On Yom Kippur, Israel's Sins Were Sent to the Desert on a Goat

Every Yom Kippur in the ancient Temple, two goats were brought before the High Priest. Lots were cast. One goat was sacrificed to God. The other was not sacrificed at all — it was sent alive into the wilderness, carrying the sins of the entire nation on its head, dispatched to a place called Azazel. This ritual is one of the strangest in all of Torah, and the rabbis never stopped arguing about what Azazel actually is.

What the Torah Actually Says

The ritual is described in Leviticus 16, which details the entire Yom Kippur Temple service. Two goats are brought. The High Priest casts lots: one lot inscribed "for God" (la-Adonai), one inscribed "for Azazel" (la-Azazel). The goat chosen for God is slaughtered as a sin offering. The High Priest then lays both hands on the other goat, confesses all the sins of Israel over it, and hands it to a designated person who leads it into the wilderness — specifically, to a rocky cliff called Tzuk HaAzel — where it is pushed off and killed.

What is Azazel? The Torah does not explain. The word itself is obscure. It may mean “strong place” (a geographic term), “the goat that goes away” (etymology of the English word “scapegoat”), or — as most later Jewish tradition holds — the name of a supernatural entity: a fallen angel associated with the wilderness, sin, and rebellion.

Azazel in the Book of Enoch

The first-century BCE apocryphal text 1 Enoch, preserved in full in the Ethiopian canon and in fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1947), gives Azazel a full biography. He is one of the Watchers — the angels who descended to earth, took human wives, and taught humanity forbidden knowledge. Specifically, Azazel taught men how to make weapons of war and women how to make cosmetics — both understood as corrupting influences that amplified human capacity for violence and vanity. For this, Azazel is bound in the wilderness of Dudael, buried under a pile of sharp rocks, awaiting the final judgment.

The ritual of Yom Kippur, in this reading, is not sending sins to a neutral geographic location. It is returning humanity's sins to their original teacher — handing back to Azazel what ultimately came from Azazel. The gesture is theologically precise: what you gave us, we give back. Our apocrypha collection contains extensive 1 Enoch material tracing the Watcher mythology.

What Did the Rabbis Think?

The Talmudic rabbis were uncomfortable with the idea of sending an offering to a supernatural being. The Mishnah (compiled c. 200 CE) describes the Yom Kippur service in detail but carefully avoids interpreting Azazel as an entity. Nachmanides (1194–1270 CE, Catalonia), in his Torah commentary, takes a more direct approach: he acknowledges that the Azazel ritual does appear to involve sending something to a supernatural being, but argues this is not worship of that being — rather, it is a divinely commanded act in which the adversarial forces of the cosmos receive something and, in receiving it, acknowledge God's sovereignty over them. Sin is returned to the powers associated with sin.

Maimonides (1138–1204 CE, Egypt), characteristically, rationalized differently: the dramatic desert dispatch was simply designed to give the people a visceral, physical sense of being freed from sin. The goat going away was a psychological mechanism — a ritual theater of release.

The Red Thread That Changed Color

The Mishnah (Yoma 6:8) records a detail that became one of the most haunting signs of the Temple's fall. Each Yom Kippur, a red thread was tied to the door of the Temple sanctuary and another to the goat's neck. When the goat was pushed off the cliff, the thread on the Temple door would miraculously turn white — in fulfillment of Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall become white as snow.” The Talmud (Yoma 39b) records that for forty years before the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, the thread stopped turning white. The sign had ceased. The people knew something had broken.

Azazel After the Temple

With the Temple's destruction, the physical Yom Kippur service became impossible. Prayer replaced sacrifice; the verbal confessions of the Amidah replaced the High Priest's hands on the goat. Yet Azazel did not disappear from Jewish consciousness. The Kabbalah texts continued to discuss him as a cosmic force associated with impurity and the wilderness, and Yom Kippur prayers still reference the ritual, now performed only in memory and aspiration.

Read the full Yom Kippur Temple service accounts and Azazel mythology in our collection at JewishMythology.com.