January 28, 1997

scapegoat

Would you please discuss the etymology of the word scapegoat"?

Scapegoat has an interesting etymology. Originally, it is a Biblical reference, to Leviticus 16. The scapegoat was a goat let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head. The usual sense now, 'a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place', is a figurative use of the Biblical meaning.

The word was coined by William Tyndale, an English religious reformer, in his influential translation of the Bible in 1530. Tyndale formed scapegoat from scape, an obsolete form of escape, and goat, with the word thus meaning 'the goat that departs'. Tyndale used this word to translate the Hebrew word 'azázél (with the accent marks here substituting for macrons), which he read as 'ezázél, or 'the goat that departs'. The actual Hebrew word, however, does not mean 'the goat that departs'; it is a proper name of uncertain derivation.

This same mistranslation occurs in the Vulgate, the fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible, and in several other translations.

The first appearance of the word in its original sense was in 1530 in Tyndale's Bible. The figurative sense is first found in the early nineteenth century, and the verb, meaning 'to make a scapegoat of; blame for' is first found as a psychological term in the 1940s.