Scapegoat
animal which is ritually burdened with the sins of others, then driven away
A scapegoat is one of a pair of goats used in the Yom Kippur Temple service during the era of the Temple in Jerusalem. The scapegoat had a band of red wool placed on it, and was then released into the wilderness, taking with it all the sins and impurities of the people as an act of symbolic atonement. The other goat was sacrificed. The ritual is described in the Book of Leviticus of the Torah, and was performed by the High Priest of Israel (of the lineage of Aaron):
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
Practices with some similarities to the scapegoat ritual also appear in Ancient Greece and Ebla. The scapegoat ritual was performed throughout the Second Temple period, with historians such as Josephus mentioning it. With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, the scapegoat ritual became impossible to perform according to its original procedure, as there was no more Temple or High Priest.
Origins
Some scholars have argued that the scapegoat ritual can be traced back to Ebla around 2400 BC, whence it spread throughout the ancient Near East.
Etymology
The Hebrew word 'ăzāzêl (Hebrew: עזאזל) occurs in Leviticus 16:8.
“Scapegoat” enters the record as animal which is ritually burdened with the sins of others, then driven away. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scapegoat, animal and ritually can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q245122. The Library of Congress control number is sh85117996. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scapegoat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.