Azazel

Place name, abstract noun ("complete removal"), and personal name all have defenders, and the older English versions chose the abstraction and gave us "scapegoat." The Masoretic Text keeps aza'zel as a single word, and the parallel structure of the two lots is itself an argument for the personal name: Yahweh is a proper name, and Hebrew parallelism suggests its counterpart is one too. On that reading the ritual doesn't offer anything to Azazel. It sends the sin-goat into territory under his jurisdiction, outside land held holy for Yahweh. The LXX's apopompe, "sending away," is the likely root of "scapegoat" through 'ez plus 'zl, "the goat that goes away." William Tyndale coined the English word "scapegoat" in his 1530 Pentateuch, building the compound to capture the ritual's function instead of transliterating Azazel or leaving it untranslated, and Symmachus, Aquila, the Vulgate, and later Luther all read the term as the goat's action rather than a being's name. DDD sorts the scholarship into three models: a nomadic desert-demon reading (the goat is sent to Azazel in the wilderness); an Egyptian derivation (Görg's 'd3-dr, "the expelled culprit," tied to Seth); and a background in South Anatolian and North Syrian elimination rites with Hittite and Hurrian parallels from Kizzuwatna, which DDD's contributor judges the most plausible both conceptually and philologically. On that reconstruction, the desert-demon reading isn't original to Leviticus 16 but grew up as the chapter's tradition formed, once postexilic monotheism needed to interpret an inherited ritual term.

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