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Japanese In the Bible a goat is first of all a clean animal, kept for milk, meat and hair and offered to God in sacrifice, so it is not a sign of evil. Its symbolic weight falls in three places: the scapegoat that bore Israel’s sins, the goats parted from the sheep at the judgment, and Daniel’s he-goat, the Greek kingdom.
The picture most people carry away is the first. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid both hands on the head of a living goat, confessed over it every sin of Israel, and sent it out into the wilderness, “unto a land not inhabited” (Leviticus 16:22). The people watched their sins walk away from them. Long after the Temple was gone, Christians still saw in that goat what Christ had done.
| The goat | What it stands for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The scapegoat | Israel’s sins carried away | Leviticus 16 |
| The goat of the sin offering | A life given to make atonement | Leviticus 4 and 16 |
| The goats at the judgment | People who did not help the hungry, the stranger and the sick | Matthew 25 |
| Daniel’s he-goat | The kingdom of Greece | Daniel 8 |
| The goat-demons of the desert | False gods Israel must not worship | Leviticus 17:7; Isaiah 13:21 |
| Goats of the flock | Food, wealth and beauty | Proverbs 27; Song of Solomon 4 |
Were goats clean animals in the Bible?
Yes. The law of Moses names the goat among the animals Israel may eat: “These are the beasts which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep, and the goat” (Deuteronomy 14:4). Goats grazed with the sheep, and a family’s flock was its living. Proverbs says so in a homely way: “The lambs are for thy clothing, and the goats are the price of the field. And thou shalt have goats’ milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy household, and for the maintenance for thy maidens” (Proverbs 27:26–27).
Goat hair was even woven into the house of God. Moses was told to “make curtains of goats’ hair to be a covering upon the tabernacle: eleven curtains shalt thou make” (Exodus 26:7), and “all the women whose heart stirred them up in wisdom spun goats’ hair” (Exodus 35:26). The same hair turns up in David’s house on the night Saul’s men waited outside to kill him. Michal let him down through a window, laid an image in his bed and put “a pillow of goats’ hair for his bolster” (1 Samuel 19:12–13).
Young goats, called kids, were the meat of a family meal, and they run all through the family stories of Genesis. Rebekah sent Jacob to “fetch me from thence two good kids of the goats” so she could cook Isaac the dish he loved, and she put “the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck” (Genesis 27:9, 16), because Esau was “a hairy man” (Genesis 27:11). In Hebrew the two belong together. The word for a he-goat, sa’ir, means “hairy one,” and the same word describes hairy Esau (Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon). A generation later Jacob was deceived in his turn, when his sons “killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood” (Genesis 37:31). And in Jesus’ parable the elder brother complains, “thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29).
Goats are pictures of beauty, too, and of the wild hills. The lover in the Song of Solomon says, “thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead” (Song of Solomon 4:1), hair flowing like a flock coming down a hillside. “The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats” (Psalm 104:18), and when Saul hunted David he searched “upon the rocks of the wild goats” (1 Samuel 24:2).
What does “thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” mean?
A kid is a young goat, and this command comes three times in the law (Exodus 23:19; 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21). The verse itself gives no reason. Jewish teaching reads it as the root of the rule that keeps meat and milk apart. The commentator Rashi explains that it is written three times “once for the purpose of prohibiting the eating of meat-food with milk-food, once to prohibit us from deriving any other benefit (besides eating) from such mixture, and once to prohibit the boiling of meat with milk.” He adds that the Hebrew word for a kid, used on its own, “implies also a calf and a lamb.”
Why were goats sacrificed in the Bible?
Goats were among the animals God accepted on the altar, and they served in several kinds of offering. A burnt offering could come “of the sheep, or of the goats” (Leviticus 1:10). Even the Passover lamb could be a young goat: “ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats” (Exodus 12:5).
A goat was the sin offering for a ruler or an ordinary Israelite. When a ruler sinned without meaning to, “he shall bring his offering, a kid of the goats, a male without blemish.” When one of the common people did the same, “a kid of the goats, a female without blemish, for his sin which he hath sinned” (Leviticus 4:22–23, 27–28). The law tells us why a life was given: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls” (Leviticus 17:11).
Hebrews looks back on all those offerings and names their limit: “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Christ entered the holy place “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12). Every goat led to the altar said that sin costs a life. Christians read those offerings as pointing ahead to the one who gave his own.
What was the scapegoat?
The scapegoat was the second of two goats chosen on the Day of Atonement, in the rite set out in Leviticus 16. The high priest took “two kids of the goats for a sin offering” (Leviticus 16:5) and cast lots over them, “one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat” (16:8). The first goat was killed. Its blood was carried behind the veil and sprinkled “upon the mercy seat” (16:15) to cleanse the sanctuary.
The second was “presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him” (16:10). Then “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited” (16:21–22). One goat’s life was given for sin. The other carried sin away to a place it would not come back from. Both were needed, and together they tell us what forgiveness is: the debt paid, and the guilt gone. Leviticus 16 is still read in synagogues on the morning of Yom Kippur.
The Mishnah, the code of Jewish law published at the end of the second century AD, more than a hundred years after the Temple fell, keeps a memory of how the rite felt. It says that Babylonian Jews in Jerusalem would pluck the goat’s hair and call out, “Take our sins and go.” Rabbi Ishmael said that a strip of crimson tied at the entrance to the sanctuary would turn white when the goat reached the wilderness, as Isaiah promised: “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).
Who or what is Azazel?
Where the King James Version says “scapegoat,” the Hebrew of Leviticus 16:8 says the second lot was “for Azazel.” The word appears only in this chapter, and it has been read three ways:
- A word for removal. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon gives “entire removal” and calls the rite a “symbol of entire forgiveness.”
- A place. Rashi, following the Talmud, says Azazel was “a precipitous and flinty rock — a towering peak,” the cliff to which the goat was led.
- A name. Most of the scholars the lexicon cites take it as the “proper name of spirit haunting desert,” and the lexicon adds that later Jewish writings about angels made Azazel a fallen angel.
Whatever the word means, Leviticus presents the goat “before the Lord,” and the very next chapter forbids Israel to sacrifice to the spirits of the wilderness.
How did early Christians read the two goats?
The New Testament takes the first step. The bodies of the sin offerings whose blood went into the sanctuary were burned outside the camp (Leviticus 16:27), and Hebrews draws the line straight to Calvary: “Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12).
The Epistle of Barnabas, an early Christian letter outside the New Testament, describes the scapegoat with its head wrapped in scarlet wool and driven into the desert, and tells its reader, “Mark how the type of Jesus now comes out.” Justin Martyr saw both goats in Christ: the two goats “were similarly declarative of the two appearances of Christ,” the first when he was put to death and sent away, the second when he comes again. When John the Baptist pointed to Jesus, he spoke of a lamb, yet his words name the very work the scapegoat did: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
Why does Jesus separate the sheep from the goats?
In Matthew 25 Jesus describes the last judgment with a picture from ordinary farm life. “And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left” (Matthew 25:32–33). The United Bible Societies’ handbook for translators explains the scene: “During the day the sheep and goats graze together, but at night they are separated.” All day it looks like one flock. Then evening comes.
What divides them is what they did. The King tells those on his right, “I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (25:35–36). Both groups are surprised, and both ask, “Lord, when saw we thee an hungred?” The King answers, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (25:40). Who the least of these are is a question of its own. Jesus does not soften the end: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (25:46). It is a hard word, and it is meant to send us out to the hungry and the sick while it is still day.
The goats in the story stand for people. There is nothing wrong with the animals. The prophets had used the same picture for the strong of the flock. In Ezekiel God says, “I judge between cattle and cattle, between the rams and the he goats” (Ezekiel 34:17), and he rebukes those who “have eaten up the good pasture” and trodden down the rest (34:18). Zechariah says, “Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds, and I punished the goats” (Zechariah 10:3). The Hebrew word for he-goats here is used, the lexicon notes, “figurative of princes and chief men.” Nothing in Scripture calls the goat a stubborn or wicked animal.
Is the devil a goat in the Bible?
No. The Bible never gives Satan the form of a goat. The nearest it comes is the se’irim, the “hairy ones,” goat-shaped demons of the waste places that some Israelites worshipped. The law commands, “they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring” (Leviticus 17:7), and King Jeroboam “ordained him priests for the high places, and for the devils, and for the calves which he had made” (2 Chronicles 11:15). Where the King James Version says “devils,” the Hebrew is se’irim; the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation renders Leviticus 17:7 as “unto the satyrs.” Isaiah pictures ruined Babylon as a place where “satyrs shall dance” (Isaiah 13:21), and Edom where “the satyr shall cry to his fellow” (Isaiah 34:14). Brown-Driver-Briggs defines the word as “satyr, demon,” a spirit pictured “with he-goat’s form, or feet.”
These are false gods of the desert, and the law condemns them. They are not the devil, and they do not make ordinary goats evil.
Where did the goat-headed devil come from?
Historians do not agree on where the horned and hoofed devil came from. Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol told Live Science that “The transition to a staple modern image of goat horns and feet and goatee beard is nineteenth-century,” and that it “does seem to derive from” that century’s literary and artistic cult of Pan, the Greek god of the countryside.
The goat-headed figure best known today comes from the same century. The French occultist Éliphas Lévi drew it as the frontispiece of his book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) and called it Baphomet, “a hermaphroditic winged human figure with the head and feet of a goat,” as Britannica describes it. It belongs to occult tradition. Scripture knows nothing of it.
Does a black goat mean anything in the Bible?
No. Scripture gives no colour of goat a spiritual meaning. The one story where a goat’s colour matters is about wages: Jacob asked Laban for “the spotted and speckled among the goats” as his pay (Genesis 30:32). A black goat in the Bible is simply a goat.
Were goats kept in Baal’s temple?
The Bible tells of no goats in any temple of Baal. In the contest on Mount Carmel, the prophets of Baal offered “the bullock which was given them” (1 Kings 18:26). The “Baal with Thunderbolt” stele from Ugarit, now in the Louvre, shows him as the storm god, raising the mace that sets off thunder and rain.
What does Daniel’s goat with one horn mean?
The goat in Daniel 8 is a kingdom. In a vision Daniel saw “an he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes” (Daniel 8:5). It charged a two-horned ram and broke both its horns. Then “the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven” (8:8).
The angel Gabriel explains it. The ram “having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia,” and “the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king” (8:20–21). Jerome, in his commentary on Daniel, saw in the swift goat and its great horn Alexander the Great, who conquered Darius of Persia, and in the four horns the four generals who divided Alexander’s empire after his death. The goat that flew over the earth without touching the ground was broken at the height of its strength. Kingdoms come and go; God saw this one coming.
What does it mean to dream about goats?
The Bible does not give a meaning for dreaming about goats, and it offers no key for reading animals in our own dreams. Two people in Scripture saw goats in a dream or vision, and both times God explained what they meant. Jacob dreamed of the speckled he-goats of his flock (the King James Version says “rams,” but the Hebrew word means he-goats), and the angel told him, “I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee” (Genesis 31:12). Daniel saw his goat in a vision, and Gabriel came to “make this man to understand the vision” (Daniel 8:16). The same holds for dreams of wolves and of dead animals: the meaning Scripture gives an animal belongs to the passage where God gave it.
And the meaning God gave the goat that matters most is the one in Leviticus 16. The goat that walked into the wilderness carrying Israel’s sins never came back. Neither do ours, once they are laid on the one John pointed to: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
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