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The practice of beating willows on Hoshanah Rabbah is a very unusual one, with no explanations offered in the Talmud or Midrash. In the ancient world, the willow represented both fertility and infertility, life and death, and the beating of willows can be connected both to beating with plants as a fertility ritual and as a form of scapegoat ritual. Echoes of both of these ideas are found in Sephardic folk practices associated with beating people with willows as well as the earliest Gaonic explanation for this practice, in addition to the later explanations found in the Zohar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article conducts two case studies into the premodern caste societies of medieval Bengal and early modern Japan. The Pirali Brahmins in Bengal and eta-hinin castes of Japan—both became scapegoats during these periods and were subject to popular disgust and stigma. The common aspects are that they were both close to the centres of power, and that these castes were feared in the ancient period for their supernatural prowess and they served as ritual scapegoats in pollution cleaning rituals. How they both became actual scapegoats from being ritual scapegoats is explored in this article using the framework popularized by the works of René Girard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a growing body of scholarship that accentuates the communicative foundations and dimensions of international criminal justice, the article explores how defendants and their defence teams navigate the discursive battleground in the course of trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Given the central role of narratives in the construction and (de)legitimation of identities, and their profound implications for perceptions about trial participants, the article seeks to understand what implications defences' relative disadvantage vis-á-vis the prosecutions' in terms of institutional support, access to resources and media visibility, have for their strategies of narrative control and positioning. To this end, the article charts the discursive battle sites at global, regional and local levels, maps specific strategies of narrative control in these sites, and zooms in on two prominent themes in the identity construction of defendants within and beyond the ICC courtroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of scholars have praised the work of René Girard as opening a way forward for biblical interpretation. This essay seeks to test the utility of Girard's theories by applying them to a close reading of 2 Samuel 21:1–14. It concludes that Girard's work draws attention to certain neglected themes but is unable to account for the narrative of 2 Samuel 21 in its final form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of mistrust – especially in constructions of purity, impurity, and purification – in ancient Greek religion. It begins by examining so-called scapegoat or pharmakos rituals, in which an individual was expelled from the city, apparently as a purificatory offering to the gods. Recent analyses have argued that these rituals were outlets for community aggression, and/or were resonant with myths of self-sacrifice. This article will suggest a different analysis of the evidence. I offer an alternative way of interpreting these rituals that sets them in a wider context of Greek ritual and belief: it suggests that the ritual of the pharmakos arose in a context of social and spiritual insecurity. This created, I argue, a prevailing dynamic of social and spiritual mistrust, within which the pharmakos ritual emerged – and which it exacerbated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Leviticus 16, Aaron is commanded to bring a bull to atone for himself and his household (v. 3) along with two goats to atone for the children of Israel (v. 5). He sprinkles the blood of the bull and one of the goats in different places in the Temple and sends the second goat, the scapegoat, to "ʾAzazel to the desert." The biblical scapegoat ritual is discussed extensively in the research community, mainly due to its similarity to ancient pagan rituals. Here, I present the interpretation of the early rabbis, which states that atonement is attained not by sending the goat away but through the confession performed on it. I also discuss the novelty introduced in the early rabbinic literature, concerning the disposition of the goat: thrown off the cliff and not just sent to the desert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern with freeing animals to protecting the human imperative to live. Introducing new ethnography on the ethical underpinnings of sacrifice among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and the Nuosu of southwest China, I propose that animal release can be an act of restrained violence that evokes the mythopoetic contours of human–animal relations, animal sentience and human self-preservation. Offering case studies on scapegoats, deferred sacrifice, and contingent forms of slaughter, I show how Buryats and Nuosu manage the ethical tensions posed by sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind the cruel mockery of Pilate's auxiliary troops (Matt 27:27–31), Matthew portrays the royal inauguration of the true cosmic lord. But what has often been missed is that this inauguration also entails Jesus's cultic elimination as the victim in a performance reminiscent of ancient curse-transmission rituals. Matthew transforms and assimilates the scene to the most famous elimination rite in his Jewish context, the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual. Jesus becomes a king who himself bears and carries away the moral impurities of the denizens of his own kingdom as the typological fulfillment of the scapegoat of Leviticus 16. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Samson narrative is notable for its cycles of violence and revenge. Sometimes this has been understood to be an expression of lex talionis (‘an eye for an eye’); indeed, Samson appears to assert as much, though his actions do not match up to the ideal. This paper argues that while the narrator permits Samson to make this claim, he demonstrates that a far more sinister dynamic is at work: namely, Girardian mimesis and scapegoating. At the centre of the rivalry between Israel and the Philistines is Samson, ‘monsterised’ by both sides, and represented in hulk-like terms. His sexual rivalry with his Philistine ‘companions’ embodies the rivalry between the two nations. Using a Girardian hermeneutic reveals how the cycles of violence are, in fact, an escalating form of mimesis, which twice approach crisis, but conclude with Samson escaping from the scapegoating role by taking matters into his own hands.
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Recognized by few in theory and practice, unconscious dynamics affect all aspects of education, including teaching and learning, as well as assessment, coding, and teacher preparation. Jung proposed that the collective unconscious is akin to a very deep psychosocial well from which individuals, families, and cultures across time and place draw in order to organize and make meaning of life. If we accept this claim, then the ways we understand and attend to interpersonal dynamics within the classroom radically change. Here, in two conjoining parts, a case is made for the vital importance of acknowledging and working with the unconscious, particularly the cultural layer (Part 1) and the familial layer (Part 2) of the psyche. Attention in Part 1 is given to the social and political turn in Jungian psychology and its importance to the dramatically changing ethnocultural character of Canada’s classrooms (likewise with many countries today). The cultural unconscious, cultural complexes, scapegoating, and the critical intersection between groups and individuals are examined in relation to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theological change suffers under the obligation to seem--and the danger of seeming--both consistent with what has come before and genuinely new. Where does the idea of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 come from? Leaving aside those acts of warfare and violence against the innocent, which seem more matters of brute aggression than symbolic atonement, we can find well-acknowledged roots for the doctrine of a suffering servant in the practice of symbolic animal sacrifice and in the figure of the prophet who suffers with, and perhaps for, the people. But there is a third root as well that goes back to the language of the divine attributes and to the ambiguous Hebrew idiom of noseh avon, bearing sin or forgiving sin. If the servant of God bears iniquity, he can be imagined not just to remove sin from the head or shoulders of many but also to carry what he removes; he himself can "bear" it. And when all the people in the Gospel of Matthew call down the blood of Jesus on their heads, they "own" (own up to, but also claim for their own) the rich history of ambiguous responsibility and atonement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The custom of tying a crimson thread to the head of an animal as part of the High Priest's official rites on the Day of Atonement and the purification rite for the leper is not specified in the Pentateuch but is known solely from mishnaic sources. The Second Temple practice is also attested by two independent early Christian sources that evidently drew on a common source that was not the Mishna. The present article searches for the origin of this tradition and its original purpose and setting through the ancient Syro-Anatolian apotropaic rites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ritual of the scapegoat in Leviticus 16 has often been understood through the lens of substitution .Whereas substitution is typically thought of in terms of death, I wish to argue for a different kind of substitution - substitutionary banishment. By highlighting banishment as a consequence for sin, the scapegoat ritual can be read as a substitutionary act in which the goat receives the consequences meant for the Israelites - not death but banishment. Furthermore, using the categories of 'psychological' and 'ontological', I wish to show that God's reasoning for the consequences is not related to an emotional wrath but is instead necessitated by his holy nature and the assumption that holy and unholy cannot coexist thus requiring the removal of one or the other. Instead of the removal of the Israelites, the scapegoat is removed - and along with it, the sins of Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex, archetypal world of twins through creation myths. Twins are special cases of ‘two’, in that their relationship is qualitative not quantitative: they enact the relationship between the ‘first’ and the ‘other’. I present two early creation myths to explore the primacy of this dyadic relationship before it was superseded by patrilineal primogeniture (c. 3000 BCE), which designated ethical, fixed gender specificity to one twin over the other. I examine which gender has been negatively affected and speculate about the reasons behind the devaluation and disassociation. Analytical psychology, in particular the individuation process, is relevant to this paper because Jung saw the creative value of working experientially with the unconscious ‘shadow’ and intra-psychic contra-sexual twin ‘other’ to help bring taboo, disassociative emotions into mainstream cultural life.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Scholars have long noted that Numbers 25, the story of Phinehas' murder of Cozbi the Midianite and her Israelite partner in crime, contains inconsistencies and tensions that reflect a complicated history of composition and transmission. This paper offers new perspective on the evolution of this text by comparing it with two Hittite military ritual texts (CTH 407 and 394) that describe the selection and sacrifice of human, female scapegoats. Scholars have discussed these texts as they relate to biblical rites for the Day of Atonement; however, the Hittite evidence has never been considered systematically in relation to Numbers 25. Such a comparison illuminates unrecognized sacrificial dynamics operative in Numbers 25, and clarifies certain inherent ambiguities in the biblical text. Parallels with the Hittite evidence point to Numbers 25 as an additional witness to the way scapegoat rituals operated within the ancient Israelite literary imagination, if not in actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two cases of scapegoating-that of Ludwig Magyar in December 1934, and that of Gevork Alikhanov in June 1937-and applies theories of group identity and behavior to explore what motivated people to scapegoat their comrades, why the groups selected particular people for scapegoating, and what these incidences reveal about the groups that engaged in this ritual. Within political groups, such behaviors are obviously inseparable from the politics of the moment. The cases examined here illustrate some key political shifts in Stalinist party policy between late 1934 and mid-1937, as manifest in a single party organization. The changes affected its members' behavior, which offers insights into intra-party fractures. The essay confines its focus to two meetings of the party organization of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI). Whereas in December 1934 the members of the party organization unanimously voted to expel Magyar from their ranks, in June 1937 rank-and-file members of the organization re-directed efforts by the party organization's leaders to scapegoat Alikhanov and attacked the party organization's leaders. Examining how this group of Stalinists behaved allows one to view scapegoating as both a Stalinist and universal social behavior. Appreciating the prominence of universal social behavior within a Stalinist political context is essential to moving beyond many scholars' unwarranted obsession with Soviet and Stalinist exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis on the etymology of the Greek term συβακχoς or scapegoat. Scholar Helladius says that the term refers to a man who is ousted for the purification purpose of the community and town in Athens, Greece. It states that the term is used in Greek scapegoats. It examines the conjectures of scholars Ogden and Mommsen. It explains the comparison of the Greek term with the Hebrew zeḇa ḥ.

This paper argues, contrary to the dominant view, that the ritual of the scapegoat in Leviticus xvi is a purely native, Israelite invention, not a modification of pre-Israelite, Near Eastern rites. The key to its construction is the procedure by which the biblical lawgiver examined his nation's traditions, singled out the first time a particular issue arose, and presented a law ostensibly the product of Moses' judgment. In the case of the scapegoat ritual, the issue he focussed on is the occasion when Joseph's brothers seek forgiveness for their offence against Joseph, thereby transferring to the beast their own wrongdoing. The thesis revives a view found as early as the Book of Jubilees and which turns up again in Maimonides that the Day of Atonement was first instituted to expiate the brothers' offence against Joseph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the hypothesis that national identity is built on a confrontational dynamic, our study intends to examine the representations of the Foreigner in emblematic texts of the Portuguese culture from the 18th to 20th Centuries, considering the principle that, depending on the context and typology (exogenous or endogenous foreigner), the Foreigner can be seen as the enemy to be fought and eliminated, or a model to be emulated. This analysis will be complemented by a reading of the Foreigner according to a structure of resentment and a scapegoat mechanism. It will be understood that only through an exegesis of the long-term representations of the Foreigner can we understand the efficacy and mobilizing force of certain myths engendered about a particular foreigner, their evolution over time and the way they have been instrumentalized in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the verb מושׁ is used intransitively in Zech 3:9 with the sense of "to depart" and that the particle את is best interpreted as the preposition "with" rather than as the nota accusativi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]