This week’s Torah portion contains the origins of Judaism’s holiest day of the year–including the scapegoat ritual, which has long been considered theologically suspicious. Did the pre-Jewish religion of ancient Judah involve an offering to a demonic power on the day of atonement? Did it, on the other hand, introduce a powerfully collective popular element into Israelite religion, which set it apart from the surrounding empires, and nations? And are these two possibilities connected?
Now, there is no hint of sketchy demonic offerings in our current Jewish Yom Kippur–it would violate Judaism’s core monotheistic principles. Yet major Rabbinic interpreters like Nachmanides, whose Kabbalistic leanings made him sensitive to mythic elements in scripture, thought the Torah had them. Were they hallucinating or–as another great Rabbinic interpreter, Ibn Ezra, suggests–is there a deeper mystery here?
Paul was Wrong: the Jews Weren’t Doomed
First and foremost this week’s Torah portion is about redemption: it gives us the original ritual of salvation from sin, Yom Kippur. In contrast to Saint Paul’s Christian ideal of an individual, once-and-for-all redemption–accepting Jesus into one’s heart to transform one’s soul–Yom Kippur is a distinctively group mode of salvation. Contrary to Paul’s famously slanted version of Jewish doom in Galatians, where he claims that our inability to follow every single one of God’s laws saddled us with an inescapable, fatal burden of sin, Yom Kippur is the collective ritual that washes away all the cosmically significant sins of the community.
Now, in Jewish tradition sins against other people can only be forgiven by the people themselves, by acting to make amends and beg forgiveness. But Yom Kippur handles the God part, fixing the cosmic order that our sins offend. This is why for Rabbinic Judaism the day of atonement was considered so holy that it is simply called Yoma’, “the day,” in the core works of Jewish law (the Mishnah and Talmud) devoted to it.*
The Torah’s creators made Yom Kippur central for a reason: its ceremony (Leviticus 16:2–28) gets the lengthiest and most detailed description of any ritual in the Bible. The editors also placed it at the literal center, in the middle of the middle book. In the Priestly calendar, it was assigned to the beginning of the year. Positioned at the center of Priestly text, time, and space, it redeems the center of the ritual universe. And this ritual not only redeems the entire people (16:17, 20–21) and purifies the very sources of purity—the sanctuary and priesthood (16:16–17)—it also causes God himself to appear.
But Where Does Yom Kippur Come From?
So why is the original Yom Kippur ritual so insanely strange? The Torah’s greatest ritual honor was granted to a text full of alien features. It uses terminology found nowhere else in Leviticus and places an otherwise unknown entity named Azazel on par with the Lord by presenting it with a sacrifice, offered in a way unknown elsewhere in the Torah. Its most distinctive public act, the scapegoat ritual, violates two fundamental patterns of Priestly ritual. For the Torah, sacrifice is typically bloody and always silent. By combining a bloodless animal sacrifice with a speech at its climax, the scapegoat ritual breaks both those patterns. Put together, these distinctive features convinced many scholars that this ritual was originally independent of the rest of the Torah. So what was it really for?
Interpreters have generally placed the scapegoat in an ahistorical and apolitical framework (as with Priestly ritual in general): in comparative religious categories, it is an expiation ritual, designed to remove pollution. But lots of people have expiation rituals–why is this one so central? Whatever system scholars have sought to find, the scapegoat has ended up escaping it*
In my first book I argued that if we see Yom Kippur historically and politically, we can see it clearly as a ritual of popular action, of a people’s collective redemption. And as we will see, it has a remarkable Canaanite predecessor which reveals the very process by which the people could become a fundamental ritual actor in the first place. But first, Satan (?)!
In Leviticus, the Day of Atonement ritual is framed as a command from the Lord to Moses about how the original Priest, Moses’ brother Aaron, is to enter the innermost chamber of the sanctuary without dying. This place, referred to here (and nowhere else in the Torah!) as haqqôdeš “the Holy,” is normally lethal to humans because of the divine presence within. The Lord reveals that he regularly becomes visible inside the sanctuary: “I appear in a cloud over the Atonement Place” (Lev. 16:2). Aaron is thus to risk death to enter the innermost chamber. First he dons priestly clothing and, as the representative of all Israel, takes animals to offer, provided by “the assembly of the Israelites,” including two goats, to divide between the Lord and another being:
He will take the two goats and he will stand them before the Lord at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. And Aaron will cast lots over the two goats: one lot for the Lord and one lot for Azazel. And Aaron will bring near the goat on which the lot for the Lord fell and make it a sin-offering. And the goat on which the lot for Azazel fell he will stand alive before the Lord, to atone through it, to send it to Azazel, into the desert. (Lev 16:7b–10)
This passage is nothing short of astonishing for the aggressively monotheistic book of Leviticus , which nowhere else seriously contemplates other divine powers. Here a divine being named Azazel receives offerings matching those for the Lord. Medieval Jewish interpreters were disturbed: How can Israelites atone by sacrificing to a being that is not God? Azazel’s divine power continues to demand explanation.
Some like Rashi tried to explain it away, but it was the Torah’s greatest Kabbalistic commentator Nachmanides (the 13th-century Italian sage Moses ben Nachman AKA RaMBaN) who drew the jaw-dropping logical conclusion: the goat is for a demonic entity named Azazel who is equivalent to Satan. After repeating the conventional explanation that “Azazel” means “a remote, sharp precipice” which the goat is to fall off of in a tragic, Warner Brothers-like death, he comes clean. He says the actual interpretation is alluded to, but concealed as a mystery by the great grammatical and linguistic commentator Ibn Ezra. Ramban starts out by quoting this dark hint:
‘I will reveal to you part of the secret by hint: when you are at thirty-three you will know it.’ Now of Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra it may be said that he of a faithful spirit conceals a matter, (Proverbs 11:13). and I will not be the tattler who reveals his secret, since our Rabbis of blessed memory have already revealed it in many places…
It is explained more clearly in (the Midrash collection) the Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer: “The reason why they would give Sammael [i.e., Satan] a conciliatory gift on the Day of Atonement, was so that he should not negate their offerings, as it is said, one lot for the Eternal, and the other lot for Azazel, the lot of the Holy One, blessed by He, to be a burnt-offering, and the lot of Azazel to be ‘the goat of sin,’ bearing upon it all the iniquities of Israel, as it is said, And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities.
The Midrash continues, claiming that the offering forestalls the objections of The Satan to the Israelites’ prayers. Who is this Satan that God would listen to him? Not the Devil of popular culture or even the Satan of early Christian theology, a kind of super-demon who opposes God. In the Hebrew Bible the original Satan is God’s own cantankerous District Attorney, called Ha-Sāṭān “the prosecutor” in Job 1 or Zechariah 3–the origin of our “Satan”)
When Sammael (=Sāṭān) saw that he could find no sin on the Day of Atonement amongst them [the children of Israel], he said to the Holy One, blessed by He: ‘Master of all worlds! You have one people on earth who are comparable to the ministering angels in the heavens. Just as the ministering angels are barefoot, so are the Israelites barefoot [i.e., do not wear leather shoes] on the Day of Atonement. Just as the ministering angels do not eat or drink, so is there no eating or drinking in Israel on the Day of Atonement….Just as the ministering angels are free from all sin, so are the Israelites free from all sin on the Day of Atonement.’ And the Holy One, blessed be He, hears the testimony concerning Israel from their prosecutor (i.e. Ha-Sāṭān), and He atones for the altar and for the Sanctuary, and for the priests and for all the people of the assembly.
But Ramban is not content with this happy picture of a domesticated demon, a kind of court Satan. Instead he digs down into the Israelites’ original polytheism and comes up with a more startling, and theologically challenging, reading:
Now this is the secret of the matter. They used to worship “other gods,” namely, the angels, bringing offerings of a sweet savor to them, similarly to that which it says, and you set My oil and My incense before (these other gods). My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a sweet savor, and thus it was; says the Eternal God (Ezekiel 16:18-19). ..Now the Torah has absolutely forbidden to accept them as deities, or to worship them in any manner.
This all sounds fine and monotheistic. Why the offering to Azazel??
However, the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us that on the Day of Atonement we should let loose a goat in the wilderness, to that “prince” who rules over wastelands, and this [goat] is fitting for it because he is its master, and destruction and waste emanate from that power, which in turn is the cause of the stars of the sword, wars, quarrels, wounds, plagues, division and destruction. In short, it is the spirit of the sphere of Mars, and its portion among the nations is Esau (Jacob’s hairy, goat-like brother in Genesis, equated by the Rabbis with the violent Roman empire), the people that inherited the sword and the wars, and among animals [its portion consists of] the se’irim (hairy goat demons) and the goats.
Wait, so this is an offering for a hairy demon?
Now the intention in our sending away the goat to the desert was not that it should be an offering from us to it — Heaven forbid! Rather, our intention should be to fulfill the wish of our Creator, Who commanded us to do so.
Okayyy so we’re commanded to make an offering to a demon but it’s ok because God wants us to?? This is really heading off the rails. But Ramban pulls it back in with a wild mashal (parable), often used for the most bold and audacious claims in Midrash:
This may be compared to the case of someone who makes a feast for his master, and the master commands the person making the feast, “Give one portion to that servant of mine,” in which case the host gives nothing [of his own] to that servant, and it is not to show him honor that he acts in that way to him, but everything is given to the master and it is the master that gives a gift to his servant; the host only observes his command and does in honor of the master whatever he commanded him to do…
So it looks like an offering to a demon, but technically it’s not?/
If the priest were to dedicate the two goats merely by word of mouth [without casting the lots], saying, “one for the Eternal” and “one for Azazel,” that would be like worshipping [Azazel] …Rather, the priest set the two goats before the Eternal at the door of the Tent of Meeting, for both of them were a gift to God, and he gave to His servant that portion which came to him from God. It is he [i.e., the priest] who cast the lots on them, but it is His hand that apportioned them, something like that which it says, The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing of it is of the Eternal. Even after the casting of the lots, the priest placed the two goats before the Eternal, thus proclaiming that both are His and that by sending one away [to the desert] we intend merely to fulfill God’s wish,… That is the reason why we do not ourselves do any act of slaughtering [of that goat, as this would imply that it is a proper offering which requires slaughtering].
With a keen eye for the otherworldly, Ramban has sensed the pre-biblical myth behind the monotheistic scenery here. Historically, the most plausible explanation is that this ritual was like the radioactive core of a religious nuclear reactor: too hot to handle let alone remove. The Priestly writers had inherited a previous Hebrew tradition that was already ancient and mysterious to them, and considered it too sacred to remove and too dangerous to leave out: Judeans believed it worked. There is a substantial scholarly consensus that the scapegoat was already old and prestigious in the Priestly writers’ time.**
And [Aaron, the high priest] will atone for the Holy Place from the pollution of the Israelites and from their transgressions {pešaˁîm, used as a technical term here and nowhere else in the Priestly source}, all their sins, and he will do thus for the Tent of Meeting {used only here to refer to the sanctuary as a whole}, which resides with them in the midst of their pollution.. . . . and he will atone on his behalf and on behalf of the whole congregation of Israel. (vv. 16–17)
The ritual atones for Aaron, the Temple, and the congregation at once, tying priest, sacred center, and people together as protagonists of a single ritual action. Next Aaron brings the live goat to the altar.
And Aaron will put his two hands on the head of the living goat and he will confess over it all the misdeeds of the Israelites and all their transgressions and all their sins and he will put them on the head of the goat and send it into the desert, at the hands of a man who is prepared for the occasion. And the goat will bear on it all their misdeeds to the cut-off land, when he sends the goat into the desert. . . . And he will go out and make the burnt offering for him and the burnt offering for the people and atone on his behalf and on behalf of the people. (vv. 21–22, 24)
Here a whole people acts as a single ritual agent, as nowhere else in the ancient Near East–well, almost nowhere. There are of course many individual rituals for sick people, cursed people, and kings. But this one makes a whole group’s responsibility collective and concrete, fused together into one utterance and then located in an animal. What makes the ritual so special, then, is not the mechanism of expiation but the people on whose behalf (ba’ad in 16:24) it acts. As Jacob Milgrom, author of the most detailed scholarly commentary ever written on Leviticus comments, “there are no group transfer rites in Mesopotamia; the biblical scapegoat, in contrast, removes the sins of the entire nation” (1991:1079).
The difference from the cuneiform empires is decisive. From Babylon to the Hittite realm, rituals never involve the people as a collective agent—the protagonists of the Babylonian and Hittite rituals are the king, his army, or his territory. This is a stage inhabited by an old and limited cast of characters, dating at least as far back as the third millennium in which old Near Eastern principles of sacred kingship are rooted. It is the king’s actions, not the people’s, that matter most to the gods.
But there is one other ancient Near Eastern expiation ritual with collective subjects: the Ugaritic ritual for collective atonement. This ritual, KTU 1.40 was the most widely used ritual known from the Late Bronze Age Canaanite city-state of Ugarit. Unlike its more famous relatives like the epic of Baal, present in just one manuscript of uncertain function, we know this ritual was used repeatedly because it is not just present in multiple copies but in multiple versions. The ritual involved a confession of sins and the slaughter of sacrificial animals for the purposes of atonement. Since its publication, scholars have noted that its ritual mechanisms parallel those of the biblical Day of Atonement, described in Leviticus 16.
What has not been emphasized is that both these West Semitic rituals revolve around a new type of participant. Both Leviticus 16 and KTU 1.40 are done on behalf of a community, not just an individual or a leader. Within Ugaritic ritual KTU 1.40 is marked by a uniquely broad sweep and high level of repetition, addressing male and female inhabitants of the city, and, again uniquely, including both foreigners and natives, ruler and citizens. It is composed of a set of three paired invocations and expiations, the first of each addressing men, the second women. And it names a spectrum of ethnic and social groups within the city, against whom sins are confessed.
The Ugaritic text and the core of the Leviticus passage share a common pattern: they represent West Semitic group salvation rituals, and each held a central place in their own new local form of the alphabet, Ugaritic and Hebrew. Both writing systems were created to represent the language that the people spoke, in sharp contrast to the older writing system of Babylonian cuneiform, which was–like Medieval Latin–a system for priests and scholars, not normal people. The similarities of the Hebrew and Ugaritic texts as unifying and atoning rituals in new local languages and polities is not an accident. Both address and assume a new kind of participant. In both the Canaanite and Biblical texts, the rituals conjure up “the people;” those who recognized themselves in it were invited to be characters in a new story, of being redeemed together.
Ramban’s sensitivity to Sammael, if not Satan, has thus led us to a similar place as our historical analysis of Canaanite and biblical ritual. In the archaic elements of Yom Kippur we witness the rise of a new kind of politics and a new religious way of being in the world: the collective atonement and redemption of a people, not a state or king.
*While its features seemed pagan and magical to writers like Yehezkel Kaufman and Israel Knohl in search of coherent forms of Israelite religion, they seemed equally far from primitive Semitic sacrifice to William Robertson Smith in his portrait of the archaic “religion of the Semites.” Most entertainingly, two of the twentieth century’s biggest theorists of sacrifice, James G. Frazier and Rene Girard, each wrote books called The Scapegoat that both avoided this inconvenient passage, despite it being the place that the term ‘scapegoat’ actually comes from (via the Greek translation).
**For example, Erhard Gerstenberger exclaims that it is “simply inconceivable” that the Priestly theologians, “loyal to YHWH as they were, could have allowed this kind of ‘polytheistic’ idea to pass through. The wilderness demon Azazel must also be appeased, and not only YHWH, the only lord of the world!”
sethlsanders 