Lenten Meditation #4 on Leviticus
This is the fourth of four Lenten meditations on Leviticus. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
“He shall let the goat go into the wilderness”
It is the goat not offered as a sin offering to the Lord but the goat “sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.” Such are the rather obscure origins of a fairly common concept and term, scapegoat. It first appears in English with John Wycliffe’s 14th century translation and from there is carried forward by Tyndale in the 16th century and into the 17th century King James Version. The Latin Vulgate following the Greek Septuagint simply refers to “the goat which is sent away,” capro emissario, as the Vulgate puts it. Scapegoat is the goat that gets away, we might say, but in Leviticus, it is the goat which is sent away with the sins of Israel imposed upon it and sent away into the wilderness, to Azazel, a kind of demonic figure.
But for us the term is familiar as the figure of blame for social and political catastrophes especially those that seem to have an apocalyptic aspect. As René Girard observes, the use of the scapegoat belongs to the collective persecution narratives that accompany major disruptions and catastrophes to the social order such as plague. The scapegoat is the figure who is blamed for what is happening. He demonstrates this with respect to the black death of the 14th century which was blamed by some if not many upon the Jews. As Girard suggests, such events as a plague result in the leveling of all cultural distinctions and differences – all are affected. This leads, he argues, both historically and mythologically, to the assigning of blame to a victim, often one who conveniently has a disability, a difference. In other words, our use of the term scapegoat is about the persecution narratives which we produce.
Girard notes that this modern and ancient understanding contrasts with the revolutionary and revelatory perspective of the Bible, both in terms of the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. As he argues, the biblical view inverts this logic of the scapegoat mechanism; the whole direction of things, Old and New Testament alike, convict us as the persecutors while emphasizing the innocence of the appointed and chosen victim identified as the persecutor. The scapegoat as such is not the persecutor but the persecuted. Jesus’ passion completes the paradox, the victim is victor, the persecutor as the persecuted annuls or negates the conflict. “He reigns and triumphs from the tree,” as Venantius Fortunatus’ Passion Sunday hymn puts it. What the Gospels highlight is that we are the persecutors not the persecuted; we are those who condemn Christ without a cause, echoing the Psalmist’s phrase that “they hated me without a cause” (Ps. 69.4; Jn. 15.24), which carries over into the stupendous first word of the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk.23.34).