Lev 16:8:
one for the LORD and one for
Azazel. As countless seals and other ancient inscriptions unearthed by
archaeologists attest, the use of a proper name or title, prefixed by the
letter lamed (“for”) as a lamed of possession, was a standard
form for indicating that the object in question belonged to So-and-so (as in lamelekh,
“the king’s”). These words, then (in the Hebrew, each is a single word, leYHWH
and la’azaz’el), are the actual texts written on the two lots. Much ink
since Late Antiquity has been spilled over the identity of Azazel, but the most
plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a
goatish demon or deity associated with the remote wilderness. The name appears
to reflect ‘ez, goat. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols.
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:421-22)
Lev 16:10:
to send it off to Azazel in
the wilderness. Approximate analogues to the so-called scapegoat ritual,
using different animals, appear in several different Mesopotamian texts. The
origins of the practice are surely in an archaic idea—that the polluting
substance generated by the transgressions of the people is physically carried
away by the goat. Azazel is not represented as a competing deity (or demon)
rivaling YHWH, but the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of
human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and
raw formlessness. An unapologetic reading might make out the trace of a
mythological plot, even if it is no more than vestigial in this monotheistic
context. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to
the primordial realm of “welter and waste” before the delineated world came
into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag. The early
rabbis, extending the momentum of the ritual, imagined the goat as being pushed
off a high cliff, but in our text it is merely sent out, or set free, in the
wild wilderness that is the realm of Azazel. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:422)
