What is the Scapegoat theory of atonement?
Question 7086
The term “scapegoat” has passed so thoroughly into ordinary language, used to describe anyone blamed for things they did not do, that its biblical origins can become obscured. The original scapegoat appears in Leviticus 16, as part of the Day of Atonement ritual, and it provides one of the most vivid pictures in all of Scripture of what happens to sin when God deals with it. Whether this ceremony provides a complete theory of atonement on its own, however, requires careful examination.
The Day of Atonement Ritual
Leviticus 16 describes the most solemn event in the Israelite calendar. On the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the high priest alone entered the Most Holy Place, and the entire ritual centred on two goats. Aaron was to present both before the Lord and cast lots over them: one lot for the Lord, one for Azazel (Leviticus 16:8). The first goat was slaughtered as a sin offering, and its blood was carried by the high priest into the Holy of Holies to make atonement. The second goat underwent something altogether different.
Aaron was to lay both hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of Israel, and “put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness” (Leviticus 16:21). A designated man then led the goat out beyond the camp and into the desert. The goat was gone. The sins were gone with it.
What the Two Goats Together Illustrate
The two-goat ceremony is not two separate, competing pictures of atonement. It is one ceremony in two acts, and both are necessary to grasp the whole. The slaughtered goat demonstrates that sin requires death as its penalty; blood must be shed, and the life of the substitute is taken. This is the foundational act of penal substitution: the penalty falls on the animal rather than on the people it represents.
The scapegoat then pictures what happens as a consequence of that atoning death: the sins are removed, carried away, gone. Psalm 103:12 expresses the same truth: “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” The scapegoat is not providing an alternative explanation of how atonement works; it is showing what atonement achieves. Sin is not temporarily suspended; it is taken away.
When John the Baptist saw Jesus and declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), he was using language that resonated immediately with anyone formed by the Day of Atonement. The two functions of the two goats are fulfilled in one person: He both bears the penalty and removes the sin.
The Scapegoat as a Standalone Theory
Some interpreters, most notably the French philosopher René Girard in his mimetic theory, have proposed the scapegoat as a self-sufficient model for understanding the atonement. In Girard’s reading, human societies manage internal violence by displacing it onto a victim, and Jesus on the cross is the ultimate scapegoat who exposes and ends this cycle of violence by becoming its final, undeserved target. The insight that Jesus was the innocent victim of collective human hostility is genuinely present in the Gospels, and there is something worth engaging in the observation that the crucifixion unmasks the mechanism of human violence and injustice.
Where the theory falls short as a complete account is that it focuses on the horizontal dimension, what human beings do to one another and to God, whilst bypassing the vertical: what God does with sin. The cross is not only the revelation of human injustice; it is the place where “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21), where the wrath of God fell on the Son as the substitute for sinners. A theory that explains the atonement in terms of God exposing human scapegoating but does not account for God’s active dealing with sin’s penalty has left out what Hebrews, Romans, and the rest of the New Testament insist is central.
Penal Substitution Remains the Foundation
The scapegoat ritual, understood within its Levitical context, beautifully illuminates what the atonement accomplishes: sins carried away, removed from the people, sent into the place of desolation. But that carrying-away was only possible because the penalty was first paid by the slaughtered goat. Remove the blood sacrifice from the Day of Atonement ritual, and the scapegoat ceremony has no basis. The order is not incidental.
This is the relationship between penal substitution and the scapegoat motif: the scapegoat illustrates the removal of sin; penal substitution explains how that removal was made possible. They are complementary rather than competing, and neither is adequate without the other. The fullness of what Christ accomplished at Calvary requires both dimensions together.
So, now what?
The scapegoat ceremony is one of the most tangible pictures Scripture provides of what God does with the sins of His people at the point of forgiveness. Not covered over, not noted and deferred, but taken away, borne by another, gone. Understanding its place in the Levitical system helps explain why New Testament writers could describe the cross as the fulfilment of what that system was always pointing towards. For the believer, the implication is direct: the sins confessed over the scapegoat in Leviticus were the totality of Israel’s transgressions, and the sins that Jesus bore were the totality of ours.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” 1 Peter 2:24
