scapegoat
n.a person or group that people blame for something bad, even if it is not their fault. You use this when someone else is punished to make a problem go away.
n.a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place. Often used in political or corporate contexts to describe the redirection of public or internal frustration toward a convenient target.
“The manager became a scapegoat for the company's poor sales.”
“In times of economic crisis, minority groups are often used as a scapegoat by politicians looking to deflect criticism.”
“The junior analyst was cast as the primary scapegoat for the systemic failure of the risk management department, despite having raised concerns months prior to the collapse.”
Commonly used with the verbs 'find', 'seek', or 'make' and often followed by the preposition 'for'.
“Hespress said the police report sought to make Morocco "the scapegoat" in Spanish political and judicial disputes.”
“Hold music is just an obvious and easy scapegoat in a story about how customer experience has failed to evolve.” But hasn’t hold music always been the scapegoat?”
The word comes from the ritual of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. Two goats were brought forward: one was sacrificed, and over the other the high priest laid his hands and confessed the sins of the people, which were symbolically transferred onto the animal. This second goat was then driven out into the wilderness, carrying the community's guilt away with it. The Hebrew term for it, Azazel, was obscure even to early translators.
The English word is a deliberate coinage. When William Tyndale made his 1530 translation of the Pentateuch, he built scapegoat from escape goat, the goat that escaped into the desert rather than the one killed. The word entered the language through his rendering and outlived the ritual it described.
To scapegoat someone now is to load them with blame that belongs elsewhere, singling out one party to bear the fault of many. The modern sense keeps the core of the ritual: guilt transferred onto a chosen victim who is then cast out.
Original etymology written by Shinotoshi Nakamura.
Israel's escape from Egypt and the long march to Canaan.
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