Azazel: the mysterious wilderness destination or being to whom the second goat of the Day of Atonement was sent away carrying Israel's sins.
This word appears only in the instructions for the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, where the high priest casts lots over two goats. One lot is marked "for the LORD," and that goat is offered in sacrifice. The other lot is marked "for Azazel," and that goat is not killed: after the people's sins are confessed over its head, it is driven out alive into the desert. Because the two lots are set side by side in exactly the same way, one for the LORD and one for Azazel, the word almost certainly names a real counterpart on the other side of the ritual, not just a purpose or a thing.
What that counterpart is has been argued for two thousand years, and there is no settled answer. Most scholars today take Azazel as the name of a wilderness power, a demon or hostile spirit of the desert waste to whom the sin-laden goat is dispatched (though never sacrificed). An older Jewish tradition read it as a place, a rugged desert cliff off which the goat was later thrown. And the tradition behind the familiar English word "scapegoat" broke it into "the goat that goes away," reading it as removal rather than a name. The three readings sit behind the different translations you will see, and the strongest current view is the first.
Whatever the name meant at its root, the point of the ritual in Leviticus is clear and controlled: the goat is sent away, not offered up. Both goats first stand before the LORD, and only one is given over to be sacrificed. The other simply carries the year's guilt out of the camp and into empty land, so that the sin is removed from the people rather than handed over as a gift. The very next chapter forbids Israel to sacrifice to the goat-demons of the open country, which is part of why many read the sending-away here as deliberately kept separate from worship.
Disputed
What or whom the word denotes: a wilderness demon or divine being, a place, an abstract sense of removal, or something else.
- majorityA supernatural being: the name of a wilderness demon or chthonic divine power to whom the sin-laden goat is dispatched (though not offered), most likely from an older form meaning something like "El is fierce." This is the majority position in critical scholarship since roughly 1980, resting above all on the parallel wording of the two lots, one for the LORD and one for Azazel, which requires Azazel to be a comparable personal recipient.; Bernd Janowski, "Azazel," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (1999), 128-131; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (1991), 1020-1021, 1071-1079; David P. Wright, "Azazel," in Anchor Bible Dictionary 1 (1992), 536-537; Hayim Tawil, "Azazel the Prince of the Steppe: A Comparative Study," ZAW 92 (1980), 43-59
- minorityA place name: a rugged desert cliff or hard mountain, the destination to which the goat was led. Dominant in Jewish exegesis from the Talmud through the Middle Ages and given a philological defense in modern scholarship by taking the final letter as a word-forming ending on a root meaning "rough, strong."; b. Yoma 67b; Rashi on Leviticus 16:8; G. R. Driver, "Three Technical Terms in the Pentateuch," Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956), 97-98; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus / Va-yikra, JPS Torah Commentary (1989), Excursus 4
- minorityAn abstract term for removal, parsed as "the goat that goes away" or "entire removal." This is the analysis behind the ancient versions and the English word "scapegoat," but its grammar is widely judged untenable, since it rests on an unattested root and mixes Hebrew and Aramaic elements.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, trans. Tregelles, 617; Brown-Driver-Briggs, s.v. עזאזל, 736