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You have probably seen it happen. A project falls apart at work, and by Friday everyone has quietly agreed it was the new person’s fault. A family argument goes sideways, and somehow it always lands on the same sibling. We have a word for that person. We call them the scapegoat.
Here is the strange part. The scapegoat in the Bible was almost the opposite. It was not an innocent animal blamed so everyone else could feel clean. It carried guilt that was real, guilt everyone openly admitted was theirs, and it carried it so far away that it never came back.
Rosh Hashanah began on September 11, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins at sundown on Sunday, September 20. So this is a good week to look at what that ancient goat was really for, and why it matters for whatever you are still carrying.
Where the Word “Scapegoat” Came From
The word is younger than you might think. William Tyndale made it up in 1530, while translating the first books of the Bible into English. He was working from the Latin caper emissarius, “the goat sent away,” and he wrote it as “(e)scape goat”: the goat that escapes. Over time it slid together into one word.
Behind the Latin sits a Hebrew word in Leviticus 16 that nobody fully understands: azazel. Careful readers have landed in three places:
- The goat that goes away. The oldest translations, the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, read it this way. Tyndale followed them.
- A place. Some Jewish interpreters, including the medieval commentator Rashi, took it as the name of a rough, steep cliff out in the wilderness.
- A name. Because the verse sets “for the LORD” right beside “for Azazel,” some scholars think it names a being of the desert. The name Azazel shows up that way in the later book of 1 Enoch.
Nobody knows for certain, and it is fine to say so. But notice what none of those three meanings involves: blaming someone who didn’t do it.
That meaning came much later. The etymology dictionary Etymonline dates the sense “one who is blamed or punished for the mistakes or sins of others” to 1824, almost three hundred years after Tyndale. For most of its life in English, the word simply meant the goat from Leviticus.
This story runs straight into the last week of Jesus’ life: a high priest, a council, a crowd, and a choice between Jesus and a prisoner named Barabbas. If you’d love to hear that whole story told the way the Bible tells it, you can get the complete Book of Matthew free, as an immersive PDF and a 28-chapter audiobook:
The Scapegoat in the Bible and the Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16 describes the one day each year when the high priest went into the most holy place on behalf of the whole nation. Two goats were brought to him. “And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat” (Leviticus 16:8).
The first goat was a sin offering, and its blood was carried inside. The second goat stayed alive. This is where it gets personal:
“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, KJV)
Read it slowly. Before anything is sent away, something is said out loud. The high priest confesses. Not “the goat did this.” Not “those people over there did this.” All the iniquities of the children of Israel. Theirs. Named, owned, and admitted in front of everyone.
Only then does the goat walk. And it walks “unto a land not inhabited.” No town. No road back. No one to hand the sins back to.
What the Old Jewish Sources Remember
Leviticus gives the bare instructions. The Mishnah, a collection of Jewish teaching written down around the year 200, remembers how the day actually looked while the Temple still stood. Three details are worth knowing (quoted from the William Davidson translation of Mishnah Yoma, chapter 6):
- The crowd wanted their own sins gone. As the goat was led out, some Jews from Babylon who were living in Jerusalem would pull at its hair and say: “Take our sins and go, take our sins and go, and do not leave them with us.” Our sins. Nobody in that crowd was pretending to be innocent.
- It was never coming back. There were ten rest-booths along the road for the man leading it, and at the end, a cliff. There he pushed the goat over the edge. Leviticus only says the goat was let go in the wilderness. The Mishnah records that, in Temple days, coming back simply wasn’t possible.
- A red strip turned white. One teacher, Rabbi Yishmael, remembered a strip of crimson wool tied at the Temple entrance that turned white when the goat reached the wilderness. He tied it to Isaiah 1:18, where sins like scarlet become white as snow.
Since the Temple was destroyed in the year 70, there has been no goat. For Jewish families, Yom Kippur is still a living holy day of fasting, prayer and repentance, and many synagogues still read the old ritual aloud in their service. It deserves to be met with respect, not just mined for illustrations.
Two Kinds of Scapegoat
Put the two meanings side by side and the flip is hard to miss.
The modern scapegoat is innocent. The guilt belongs to the group, but the group won’t say so. Blaming one person lets everyone else feel clean without changing a thing. And the scapegoat never really goes away. They get blamed again next time.
The scapegoat in the Bible carried guilt everyone agreed was real. The people said so, out loud. The goat carried it away. And it didn’t come back.
In other words, modern scapegoating is a way of not confessing. The ancient ritual was a way of confessing all the way down.
The first scapegoat wasn’t blamed. It was confessed over.
The High Priest Who Described Both
Now for the detail that is easy to read right past. In John 11, Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead, and the religious leaders are frightened. “Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles” (John 11:47). One man speaks up:
“And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” (John 11:49-50, KJV)
That is the modern scapegoat, almost word for word. One man goes down so the rest of us stay safe. Whether he is guilty doesn’t come into it. It is simply “expedient.” And from that day on, John says, “they took counsel together for to put him to death” (John 11:53).
But look at who said it. Caiaphas was the high priest: the one person in the nation whose job on the Day of Atonement was to lay his hands on a goat’s head and confess the people’s sins. John points at that twice. First, “being the high priest that same year.” Then again: “And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation” (John 11:51).
So Caiaphas meant the modern kind. And without knowing it, he was describing the ancient kind.
Jesus holds both meanings at once. Like the modern scapegoat, He was innocent. Even Pilate said, “I find no fault in this man” (Luke 23:4). But unlike the modern scapegoat, what Jesus carried wasn’t a lie someone pinned on Him. It was real sin. Ours. The kind the old ritual confessed out loud.
To be precise, the New Testament never actually calls Jesus “the scapegoat.” When the book of Hebrews reaches for the Day of Atonement, it points to the other goat, the sin offering whose body was burned outside the camp (Leviticus 16:27): “For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:11-12). The two goats of that one day belong together, and many Christians see both of them pointing to the cross.
What This Means for What You’re Carrying
Here is why this matters on an ordinary weekday. There are really only two things a person can do with guilt.
You can find a scapegoat, the modern kind. Blame a parent, a boss, an ex, a coworker, “the system.” It works for about an afternoon. Then the guilt is still yours, and now you have a grudge to go with it.
Or you can do what the Day of Atonement did. Say it out loud. Name what is yours. Then let it be carried somewhere it doesn’t come back from. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The Hebrew picture of this is lovely too; if you want to go deeper, here is what the Hebrew word for forgiveness really means.
The surprising gift of the Day of Atonement is that confession isn’t the punishment. It is the door out. The goat doesn’t carry the sins you hide. It carries the ones you name.
Scripture has more than one picture of this. The Torah’s cities of refuge gave a guilty person a place to run to instead of a price to pay. And Psalm 103 says it simply: “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). A land not inhabited.
And if you have been the scapegoat, the one who always got blamed, the cross says something to you too: God knows the difference between being blamed and being guilty. Forgiving the people who did that to you can feel impossible. Our free Am I Ready to Forgive? check-in can help you see honestly where you are, with no pressure.
Actions to Take Today
- Catch one “their fault” sentence. The next time you hear yourself blame someone today, even in your head, add four words: “And my part was…” Then finish the sentence honestly.
- Say one thing out loud. Find two quiet minutes: a walk, a bus seat, a locked door. Tell God one specific thing that is truly yours, in plain words, the way the high priest did. No excuses attached. Then read 1 John 1:9 and leave it there.
- Stand next to today’s scapegoat. Think of the person who always gets blamed at your work, school or in your family. Send them one kind message, or say one fair sentence the next time their name comes up.
Journaling Prompts
- Where in your life is it easier to blame someone else than to say, “that part was mine”?
- Is there something you have already confessed to God that you keep dragging back out of the wilderness? What would it look like to leave it there?
- Have you ever been someone else’s scapegoat? What would change if you truly believed God sees the difference between being blamed and being guilty?
A Prayer for Letting It Go
God, I’m tired of pointing at other people so I don’t have to look at myself. So here it is, plainly: the things I’ve done, the things I’ve blamed on others, and the things I’ve been carrying for years. Thank You that Jesus carried what I couldn’t, and that You don’t send it back. Help me leave it in the wilderness, and help me be fair to the people I’ve made carry my share. Amen.
Let’s Talk
Why do you think it’s so much easier for a group, whether a family, a team or a whole community, to find one person to blame than to simply say “we got this wrong”? Share your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear what you’ve seen.
Share This
- “I always thought a scapegoat was someone blamed for what they didn’t do. In the Bible, it carried sins people openly admitted were theirs, and it never came back. #DayOfAtonement #YomKippur #Faith”
- “The first scapegoat wasn’t blamed. It was confessed over. I’m learning that owning my part isn’t the punishment. It’s the door out.”
- “Caiaphas said it was ‘expedient for us, that one man should die for the people.’ He meant it coldly. Without knowing it, he was describing exactly what Jesus came to do.”
Questions About the Scapegoat in the Bible
What does scapegoat mean in the Bible?
In the Bible, the scapegoat is the live goat in Leviticus 16 on the Day of Atonement. The high priest laid both hands on its head, confessed all the sins of the people of Israel over it, and sent it away into the wilderness “unto a land not inhabited.” The biblical scapegoat was not blamed for something it did not do; it symbolically carried away sins the people openly admitted were their own.
Who invented the word scapegoat?
The English word “scapegoat” was coined by William Tyndale in 1530 in his English translation of the first books of the Bible. Tyndale was rendering the Latin phrase caper emissarius, “the goat sent away,” and wrote it as “(e)scape goat.” The modern meaning of a person unfairly blamed for the faults of others is recorded by 1824, according to Etymonline.
What does Azazel mean in Leviticus 16?
The meaning of the Hebrew word azazel in Leviticus 16 is disputed. The Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate read it as “the goat that goes away,” which led to the English word scapegoat. Some Jewish interpreters, including Rashi, read azazel as the name of a rugged cliff in the wilderness, and others read it as the name of a wilderness being, a name that appears in the later book of 1 Enoch. No single view has settled the question.
Is Jesus the scapegoat?
The New Testament never directly calls Jesus the scapegoat. The book of Hebrews connects Jesus to the Day of Atonement through the sin offering whose body was burned outside the camp, saying that Jesus “suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). Many Christians see Jesus in both goats of Leviticus 16: innocent like a modern scapegoat, yet carrying real sin away like the goat sent into the wilderness.
When is Yom Kippur in 2026?
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins at sundown on Sunday, September 20, 2026, and ends at nightfall on Monday, September 21, 2026. It is the holiest day of the Jewish year, observed with fasting, prayer and repentance. The scapegoat ritual described in Leviticus 16 has not been performed since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70.
