In our time, the words "scapegoat" have become phraseological units. This idiom has long lost its original meaning. What did it originally mean? Why a goat and not some other animal? And who or what did he release? What metamorphoses and rethinking did the idiom undergo in the future? Learn about it from this article. We will tell you in which cases it is appropriate to use this expression. Let's also consider which phraseological unit is closest in meaning to the "scapegoat" and why this synonym is used.
Cleansing ritual
The historical roots of the origin of the phraseologism "scapegoat" should be sought in Judaism. The Old Testament book Leviticus in chapter 16 on behalf of God gives clear instructions on how the high priest and the rest of the people of Israel should act in order to be cleansed from sins and receive forgiveness from the Lord. ATthe holiday of Yom Kippur, which is celebrated "in the seventh month, on the tenth day" of the Jewish calendar, four animals were brought to the temple. They were a young bull (calf), a ram (ram) and two goats of the same color. The priest cast lots for these last two animals. On which of them the choice fell, was set aside. Three others were slaughtered, the tabernacle was consecrated with their blood, and the carcasses were burned in front of the temple as a sacrifice to God. The surviving goat was brought to the high priest. He laid both hands on his head and confessed all the sins of the Jewish people. It was believed that as a result of such a rite, all the guilt of people before God passed to the animal. After that, a special courier took the goat to the waterless Judean desert, where he left him to die a cruel death of starvation. According to another version, the animal was thrown into the abyss from the rock Azazel, which was considered the abode of the Devil.
Gift to Satan?
This ritual, practiced as early as the time of the first tabernacle (10th century BC) and up to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (1st century AD), gave rise to the erroneous opinion among neighboring peoples that the Jews brought sacrifice to the Devil. Like the ritual of slaughtering and burning a bright red cow outside the city, sending small cattle into the desert did not at all mean a gift to anyone. Then who, or rather, what was the scapegoat? The meaning of this ritual is this: all the bad deeds of the people were assigned to the animal. Thus, it turned into a repository of sins. The goat was sent to the desert, where demons lived, and the people of God, cleansed of filth, could communicate withLord. In the early rites, absolution was accompanied by the fact that a piece of red cloth was tied to the horns of the animal. Before exiting the mill, the tape was cut in two. Half of the rag was tied to the gate, while the rest remained on the animal. If the repentance of the Jews in the face of God was sincere, then at the time of the death of the goat in the wilderness, the rag should have turned white. And the red cow was considered a symbol of the golden calf, love of money, the beginning of all sins.
Rethinking the scapegoat ritual in Islam and Christianity
In world religions that revere the Old Testament, there has been an inevitable interpretation of this rite. In Islam, there is a special ritual of stoning Satan. True, no animal is "loaded with sins" anymore. People simply go to the valley, where, according to beliefs, the Devil lives, and throw stones there. In Christian theology, the scapegoat is sometimes interpreted as a symbolic image of the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. All the Gospels and other books of the New Testament are full of references to the fact that the Son of God took on his shoulders the original sin of mankind, which came from the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and atoned for it by his death. True, our Lord Jesus is not called a "goat" but the "Lamb of God" (for example, this is what the Forerunner calls him in John 1:29). But the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ differs from the scapegoat ritual in one very important detail. This is voluntariness. The animal did not choose its own death, it was appointed to be a "scapegoat".
The vitality of the image
The Jews were not the only people who practiced such a rite of transfer of sins and the subsequent killing of the "receptacle of evil." J. Fraser, a researcher of ancient beliefs, notes that everywhere, from Iceland to Australia, people sought to get rid of the evil, unfavorable forces of nature in a similar way. In ancient Greece, in case of natural disasters or pestilence, criminals or prisoners who were sacrificed were always ready. Beliefs that sins can be the cause of universal disasters are also observed among the Slavic peoples. Thus, the rite of burning the effigy of Winter is based on ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Among the agricultural peoples, a kind of "scapegoat" was practiced on the feast of the first furrow, haymaking, and the last sheaf.
Transforming into a metaphor
People tend to shift the blame from themselves to others. It is very convenient and drowns out the pangs of conscience. Many of us have experienced in our own skin what a scapegoat means. But more often than not, we blame others for our bad deeds. “I didn’t do my job because I was interrupted”, “I flared up because I was driven” - we hear these kinds of excuses every day and make them ourselves. Perhaps the share of guilt of these "others" is present. But do we become less guilty of this? Due to the fact that the practice of “shifting from a sick head to a he althy one” is found everywhere and at all times, a single ritual of the Jewish people has become a household name.
"Goatabsolution ": the meaning of phraseology
Now this idiom is used solely as a figurative expression, a metaphor. A scapegoat is a person who has been unfairly blamed for the failures of others, made to blame for failures in order to whitewash the real criminals. As a rule, such a "ritual animal" is the lowest in the hierarchy of the worker. In the conditions of a corrupt system of investigation and courts, prisons are overflowing with such "scapegoats" who received time for the actions of rich people who "evaded" liability for bribes.
Propaganda tool
History knows many examples of politicians hiding the reasons for their own failures, blaming various wreckers and saboteurs, and sometimes entire nations, for the disasters and misadventures that befell people. Even during the Great Plague (mid-14th century), Jews were blamed for the cause of the epidemic. This was the cause of anti-Semitic pogroms that swept across Europe. Jews throughout history have been scapegoated quite often. The expression about why there is no water in the tap also exists in Russian. In Nazi Germany, the authorities also laid the blame for the economic crisis on the Communists, Roma and other categories of the population. In modern Russia, the West and the United States have traditionally been such scapegoats. So politicians always choose the extreme ones.
Goats and switchmen
Because the blame was often placed on the poor, unable to fend for themselves,appeared in the expression "scapegoat" synonymous with "switchman". Why did this railroad worker become a household name? Because at the dawn of the train era, there were frequent crashes. In judicial investigations into the causes of the disaster, responsibility for what happened was often lowered down the hierarchical ladder until they settled on simple switchmen. Say, the whole composition went downhill because of his negligence. Therefore, the expression "translate arrows" is also common, meaning "put the blame on someone who has nothing to do with the case." No less popular is the saying "blame with a sore head on a he althy one." It means that the guilty person wants to shift the responsibility onto the shoulders of another person.
