The Day of Atonement

Leviticus 16 begins by dating itself: 'after the death of two of Aaron's sons when they approached the presence of the LORD.' You cannot read the chapter properly without chapter 10.

Nadab and Abihu offer unauthorised fire before the LORD, 'contrary to His command', and fire comes out from the LORD and consumes them. Moses' explanation to Aaron is severe: to those who come near me I will show my holiness. Aaron remains silent. The text gives no further comment, and the commentators have supplied many: drunkenness, on the strength of the prohibition that follows; improper incense; entering where they should not; presumption. None is certain.

What the placement establishes is the problem Leviticus 16 solves. The presence Israel wanted is now living in the middle of the camp, and it is not tame. Access has to be regulated, not because God is capricious, but because holiness and uncleanness cannot occupy the same space without consequence.

Chapter 16 therefore opens with a warning that Aaron must not come into the holy place whenever he chooses, lest he die, and then gives the one procedure by which he may.

The high priest sets aside his ornate garments and wears plain linen, the clothing of a servant. He bathes. He offers a bull for himself and his household first, which is a striking admission built into the liturgy: the mediator needs the rite as much as the people do.

Two goats are presented, and lots are cast. One lot is for the LORD, one for azazel (the BSB's text says scapegoat; see section 3). The first goat is killed as a purification offering. Its blood is taken through the curtain, the only entry of the year, and sprinkled on and before the mercy seat.

Here is the part modern readers usually miss. The blood is applied to the sanctuary, its furnishings, and the altar, and the stated purpose is to cleanse them: 'because of the impurities and rebellious acts of the Israelites in regard to all their sins' (16:16). Israel's sin accumulates on the place where God dwells. The day's first business is decontaminating God's house.

Then the second goat. Aaron lays both hands on its head and confesses over it all the iniquities of Israel, putting them on the head of the goat, and it is led away into the wilderness by a man appointed for the task, 'The goat will carry on itself all their iniquities into a solitary place' (16:22).

Two goats, two mechanisms: blood that cleanses the place, and a live animal that carries guilt away from the camp. Neither alone would do what the day does.

The Hebrew word azazel occurs only here, four times, and its meaning is genuinely unknown. Three proposals hold the field.

The first reads it as a compound meaning something like the goat that goes away, which is where Tyndale's 'scapegoat' comes from, followed by the King James and much of English tradition. It is old: the Septuagint already rendered the word as the goat 'sent away' (apopompaios), and the Vulgate as caper emissarius. The BSB follows it too: its text prints scapegoat at 16:8, 10 and 26, and only a footnote at verse 8 gives the literal 'the other to Azazel'. That is a translator's choice among the three proposals, not something the Hebrew settles; the footnote at verse 8 is the only trace of the alternatives.

The second takes it as a proper name, a demon or wilderness power, which the parallel construction supports: one lot for the LORD, one lot for azazel, as though naming two recipients. The Book of Enoch and later Jewish texts treat Azazel as a named being. Advocates stress that the goat is not sacrificed to this figure; it is sent out to the realm of chaos, carrying what does not belong in the camp.

The third takes it as a place, a rocky or remote destination; the Mishnah (Yoma 6) has the goat pushed over a cliff, and the Talmud glosses azazel as the hardest of the mountains, a gloss that rests on the sense of az, hard or rough, and some scholars compare Arabic 'azaz, rough ground.

Nothing in the ritual's logic requires resolving this, and a teacher should say so. The function is clear whatever the word means: the sin is removed to somewhere else, and the somewhere else is outside the ordered world of the camp.

Christian readers come to this chapter with Hebrews in hand, and Hebrews 9 and 10 do use it directly: a high priest entering the holy place once for all with his own blood rather than yearly with the blood of goats. The typological reading is not an imposition on the text by later readers; it is a New Testament argument in its own right.

Two cautions for teaching it. First, do the Leviticus work before the Hebrews work. A student who can only read chapter 16 as an illustration of the cross has not understood what it meant to the people who observed it for centuries, and will misread Hebrews too, since Hebrews argues from a real understanding of the rite.

Second, notice that the two goats do not map neatly onto one figure. Christian tradition has long observed that the ritual needs both a death and a removal to say what it says, and has variously seen both goats as aspects of a single work. Let that complexity stand rather than flattening it.

And note what Leviticus itself asks of Israel on this day: 'you shall humble yourselves and not do any work' (16:29). The Hebrew behind the first part is literally to afflict the soul, which the BSB footnote also offers as 'deny yourselves', and it was later understood as fasting. The most elaborate ritual in the book is accompanied by the people doing nothing at all. Yom Kippur remains, for Jews today, the most solemn day of the year, and its shape is still recognisably this chapter's.