The Day of Atonement

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Atonement, Day of,” “Azazel,” “Mercy Seat,” “Sacrifice.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Pentateuch — “Day of Atonement,” “Atonement,” “Sacrifice and Offerings,” “Holiness.”
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — כָּפַר (kāp̄ar, atone/cover), כַּפֹּרֶת (kappōreṯ, mercy seat), חַטָּאת (ḥaṭṭāʾṯ, sin offering), עֲזָאזֵל (ʿăzāʾzēl).

• Gordon Wenham (NICOT), Jacob Milgrom (AB), Mark Rooker (NAC) on Leviticus.
• Leviticus 16 studies: the kapporet as “place of atonement,” the two-goat rite, and the Azazel question.
• Beale & Carson, Commentary on the NT Use of the OT (Hebrews; Romans 3).

Cleansing the sacred, carrying off the impure. Ancient cultures knew rites that purged a temple and elimination rituals that loaded evil onto an animal or object and drove it out (e.g. Hittite and Mesopotamian purification texts). Leviticus 16 has both movements — blood that purges the sanctuary and a live goat that removes guilt — but reframed: the Lord himself commands the rite, sin is moral before him, and the goat is not a bribe to a hostile power but a God-given picture of sin carried away.

The debated ‘Azazel.’ The word עֲזָאזֵל (16:8,10,26) is rare and its meaning contested. Three readings are held: (1) “removal / the goat that goes away” (the traditional “scapegoat,” followed by the LXX’s ἀποπομπαῖος, “the one sent off,” and the Latin caper emissarius); (2) a rugged place or cliff in the wilderness; (3) the name of a wilderness being or demon — a reading reflected in 1 Enoch. Even on the third reading, the goat is not a sacrifice offered to Azazel (Israel is forbidden to sacrifice to “goat demons,” Lev 17:7); it carries Israel’s sin away from them into uninhabited wilderness. Both goats belong to the Lord’s single atonement.

• Hittite and Mesopotamian purification / elimination rites — ritual removal of impurity onto an animal or object: shared cultural furniture, reframed morally in Leviticus.
• 1 Enoch 10:4–8 (Pseudepigrapha — a witness, not Scripture) — Azazel bound in the wilderness: a Second-Temple reading behind the “demon” interpretation, which the text of Leviticus does not itself require.
• Jubilees 34:18–19 (Pseudepigrapha — a witness, not Scripture) — links the Day of Atonement to Israel’s mourning; the Mishnah, Yoma (rabbinic-era) preserves the ritual detail.
• Epistle of Barnabas 7 (early Christian, not Scripture) — an early reading of the two goats as a type of Christ.

• Hebrews 9:1–14, 24–28; 10:1–14 — Christ our High Priest enters the true holy place “once for all” by his own blood; the yearly rite could not “take away sins.”
• Romans 3:24–26 — Jesus “whom God put forward as a propitiation (ἱλαστήριον) by his blood”: the true mercy seat.
• Hebrews 13:11–12 — the sin-offering bodies burned “outside the camp”; so “Jesus also suffered outside the gate” (Lev 16:27).
• 1 John 2:2; 4:10; John 1:29 — Christ the propitiation (ἱλασμός) for our sins; “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

• Exodus 25:17–22 — the mercy seat; Exodus 30:10 — the yearly atonement on the horns of the altar of incense; the ark at the center of the covenant (see Exodus 24).
• Isaiah 53:4–6, 11–12 — the Servant who “bore the sin of many,” of whom Isaiah says, “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”: the scapegoat’s burden, personified.
• Leviticus 17:11 — “the life of the flesh is in the blood… it is the blood that makes atonement”: why blood is central.
• Hebrews 9–10; Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2 — the Day of Atonement fulfilled in Christ, our High Priest, sacrifice, and mercy seat.
• Acts 27:9 — “the Fast” (the Day of Atonement) as a time-marker (see The Fast and the Day of Atonement).

• Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus (Anchor); Mark F. Rooker (NAC).
• Studies of the kapporet / ἱλαστήριον and the two-goat rite; the Azazel debate (removal / place / being).
• G. K. Beale & D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament.

• Two goats, one atonement. The slain goat’s blood purges; the live goat removes. They are two facets of a single rite (both are taken “for a sin offering” for the congregation, 16:5), fulfilled together in Christ who both cleanses and carries sin away.
• ‘Azazel’ is genuinely uncertain — removal, place, or being. The demonic reading (from 1 Enoch) is a Second-Temple interpretation, not a claim of Leviticus itself; on any reading the goat is not an offering to a demon.
• Propitiation and cleansing. The rite both turns away wrath and wipes away defilement; the New Testament’s ἱλαστήριον / ἱλασμός language holds both together in Christ, without pitting them against each other.

• Sin is real, and so is cleansing. The Day of Atonement takes guilt seriously — and provides a way to be made clean. God does not ignore sin; he covers it.
• Christ is both goats. He is the slain goat whose blood cleanses and the scapegoat who carries our sin away — “as far as the east is from the west.” What was repeated yearly, he finished once for all.
• Draw near with confidence. Because Jesus entered the true Most Holy Place with his own blood, we may “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb 10:22). The veil is open.

Step in response: name a specific sin you keep carrying, and consciously hand it to the One who is your mercy seat and your scapegoat — not to be covered for a year, but taken away forever. Then live as one cleansed: draw near to God this week without hiding, in the confidence the blood of Christ has purchased.