Leviticus 16.

Azazel as the Devil

A later Jewish work, the Apocalypse of Abraham, carries the identification one step further. It was written after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, within a generation or two of the apostles, and in it Azazel is the chief of the evil powers. Andrei Orlov, who has studied the book’s use of the Day of Atonement, shows that it treats Azazel himself as the scapegoat.

When Azazel comes to Abraham in the form of an unclean bird, an angel who acts as a heavenly high priest drives him away and tells him that Abraham’s corruption has passed over to him. Abraham is then taught to send Azazel off into the untrodden parts of the earth, the same phrase the Greek Bible used for the goat’s destination. In a later vision Abraham sees Adam and Eve in the garden with a winged creature shaped like a serpent standing between them, feeding them from the forbidden tree. The angel tells him that this creature is Azazel.

So the author of the Apocalypse of Abraham identified the Azazel of Leviticus with the tempter of Eden.

Azazel is one part of the Day of Atonement. How Atonement Works follows both goats through the work of Christ: the blood brought into God’s presence, the sins carried away, and the defeat of the devil.

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The Book’s View: Azazel Is Satan

Chris White’s view in How Atonement Works draws these readings together. It is a synthesis: no single text says that Azazel is Satan, and the book reaches that identification as a conclusion from several texts read together. It takes three steps.

• Azazel is a personal being. This rests on the grammar of Leviticus 16:8, where “for Azazel” matches “for the LORD,” and it is the view of most scholars.
• He is the fallen angel of 1 Enoch. This is how Jews before Christ read the name: a being bound in the wilderness, with the sin of the earth charged to him.
• He is the one Scripture calls Satan. The Apocalypse of Abraham made this identification, and the book makes it with it, from the roles the texts give him.

The third step rests on a match of roles. In 1 Enoch, Azazel is the one to whom all sin is ascribed, who corrupted the whole earth, and who is bound to await judgment. In Scripture one figure fits that description: “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9), who is to be bound and cast “into the bottomless pit” (Revelation 20:2–3).

The setting of the rite fits this as well. Milgrom described the goat’s destination as the wilderness and the netherworld, since in the cultures around Israel the wilderness was a symbol of the realm of the dead. Michael Heiser, drawing on the same background and on the Jewish texts, argued that the desert where Azazel was bound stood for the realm of the dead.

Sent Back to Its Source

If Azazel is a person, why send the sins to him? The book answers with what it calls the return-to-sender view, which Heiser’s work suggested. It goes one step beyond what the ritual text states, and Chris White presents it as his own proposal.

Scholars of Leviticus already speak of the goat returning evil to its source. Milgrom wrote that the goat, though bound for the wilderness, was in reality returning evil to its source, the netherworld. Christophe Nihan describes every transgression against the creator’s order being sent back to Azazel. For these scholars the source is a realm, and Azazel is a name emptied of power. The book adds that the source has a name, as Leviticus says, and that the name belongs to a person.

In the Jewish reading of the name, Azazel was the one through whom the earth was corrupted and to whom all sin was ascribed. To ascribe sin to someone is to charge it to his account. On the Day of Atonement Israel’s sins were confessed and laid on the goat, and the goat was led out to the one to whom those sins were already charged. God forgave his people, and the burden went back to the one it belonged to in the first place.

The same point answers a long-standing objection: a goat sent to a demon would seem to be a sacrifice to a demon. The book answers 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, nobody calls that a gift.

The goat was presented alive before the LORD and let go. The law prescribes no slaughter in the wilderness and no offering of its blood to anyone, and the next chapter forbids sacrifices to the goat-demons altogether (Leviticus 17:7). Milgrom made the same observation: an animal laden with sin would be acceptable as an offering to no one, God or demon.

The book carries the question to Christ. Hebrews says that Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), which is what the second goat did for Israel. Some early Christian writers, including the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr, read the second goat as a picture of Christ. The chapters that follow in the book ask what Christ bore, where he carried it, and what the return meant for the devil.

Where This Understanding Comes From

How Atonement Works builds on a long history of study and credits it.Jacob Milgrom’s Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus supplies the grammatical case for a personal name, the link between the wilderness and the netherworld, and the language of returning evil to its source. Baruch Levine, Baruch Schwartz, David Wright and Christophe Nihan contributed to the debate over what the rite did. Richard Barry’s study of the two goats in Jewish temple theology gathers much of this work. Andrei Orlov’s study of the two goats in the Apocalypse of Abraham traces Azazel through the Jewish texts, and Paul Hanson’s work on 1 Enoch raised the question of its debt to Leviticus. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm suggested the return-to-sender reading. Among early Christian writers, the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr related the two goats to Christ.