Scapegoat

[4][page needed] Alternatively, broadly contemporary with the Septuagint, the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch may preserve Azazel as the name of a fallen angel.

Jewish sources in the Talmud (Yoma 6:4,67b) give the etymology of azazel as a compound of az, strong or rough, and el, mighty, that the goat was sent from the most rugged or strongest of mountains.

Two goats were chosen by lot: one to be "for YHWH", which was offered as a blood sacrifice, and the other to be the scapegoat to be sent away into the wilderness and pushed down a steep ravine where it died.

Later in the ceremonies of the day, the High Priest confessed the intentional sins of the Israelites to God placing them figuratively on the head of the other goat, the Azazel scapegoat, who would symbolically "take them away".

[15] Ancient Greeks practiced scapegoating rituals in exceptional times based on the belief that the repudiation of one or two individuals would save the whole community.

[16][17] However, since no king or person of importance would be willing to sacrifice himself or his children, the scapegoat in actual rituals would be someone of lower society who would be given value through special treatment such as fine clothes and dining before the sacrificial ceremony.

The scapegoat, as a religious and ritualistic practice and a metaphor for social exclusion, is one of the major preoccupations in Dimitris Lyacos's Poena Damni trilogy.

[20][21] In the second book, With the People from the Bridge, the male and female characters are treated apotropaically as vampires and are cast out from both the world of the living and that of the dead.

[22] In the third book, The First Death, the main character appears irrevocably marooned on a desert island as a personification of miasma expelled to a geographical point of no return.