who led the scapegoat inlev 16-1

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JBL 127, no. 3(2008): 417-422

Who Led the Scapegoat

in Leviticus 16:21?

RAYMOND WESTBROOK

[email protected] Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218

THEODORE J. LEWIS

[email protected]

The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218

A celebrated passage in the book of Leviticus prescribes the ritual of public

atonement for the collective sins of the Israelites, to be performed by Aaron, the

high priest, as part of the Yom Kippur purgation. It involves two goats, one to be

sacrificed as a sin offering and the other to be led out into the wilderness. The pro

cedure, according to Lev 16:21, is as follows:

Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess

over it all the iniquities of the people ofIsrael, and all their transgressions, all

their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into thewilderness by means of someone designated for the task(TIU WN). (NRSV)

The translation "someone designated for the task" reflects the later talmudic

tradition that a priest was assigned the task of leading the goat out and ensuring that

it did not return (m. Yoma 6:3). Other modern translations follow the LXX, which

has ("someone at hand, ready, prepared") for Tltf WK (cf.

Vg.: per hominem paratum). Jacob Milgrom, for example, renders the phrase as a

"man in waiting," and the Eberhard Bible as "(durch einen) bereitstehenden Mann."1

The descriptive phrase in all these translations is superfluous, telling us nothing of consequence about the man who is to lead the scapegoat. In this respect, the
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418 JournalofBiblicalLiterature 127, no. 3 (2008)

KJV's "a fit man" is no wit inferior. Like all the versions ancient and modern, it

reflects the translator's difficulties with a hapax legomenon ofuncertain meaning:

*. The apparent root is nv ("time, appointed time"), but translators have not suc

ceeded in deriving a term from it that is appropriate to the context (cf. Tg. Onq.:

gbar dizmn).

We suggest that the description of the man involved was of great significanceto the ritual and propose an entirely new interpretation based on parallel Hittite andGreek traditions2 and on a different etymology of the word ^tyo.

A number of Hittite rituals have been compared with the biblical scapegoat,but one is of particular interest because it involves both an animal and a humanactor to accompany the animal. The Ritual of Ashella prescribes the steps to be

taken to rid the army camp of plague:3

4-7. At evening time, the army commanders, whoever they are, all prepareramswhether white or dark does not matter at all11-14. At night they tie them in front of the tents and say as follows: "... Whatever god has made this plague (henkan), behold! I have bound up these rams foryou: be appeased!"15-17. At dawn I drive them out onto the steppe and with each ram they bringa jug ofbeer, a loaf of thick bread, and a . . . jug, and they make an adorned(unuwant) woman sit down before the king's tent and place with the woman a jugof beer and three loaves of thick bread.18-24. Then the army commanders place their hands on the rams and say asfollows: "Whatever god has made this plague, now behold! the rams are standing here and are very fat in entrails, heart, and loins. Let human flesh be hatefulto him and let him be appeased by these rams." And the army commanders bowto the rams and the king bows to the adorned woman.25-32. Then they bring the rams and the woman and the bread through thecamp and they drive them away onto the steppe. And they run away to theenemy's border without coming to any place ofours. And they say repeatedly asfollows: "Behold! Whatever evil (idalu) there was in the camp among the men,oxen, sheep, horses, mules, and donkeys, now behold! these rams and this womanhave taken it away from the camp. And the one that finds them, may that landtake this evil plague (idalu henkan)!*

The ritual is explicitly designed to transfer the evil (idalu) that is the cause ofthe plague (henkan) from the soldiers to the rams. They are chased out of camptogether with the woman, and both woman and sheep continue on until they reach

2 By doing a comparative legal analysis of three neighboring societies, we are by no means


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WestbrookandLewis: Who Led the Scapegoat? 419

enemyterritory. There is thus a double dispatch: the king and his troops send away

the woman and the rams, but it is she who has to herd the rams across the border.

The woman acts as a buffer between the king and the rams, who are contaminated

with the evil plague. In terms of awarriors' encampment, a woman, the symbol of

weakness, held the lowliest possible status. Nonetheless, she is dressed in finery,

apparentlyas a substitute for the king, just as the male rams are substitutes for the

warriors. In another Hittite plague ritual, the king exchanges clothes with a prisoner

ofwar, who is then described as "adorned" (unuwant),,4

In the Greekworld of the first millennium B.C.E.,more closelycontemporary

with the biblical source, the archetypal scapegoat is a person (), not an

animal. Various sources attest to the chasing out (or killing) of ascapegoat in order

to end a famine or plague, or else as part of an annual ritual.5 In descriptions ofactual rituals, as opposed to mythological accounts, the scapegoat was a marginal

person, such as a criminal,6

slave, or poor person. Indeed, the word

became a term of abuse, as were other terms also used to describe the scapegoat,

such as ("offscourings") and ("sweepings").

Notwithstanding his lowlystatus, the Greekscapegoat was sometimes dressed

infinery,like the Hittite woman. Jan Bremmer has explained the dichotomy bythe

fact that in theory aversion of the catastrophe demanded sacrifice of a valuable per

son, but in practice the upper ranks ofsocietywere unlikely to be forthcoming.Accordingly, an expendable subject was taken, but was treated as an important per

son.7

It may rather have been a question of substitution by appearance, as in the

Hittite rituals.

4

The ritual involves a prisoner ofwar and a captive woman. The former is expresslya sub

stitute for the king. They are to be the focus ofa plague-bringing enemy deity, male or female

respectively, and are to carrythe plague backinto their own country. SeeKBoXV116-22 in Hans

Martin Kmmel, Ersatzrituale fr den hethitischen Knig (Studien zu den Bogazky-Texten 3;

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967), 111-25.5 There is an extensive bibliography on the subject going back to 1913 in James George

Fraser, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic andReligion, part 6, The Scapegoat (3rd ed.; repr.,London: Macmillan, 1966). The evidence is surveyed by Jan Bremmer, "Scapegoat Rituals inAncient Greece," HSCP 87 (1983): 299-320. See also Walter Burkert, Structure andHistory inGreek Mythology and Ritual(Sather Classical Lectures 47; Berkeley: University of California Press,1979), 59-68, for a comparative analysis of the Greek, Hittite, and Hebrew sources. Some Greeksources suggest that the scapegoat was killed, but Dennis D. Hughes argues that the later lexicographers and scholiasts added the element of killing, whereas the earlier sources contemporarywith the living custom speak only of expulsion (Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece [London: Rout-ledge, 1991], 139-64; cf. Bremmer, "Scapegoat Rituals," 315-17).

6 Mary Douglas ("The Go-Away Goat," in The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception


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420 JournalofBiblicalLiterature 127, no. 3 (2008)

In Strabo's description ofa Leucadian custom, the qualification for the scape

goat in an annual ritual was not class or character in general, but actual criminal

culpability(10.2.9):

It was also the ancestral custom among the Leucadians every year during the sacrifice to Apollo for someone ofthose guilty (of crimes: ) to be thrown from the cliff for the sake of averting evil. To him wereattached feathers ofeverysort and birds capable of reducing with their flutteringthe force of the leap, and below many men would wait in a circle in small boatsand take him up. And when he had been taken up theywould do all they couldto remove him safely beyond the borders.

Several points are to be noted. Although the victim is a criminal, the ritual is not

punishment for his particular crime. Rather, it is apotropaicto ward offa poten

tial calamity to the community. The text gives the impression that the victim is

selected more or less at random from a number of suitable candidates. Nor is the

victim actually killed. Although he is required to make a hazardous leap into the

sea, measures are taken to ensure his survival.He is then hastily expelled from the

territory, perhaps without touching land again.

His banishment notwithstanding, in a sense it was the criminals good fortune

to be selected for this fate. The phrase suggests that he has been found

guilty but not yet punished.8 Exile in this ritualistic way may well have been a meansfor him to escape a more severe punishment.

In the light ofthese scapegoat traditions from neighboring societies, we may

reconsider the etymology of7 in Lev16:21. The traditional understanding oi^W

is to see it as a form ofT\V, the Hebrewword for "time" from the root , with th

doubling of the being the result of the regular assimilation nt>tt(*cintt>

cittt).

Owing to the contextual difficulties noted above, it seems more likely that *ny

(again with the common nt>ttassimilation) is from the Semitic root rttP. Here our

best evidence is from Syriac, Aramaic, and Arabic.The noun

cett(:>) is well attested in Syriac with the meaning "deceit, knavery,villainy, depravity."9 Robert Payne Smith notes that it often translates Hebrew J1N>"trouble, wickedness."10 Carl Brockelmann points out thatcettD is used to translateD"OQn, "lawlessness" (//ITCh, "wickedness") in Prov4:17.n

The verbal root for cett:> would be cnt. It appears in its assimilated form (nt >tt) in Syriac as ct(t) with the meaning "to defraud, be fraudulent, dishonest,

8 The term refers solelyto guilt, blame (or the accusation thereof). See the referencesin LJS, 44a s.v. I.


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Westbrook andLewis: Who Ledthe Scapegoat? 421

wicked."12

As pointed out byR. Payne Smith, the cognate form is well attested in

Arabic ascanita (with lack of assimilation) meaning "to be in distress, to meet with

hardship, to commit crimes, sins, or acts of disobedience deserving punishment."

13

Acognate noun Krtfg, "oppressor, wrongdoer," is used in the Targum of Prov

16:33 to translate the Hebrew Vorlage reflected by the LXX's , "ungodly,

unrighteous, unjust" (not in the MT). Brockelman also lists the Arabiccanatun,

"crimen."14

Elsewhere one could reconsider the etymology of the Ugaritic warrior goddesscAnatu. Suffice it to say that numerous suggestions have been offered in the past

with, in PeggyL. Day's opinion, "no conclusive results."15

Though warriors can be

painted in a positive light (cf. the HebrewPN^Wreferring toone of Davids mighty

warriors in 1 Chr 12:12), their violent actions (such ascAnatu's decapitations and

cutting off hands in KTU1.3.2) can easilybe cast in a negative light. Thus, the ety

mology underlying the Ugaritic DNcAnatu and the HebrewPN *ng may be cog

nate to the rootcntin Arabic, Syriac, and Aramaic mentioned above.

16

Lastly thefinalivowel on Til) (UPN) deserves comment. No satisfactory answer

has been presented for this vowel, even among those who follow the traditional

interpretation that the word designated a "timely" person. It is most likely not a

remnant of the original case system or associated with the so-called hireq com-

paginis, which is mostly restricted to nouns in construct and participle forms inpoetry.

17A better option would be the relational/adjectival suffix t(the so-called

nisbe suffix), which is well known through its use on gentilics and ordinal numbers.

According to Bruce K. Waltke and Michael O'Connor, the suffix can be used "tomake adjectives from substantives" with examples such as bxi "foot" > 'Xl"foot-(soldier)," nDJ "strangeness" > nM "strange,"and "below" > "lower."18

Thus TU) UPN could designate a criminal man.

From the parallel rituals, the rationale for choosing such a person becomesperfectlyclear. He is the ideal candidate for taking away the goat carrying the com-

1 2

R. Payne Smith, Thesaurus SyriacusII, 3008; J Payne Smith, Compendious Syriac Dic

tionary, 431, Jessie Payne Smith Margohouth, Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus ofR Payne

Smith (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981), 256, Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, 5351 3

R. Payne Smith, Thesaurus SyriacusII, 3008; see Edward William Lane, Arabic-English

Lexicon, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1984), 2168-69.1 4

Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, 535.1 5

PeggyL. Day, "Anat," in DDD, 36.16There is a possibility that the root may also be found in the opening line of the larger of

the two Arslan Tash inscriptions which reads Ihst Ief and could refer to an "incantation against


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422 JournalofBiblical Literature 127, no. 3 (2008)

munity's sins. As in the case of the Leukadian scapegoat, his crime is not specified,

but it symbolizes impurityakin to that of the goat, except that the latter had to be

made impure bya ritual oftransference. Like the Hittite woman, he plays the role

ofa buffer between thehigh priest and the sin-ridden scapegoat and there is a dou

ble dispatch: of the " UPN bythe high priest and of the goat bythe *np WX.

Unlike in the parallels, the biblical criminal could eventually return after dis

patching the scapegoat and could presumably escape further punishment for his

offence.19

The difference is based on impeccable logic. Since the purpose of the

biblical ritual is to remove not a plague (or similar divine punishment for sin) but

the actual sins of everyIsraelite, the criminal must have had his sin removed as

well.

1 9

He did, however, have to wash his clothes and bathe before he was allowed to reenter the

camp (Lev16:26). The one who burns the sacrificial bull and goat of the sin offering outside the

camp must perform the same cleansing ritual (Lev16:27-28).


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who led the scapegoat inlev 16-1

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