Leviticus 16:26–28

Leviticus 16:26 — The Scapegoat Handler

The man designated to lead the live goat — upon whose head Aaron had laid the sins of Israel (Lev 16:21) — into the wilderness becomes, by that very act, ritually impure. The verb used for "lets go" (Hebrew: šillaḥ) carries connotations of release and sending away, echoing the vocabulary of emissaries and exiles. Having physically transferred the weight of communal sin into the desert, this man is not celebrated but quarantined. He must wash his clothes and bathe his entire body before returning to the camp — a double cleansing (garments first, then flesh) that mirrors the thoroughness required by the gravity of the task. He does not return immediately; the purity process takes time, implying that proximity to sin's bearing — even vicarious, even liturgical — leaves a mark requiring intentional purification.

Leviticus 16:27 — The Sin Offerings Carried Outside

Both the bull (offered for Aaron and the priesthood) and the goat (offered for the people) whose blood had been brought into the Holy of Holies for sprinkling before the Ark of the Covenant are now removed entirely from the camp. Their blood accomplished the interior, invisible work of atonement before God; their bodies are expelled. The instruction is explicit: skin, flesh, and dung — the entire carcass — must be burned. This complete incineration differs from the ordinary burnt offering in that nothing is consumed in worship at the altar; these animals bear sin and must be utterly destroyed outside the boundaries of the sacred community. The camp, as the dwelling place of the holy God (Num 5:3), cannot contain what has absorbed the weight of transgression. The phrase "outside the camp" is not incidental — it is a theological geography, marking the boundary between holiness and sin-contaminated matter.

Leviticus 16:28 — The Burner's Purification

Symmetrically, the one who performs the burning is also rendered impure by his work, and the identical double-washing formula is prescribed. The repetition of this purification requirement in verses 26 and 28 creates a deliberate literary bracket, enclosing verse 27's instruction about the offerings. The structure communicates that both forms of sin-removal — the living goat sent away and the dead animals incinerated — defile those who execute them. Holiness and contamination coexist in these acts; those who serve the community's atonement absorb its impurity.

The Typological Sense

Read through the lens of the New Testament and the Catholic interpretive tradition, these three verses constitute one of the richest typological clusters in all of Torah. The two goats together form a single sacrificial type: one bears sin away into oblivion; the other's blood is poured out for atonement — and both find their antitype in Christ. The expulsion of the sin offerings outside the camp is seized by the author of Hebrews as a deliberate sign: "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12). Golgotha was outside Jerusalem's walls — a spatial fact laden with theological weight. The burning and total destruction of the carcasses prefigures the completeness of Christ's sacrifice: nothing is left unconsumed, no sin escapes the fire of his atonement. Meanwhile, the washing prescribed for the servants anticipates baptismal regeneration — the waters that cleanse those who come near the mystery of sin-bearing and make them fit again to dwell in the community of God's people.

Catholic tradition reads these verses within a sacramental and typological framework that draws out meanings invisible to a purely historical reading.

The Theology of Ritual Contagion and Original Sin. The Catechism teaches that sin wounds human nature and affects the sinner and the community (CCC 1869). The Levitical logic of contagion — that contact with sin-bearing matter defiles even the innocent servant — reflects a deep anthropological truth: sin is not a private transaction but a force that marks, spreads, and requires communal remedy. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 102, a. 5), treats these Levitical washings as ceremonial precepts that signified the interior cleansing of the soul from sin through divine grace, noting that the external rite pointed beyond itself to a spiritual reality.

Christ as the Totality of Both Goats. The Fathers consistently refused to separate the two goats of Yom Kippur. Origen (Homilies on Leviticus, Hom. 9) argues that both goats together form one type of Christ: the sacrificed goat represents Christ's death and blood-atonement; the scapegoat represents Christ carrying away sin into nothingness. St. Cyril of Alexandria develops this further, seeing in the scapegoat's dispatch into the wilderness the harrowing of hell — Christ descending to bear sin to its ultimate place of banishment. Barnabas 7 (among the earliest Christian writings) identifies both goats explicitly with Christ's two advents or two natures.

Baptism and the Purifying Wash. The double washing — clothes then body — is read by St. Ambrose in De Mysteriis as a figura of baptism, which cleanses both the external conduct (clothes) and the interior person (flesh). The Catechism affirms that baptism "cleanses from all sin" (CCC 1263) and configures the baptized to Christ's death and resurrection. These unnamed servants, washed in obedience before re-entering the community, are thus images of every Christian who, having been drawn close to the mystery of Christ's atonement, is plunged into baptismal waters and restored to full membership in the Body.

These verses challenge a comfortable modern assumption: that proximity to grace is always comfortable, that sacred service leaves us unmarked. The servants in these verses do everything right — they obey, they serve, they carry out God's instructions exactly — and they still emerge requiring purification. This is a genuine spiritual warning for Catholic ministers and laypeople alike. Those who serve the Church most intimately — priests handling the Eucharist, ministers of care encountering human suffering and moral darkness, confessors who hear the weight of others' sin — are not immune to spiritual fatigue or a kind of interior residue from that encounter.

The prescribed response is not shame but washing: deliberate, unhurried, sacramental cleansing. For a Catholic today, this means regular recourse to Confession (not just when one has sinned gravely, but as a discipline of spiritual hygiene), meditative prayer that allows one to "re-enter the camp" with a clear interior, and the humility to acknowledge that holy work does not make one automatically holy. The Day of Atonement ends not with the servants strutting back into camp, but with bathed bodies and washed garments — a posture of refreshed readiness, not pride. Catholic ministers especially might examine whether they are building in intentional rhythms of spiritual renewal proportional to the weight of what they carry.