Essay On Scapegoat

Taking the blame for someone else happens more often than not. Sometimes people take the blame for others for a purpose, and others take it without want or warning. Imagine what life would be like without blaming things on others. Throughout time, there have been famous examples of scapegoats, and instances that go unnoticed day after day. History, psychology, and religion all have ties with the word scapegoat.

Scapegoats have played a major role in lives today, and in history. “The word scapegoat originated in 1530 by Tyndale (Harper). It was considered as a "goat sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement, symbolic bearer of the sins of the people," coined by Tyndale from scape (n.) + goat to translate Latin caper emissarius, itself a translation in Vulgate of Hebrew 'azazel (Lev. xvi:8,10,26), which was read as 'ez ozel "goat that departs," but which others hold to be the proper name of a devil or demon in Jewish mythology (sometimes identified with Canaanite deity Aziz)” (Harper). One of the first times in history, the word scapegoat was used was in 1783, by J. O. Justamond, he said, “They have a scape-horse, analogous to the scape-goat of the Jews.” Today according to Dictionary.com scapegoat is defined as “a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place” (“Scapegoat”). Scapegoat can also be defined as “a goat let loose in the wilderness in Yom Kippur after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head” (“Scapegoat”).

6,000,000 Jews were murdered under the chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler (Berman). The “Final Solution” that Hitler exclaimed needed to happen, was to eliminate the population of Jewish beliefs. Having blonde hair and blue eyes was very beneficia...

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...ned with the sins of the Jewish people” (“scapegoat (religion)”). “Some believe the animal, a goat, was chosen by a lot of palacate Azazel, a wilderness demon, to rid the nation of iniquities (“scapegoat (religion)”). The scapegoat motif began centuries ago as a part of the sacrificial dynamic with a god or gods (Mathews). The members of a village would write down their sins on a ribbon tied around a goat’s neck. The goat was sacrificed or sent away into the wilderness. Either way the scapegoat carried the sins of the village with it” (Mathew). This method was to help keep the villages away from anything bad that the sins would have carried along with. Sending them with the goat, helped keep the villages less worried about danger coming for them, but hopefully sending them with the goat on his journey out of the village or dying with the goat once it was sacrificed.