5. Faroese. — Into this dialect only the Gospel of St. Matthew has been translated, about the year 1817, by the Kev. ]Mr. Schroeter, rector of one of the churches in the Faroe Isles. It was corrected by j\Ir. Lyngbye, of Jutland, who also superintended the printing of St. Matthew's Gospel, of which 1500 copies were issued. This is the only book of the New Test, that has ever been printed or translated into Faroese.
See Lorck, Bibelt/eschichle, i, 203 sq., 208 sq., 399 sq. ; Ooze, Sammliinrj merkwiirdiger Biheln, p. 277 sq. ; Index Biblioruni hi Christiano-Eriiestina Bibliolheca, p. 13, 42, 66 ; Bibliolheca Biblica, oder Verzeichniss der Bibel- Sammlang der Herzogin von Braunschweig, etc., p. 182 sq. ; The Bible of Every Land, p. 214 sq. ; Schinmeyer, Versuch einer Geschichte der schwedischen Bibel-Ueber- setzungen und Ausgaben (Flensburg, 1777). (B. P.)
Scape -goat (Heb. ^.fX)"., Azazel) is the name given in the A. V. to one of the two goats used in the sin-oflfering for the entire community of Israel on the great day of atonement, the goat which was to be sent away into the wilderness. To determine which of the two goats was to be slain, and which sent alive into the wilderness, it was ordered that the priest should "cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord [.Je- hovah], and the other lot for the scape-goat" (Lev. xvi, 8), but literally /or Azazel (btST"b), a word nowhere else used. There can be no doubt that this has the appearance of being some sort of personage, or interest personified, standing over against Jehovah, or somehow contradistinguished from him. But opinions have from early times been divided on the sidjject.
1. The one followed by our translators, which regards it as a name for the goat itself, is of great antiquity, and has numbers on its side — Symmachus (rpriyot; cnrep^o- fievoi;), Aquila (rpdyoQ a.TToXeXvf^ifi^voi;'), the Vulgate (hircus emissurius) , Luther, and many moderns, also re- cently Hoffmann. Tlie term so miderstood is viewed as a compound of T^', goat, and sTX, to go aivay. The chief objections to it are that T? is never used preciselj' of a goat ; in the plural it bears the sense of goats gener- all3', but in the singular it designates on\y she-goat ; and in Lev. xvi, 10 and 20, the goat and Azazel are express- ly distinguished from each other, "the goat ("i''""ii)n) for Azazel." These are fatal objections, and have led to the general abandonment of the view.
2. By others it has been taken as the name of a place, either some mountain in the desert (Pseudo-Jonathan, Aben-Ezra, Jarchi), or a lonely and desolate region (Bo- chart, Deyling, Carpzov, Jahn). But this, also, is at va- riance with the natural import of the statements, espe- cially with the expression in ver. 10, "to let him go for Azazel into the wilderness." which would then mean, for the wilderness into the wilderness. Nor coulil Jehovah
on the one side, and a place on the other, form a proper
antithesis.
3. Others, again, have taken the word as a pealpal form of the Arabic verb PT?, to remove, formed by mod- ification from ^T5TS', so that the meaning comes to be for a complete removing or dismissal (Tholuck, Steudel, Winer, Biihr). Grammatically, no objection can be urged against this view; and it undoubtedly accords well with the general import of this part of the rite. "The true expiation," to use the words of Biihr, "was effected by the blood of the first goat, which was set apart for Jehovah ; on the other hand, the ceremony with the other goat appears as a mere addition made for special reasons, a kind of complement to the wiping- away of the sins which had already been effected by means of the sacrifice. . . . After the expiation had been accomplished by the sprinkling of the blood, the sin was still further to be carried away into the desert. What the first goat, Avhich died as a sin-offering, was no longer in a condition to set forth was supplied by the second, which was, as it were, one with the first, inasmuch as it carried the sin which had been covered entirely away, and that into the desert or desolate place, where it was quite forgotten; so that the idea of expiation, or the ex- termination of sin, was rendered thereby absolutelv per- fect" (Mic. vii, 19). In this view of the matter, the cast- ing of the lots had for its object the assigning of one goat to Jehovah, namely, for an atonement to his jus- tice, and the other to complete removal or bearing away into tlie oblivion of the desert — namel}', of the sin which had been atoned ; an explanation wliich accords well with the general idea of the transaction, and does no •violence to the language. The objection of Hengsten- berg, that it gives a cold and empty appearance to the peculiar word Azazel, a word coined for the occasion, to suppose it to have expressed only the comparatively common idea of complete removal, may perhaps be ob- viated by conceiving this idea to have been for the oc- casion invested with a kind of personified existence — much as Sheol, the region of departed spirits, became personified — the one the coverer or dark receptacle of people's lives, the other of their (forgiven) sins. Hence also, probably, the reason of the word being confined to this one occasion, there being no other in respect to which such utter personified oblivion could be predi- cated.