Scapegoat
The scapegoat carried the sin of the people away with it, thereby cleansing Israel for another year.
The English scapegoat is a compound of the archaic verb scape, which means "escape," and goat,
and is modeled on a misreading of the Hebrew ʽazāzēl (which is probably the name of a demon) as ʽēz 'ōzēl , "the goat that departs." More modern translations render scapegoat in this text as Azazel, but the misreading endured and has entered the lexicon.
History and Etymology for scapegoat
Noun
scape entry 1; intended as translation of Hebrew ʽazāzēl (probably name of a demon), as if ʽēz 'ōzēl goat that departs—Leviticus 16:8 (King James Version)
Definition of SCAPEGOAT
Tyndale translated the word Asazel into "escape goat"--over time, the e was dropped.
It is now generally accepted that Tyndale got his translation of the Hebrew sources wrong. He misread ʿăzāzel' in the original and translated it as 'ez ozel', literally 'the goat that departs' or ‘the goote on which the lotte fell to scape’. Later scholars corrected the mistake and 'scapegoat' doesn't appear in the Revised Version of 1884, which has ‘Azazel’ as a proper name in the text, but by that time the word had already been established as a commonplace word. So commonplace in fact that, in the way that 'gate' is now added to form the name for any scandal, the 18th century gave us 'scape-horses', 'scape-rats' and 'scape-geese'.
'Scapegoat' - the meaning and origin of this word