^ A. Maclaren.
LEVITICUS XVI. 22 355
be covered over (atoned) for you, to make you clean ; from all your sins before Jehovah, ye shall be cleansed." And while the prostrate multitude worshipped at the name of Jehovah, the high- priest turned his face towards them as he uttered the last words, " Ye shall be cleansed ! " as if to declare to them the absolution and remission of their sins. Then a strange scene would be witnessed. The priests led the sin-burdened goat out through " Solomon's Porch," and, as tradition has it, through the eastern gate, which opened upon the Mount of Olives. Here an arched bridge spanned the intervening valley, and over it they brought the goat to the Moimt of Olives, where one, specially appointed for the purpose, took him in charge. Tradition enjoins that he should be a stranger, a non-Israelite, as if to make still more striking the type of Him who was delivered over by Israel unto the Gentiles. Scripture tells us no more of the destiny of the goat that bore upon him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, than that they " shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness," and that " he shall let go the goat in the wilderness." But tradition supplements this information. The distance between Jerusalem and the beginning of "the wilderness " is computed at ninety stadia, making precisely ten intervals, each half a Sabbath-day's journey from the other. At the end of each of these intervals there was a station, occupied by one or more persons, detailed for the purpose, who ofifered refreshment to the man leading the goat, and then accompanied him to the next station. By this arrangement two results were secured : some trusted persons accompanied the goat all along his journey, and yet none of them walked more than a Sabbath-day's journey — that is, half a journey going and the other half re- turning. At last they reached the edge of the wilderness. Here they halted, viewing afar off, while the man led forth the goat, tore off half the "scarlet-tongue," and stuck it on a projecting cliff; then, leading the animal backwards, he pushed it over the projecting ledge of rock. There was a moment's pause, and the man, now defiled by contact with the sin-bearer, retraced his steps to the last of the ten stations, where he spent the rest of the day and the night. But the arrival of the goat in the wilderness was immediately telegraphed, by the waving of flags, from station to station, till, a few minutes after its occurrence, it was known in the Temple, and whispered from ear to ear, that " the goat had borne upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited." ^
2. What, then, was the meaning of a rite on which such momentous issues depended ? Everything about it seems strange * Edersheim, The Temple, 817.
356 THE SCAPEGOAT
and mysterious — the lot that designated it, and that " to Azazel " , the fact that, though the highest of all sin-offerings, it was neither sacrificed nor its blood sprinkled in the Temple; and the circumstance that it really was only part of a sacrifice — the two goats together forming one sacrifice, one of them being killed, and the other " let go," there being no other analogous case of the kind except at the purification of a leper, when one bird was killed, and the other dipped in its blood, and let go free. For the common worshipper, then, the broad impression of this Day of Atonement was that the sins of the people were not only atoned for by the death of a victim, but separated from them and banished to forgetfulness through the same offering in another phase. While in the typical sacrifice this could be effected only by means of two victims, in the eternal reality to which it pointed the one Saviour who died and rose again becomes at once the atoning Sacrifice and the risen Sanctifier by whom our sin is removed.
^ These two goats were not for Aaron, but for the people. We must regard them as if they were but one offering, for it needed both of them to set forth the divine plan by which sin ia put away ; one was to die, and the other was typically to bear away the sins of the people. One goat was to show how sin is put away in reference to God by sacrifice, and the other goat was to show how it is put away in reference to us, God's people, by being carried into oblivion.^
^ Man hath not done anything on the day of sacrifice more pleasing to God than spilling blood; for verily the animal sacrificed will come on the day of resurrection with its horns, its hair, its hoofs, and will make the scale of his good actions heavy ; and verily its blood reacheth the acceptance of God, before it falleth upon the ground : therefore be joyful in it.'
IIL
Fob Azazel.
1. Of the two goats it is stated (xvi. 8) that the one was " for Jehovah," the other " for Azazel " (K.V. ; the A.V. uses here the word " scapegoat "). " Azazel " is not mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament, and its meaning is much disputed. In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, Azazel is a spirit, the leader of the