Who gets the price of redemption?

Well...it's complicated. Eventually, I think I am going to have to admit that the notion of "redemption" evolved to a point where "payment" is ambiguous and a receiver of the payment is absent entirely. That will make it hard to understand, but I'm not worried. This is theology. When the clarity of my vision fails or I fall prey to any of several contradictions in my thinking, I can just say that it's a paradox. Or a mystery. Or a conundrum. In any of those, the fault is not ME, so they all sound pretty good.

I started down this path some time ago with a consideration of a Greek verb collection with the root lytr- and meaning "to redeem." I looked at a lot of the ealy uses of the noun (ranson) and the verb (to ranson) and built, to help me understand the transaction, a five-step template. This template assumes we are considering an Israelite who has become a slave. It falls, then, to a kinsman to "redeem" him from slavery. The kinsman pays the current owner and frees the slave. This is a pretty simple transaction.

There is (1) a condition: slavery. There is (2) an agent (the kinsman). There is (3) a medium of exchange (a money payment). There is (4) a receiver of the payment (the slave owner). And there is (5) a final condition (freedom). That counts out as my children used to count when they were small. One, two, FREE, four, five.

The next step is going to have to be a look at the Israelite sacrificial system. The high priest makes a sacrifice which recognizes the sins of the people and follows the ritual prescribed for the forgiveness of those sins and restoring a ritual purity. This is a much more complicated process than redeeming the kinsman. We have a prior condition: sin and guilt. We have an agent: the high priest. We have a medium of exchange: the animal which is sacrificed. We have the receiver of the payment--I know it is not a "payment," but I am following the terms of the model as closely as I can because it is the only handle I have on this dilemma--i.e., God. And we have a final condition: purity, holiness.

For me, the way forward is going to run me into the account in Hebrews (Chapters 6--9) where Jesus himself in "the great high priest" as well as "the sacrifice." I'm not eager to go there, because I am sure it is going to tear up my model and I am still attached to the model, having just built it. So I'm going to take a step backward, instead, and look at a possible precursor to the "redemption" idea.

I came to this quite by accident as I was looking up the source of the English word scapegoat. Here's what I found. This is the account I gave in a series of papers I did for some years, called Words of Interest.

Scapegoat was coined by William Tyndale in the middle of the 16th Century, probably from the Late Latin, caper emissaries, literally an “emissary goat.” The Latin expression came from the Greek tragos aperchomenos, a “departing goat,” which came from the Hebrew sair laazazel. The Hebrew is probably built from three pieces. The first is sair, “a he-goat.” The second is l-, or “to,” and the third, azazel, which was probably the name of a desert demon. So, more properly, Azazel. I found the picture by googling it and I'm using it because it is exactly the sort of image I imagined when "desert demon" first came to mind.

This derivation—Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English—casts the scapegoat in an entirely new light. According to the account in Leviticus 16, the goat “absorbed” in some way the sins of the Hebrew people, after which it was sent out into the wilderness; sent “away from the settlement.” But as ecologists were the first to point out, there is no destination that can be considered “away.” This word has its point of reference at the Hebrew settlement and sees the goat as “sent to Azazel.” If this were the acknowledged transaction, rather than just an etymological recreation, it would be idolatry.

A folk etymology developed as well. When people had looked at the word for awhile, they imagined that it had been constructed by combining ez (a female goat) and the verb azal, “has left.” No more demon—just a goat with a bad sense of direction and a very heavy cargo.

That is where I left it in 1997 and I don't remember thinking of it since then. Until I started messing with "redemption." What caught my eye as I remembered this account is the presence of all five of the nodes. There is an initial condition, some collective guilt. There is an agent, the priests. There is a medium of exchange, the goat. There is a recipient (the God of Israel, for the winning goat, and the desert demon Azazel, for the losing goat). There is a final condition, collective purity.

It is the maintenance of a place that is "away" that caught my eye. It may well be, just speculating here, that the process which is now directed toward the God of Israel received its Off Broadway run with Azazel, the Desert Demon. The five steps all work. The ingenuity of the people of Israel in taking stories and characters from the accounts of other peoples and reworking them into the story of Yahweh, works as well. Maybe not as clearly as the Off Broadway, On Broadway model implies, but I do find it intriguing.

So at the end of this step backward, I find myself still interested in the fourth node. Who, in the First Century Christian understanding of redemption, plays the part that was played by Azazel in the sacrificial account and by the kinsman in the redemption from slavery account?