Leviticus 16:8

Summary

Aaron places lots upon the two goats: one lot designated la-YHWH ("for Yehovah") and the other la-'azazel ("for Azazel"). The verse describes the mechanism of lot-casting that determines which goat receives which designation, without describing the casting action itself as a distinct verb — Hebrew uses "give/place" for the whole procedure.

Key words

• na.Tan ("he will put/give", H5414L) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative sequence from the prior verse. The verb's basic sense is "to give" or "to place," not a dedicated word for "cast [lots]"; the casting is implied by context (lots placed 'al, "upon," the goats).
• se.'i.Rim ("male goats", H8163B) — masculine plural noun with definite article (ha-), referring back to "the two goats" already introduced earlier in the passage.
• go.ra.Lot ("lots", H1486) — feminine plural form of the noun that appears twice more in this verse as singular (go.Ral, H1486). The shift from plural to two singular instances marks the movement from "lots" as a category to each individual lot's assignment.
• 'e.Chad ("one", H0259) — cardinal number, feminine singular, used twice to distinguish "one lot" from "the other lot" in the two clauses that follow.
• 'a.za.Zel ("Azazel", H5799) — treated grammatically as a proper name/title, parallel in construction to la-YHWH, both preceded by the preposition la ("for").

What the text says

The clause structure moves from general to specific: first na.Tan... 'al shenei ha-se'irim goralot ("he will put/give upon the two male goats lots") states the action in plural, then two parallel clauses — goral 'echad la-YHWH and ve-goral 'echad la-'azazel — each assign one singular lot to one recipient. This grammatical parallelism (identical construction goral 'echad la-X) places YHWH and 'azazel in the same syntactic slot, though the text does not comment on what this parallelism means beyond the lot assignment.

The verb na.Tan (H5414L) does not inherently mean "to cast" in the sense of throwing dice; its core meaning is "to give" or "to place." The specific act of lot-casting is conveyed through the object goralot ("lots") and the preposition 'al ("upon" the goats), not through a specialized verb.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew 'a.za.Zel (H5799) is transliterated as a proper name. The LXX renders it as τῷ ἀποπομπαίῳ ("to the one sent away" / "for the sending-away one"), and the Vulgate as capro emissario ("to the goat sent out" / "scapegoat"). Both Greek and Latin versions translate the term descriptively (based on function) rather than preserving it as a proper name, unlike the Hebrew and modern versions such as RV1909 and BSB, which keep "Azazel" as a name.