Tyndale coined “scapegoat” to translate a strange Hebrew term, Azazel, whose real meaning scholars still argue over.
The word exists to solve one problem: Leviticus 16 describes two goats on the Day of Atonement. One is slaughtered as a sin offering. The other has hands laid on it, Israel's sins confessed over it, and is driven out into the wilderness, sent "for Azazel." That last phrase is the puzzle. Azazel might be a place name, a wilderness demon's name, or an abstract term for removal or departure. Nobody is fully sure.
English translations needed something for that goat to be called, so Tyndale built a new word: "escape-goat," shortened to scapegoat, meaning roughly the goat that gets away. It reads as a translation but it's really an interpretation, one guess among several about what Azazel meant, frozen into English and now used everywhere for an unrelated idea, someone unfairly blamed for others' faults.
After Aaron casts lots for the two goats, one for the LORD and the other for the scapegoat,
The two goats are chosen by lot, one for the LORD and one for Azazel.
But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to make atonement by sending it into the wilderness as the scapegoat.
States the goat's function plainly: to be presented alive and sent into the wilderness for Azazel.
Then he is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and rebellious acts of the Israelites in regard to all their sins. He is to put them on the goat’s head and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man appointed for the task.
Aaron lays both hands on the goat and confesses Israel's sins over it before it is sent away.
The man who released the goat as the scapegoat must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water; afterward he may reenter the camp.
The man who releases the goat must wash afterward, showing the ritual still carries real weight.
The King James Version kept Tyndale's "scapegoat" and most English Bibles since have followed it or leaned on it in footnotes. Modern translations like the ESV and NASB instead transliterate the Hebrew directly as "Azazel," admitting they don't know exactly what it means rather than picking a meaning for the reader. The NIV sometimes glosses it as "the goat of removal." Each choice commits English readers to one theory the Hebrew itself leaves open.
People assume "scapegoat" in the Bible means what it means in everyday speech, someone unjustly blamed for a mess they didn't cause. The Levitical goat is the opposite of that. It genuinely carries real, confessed guilt away from the camp; nothing about it is unfair or mistaken. A popular but shaky word study also claims Azazel definitely means "goat that departs" from Hebrew roots, treating a guess as settled fact.
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