Talk:Scapegoat

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

problem with scapegoat/scapegoating split
most of the articles that link here relate to scapegoat in the psychological sense and therefore relate more to scapegoating.: Special:WhatLinksHere/Scapegoat --Penbat (talk) 13:34, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Proposals: Merger &/ Redefine & Title Change
I propose to merge Azazel into Scapegoat. Especially the way the article is written, Azazel and Scapegoat are one in the same, so I can see no reason that they are not merged.

Really I think the article should be rewritten to define scapegoat more broadly to include those currently referred to as "practices with some similarities to the scapegoat ritual" & "superficially similar to the biblical scapegoat". (If it is rewritten, there may be room to go either way on the merging.)

I propose changing the title to something like "Scapegoat ritual" (or adding a parenthetical) and redirecting plain scapegoat to the disambiguation page (or even to the scapegoating page) for the following combination of reasons:
 * This article does not reflect the (most) common usage of the term scapegoat (which is on the scapegoating page).
 * It seems to me that most of the time I'm seeing the term "scapegoat" used in academic literature related to religion & history it's referring to the "scapegoat ritual(s)" rather than the goat itself.
 * Is this more of an article about scapegoats or scapegoat rituals?
 * See previous post which points out that many articles linking here will likely be using the term in the psychological/political sense.

On the other hand, Britannica seems to use the "scapegoat" entry in the religious sense (including humans) (they have no dedicated article to scapegoating). However, I found an Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World published by Brill that does use the entry "scapegoat ritual".

This discussion regarding the original split (from the Scapegoating page) may be relevant (I'm not sure I fully followed all of it tho). I also noticed that in the original split, the article started with "In modern usage a scapegoat is an individual, group, or country singled out for unmerited negative treatment or blame..." until it was removed here.Yaakovaryeh (talk) 08:06, 1 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Oppose The Scapegoat article should be made broader, while the Azazel article should be short and about the Jewish term only. Debresser (talk) 16:54, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose Azazel is a fallen angel in Judaism. It's related to scapegoat, but not the same.--Watchlonly (talk) 00:38, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose The concept of a scapegoat existed in pagan religions too. Im The IP  (talk) 18:22, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose Merger simply makes no sense. Zhomron (talk) 16:26, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose While related, these are really different concepts in how they are used and worked with via people who would use Wikipedia to learn about these separately. --- FULBERT (talk) 18:06, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose One article is theological in nature and the other broader. Alex (talk) 05:31, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Opoose. Ther is simply no material overlapping. No user would ever stand confused between the two articles. No user would ever look for one of the two articles and erroneously land on the other. -The Gnome (talk) 11:59, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose: Keep the religious and common use terms separate.  No News  !  04:20, 11 May 2021 (UTC)