On Sunday, I preached from the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). There’s lots of details and lots of theology there, so I had to cut out a discussion of an odd Hebrew word.

In Leviticus 16, a word appears 4x, and it is the only time the word appears anywhere in Scripture. The word azazel is the cause of some debate because it appears nowhere else in the canon.

Some translations render it as ‘scapegoat’ (NIV, NASB, KJV, Geneva Bible); The CSB translates it as “uninhabitable place.” Translating such conveys that the sins of the people were carried outside the camp, away from the people of God – as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).

Some Jewish traditions hold that azazel was a rocky precipice where the goat bearing the people’s sins was led. At the edge of the precipice, a heavy rock would be tied to the goats horns and the goat would be thrown over the edge to its destruction.

Other Jewish traditions, and the ESV, NRSV, RSV, NLT, ASV, NAB, Tanakh, and the Message take this word as a name, Azazel. In favor of interpreting as a personal name, OT scholar John Walton points writes “We know that ‘aza,zel should be the proper name of a party capable of ownership because a lot ceremony designated one goat layhwh, ‘belonging to Yahweh,’ and the other goat as la ‘aza,zel , ‘belonging to Azazel'”. While the word Azazel doesn’t appear elsewhere in the canon, it does show up in 1 Enoch, where Azazel is a desert demon. If this interpretation holds, God is, in essence, saying “sins come from Satan and his minions. Send them back to where they came from!” The goat serves as a sort of spiritual dump truck, loaded up with Israel’s sins and taking them to the demonic dumpster in the desert.

I really like that imagery. Sin doesn’t belong among the people of God. Send it away. Send the toxic waste of sin back to where it came from. Scapegoat = Sin Dump Truck.