Leviticus 16: on Yom Kippur, two goats stand before the Lord; lots are cast, one for YHWH, sacrificed, one for Azazel, loaded with the confessed sins of Israel and driven into the wilderness. Azazel appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Scholars offer four options: a desert demon, a place, an abstract removal, or a compound, goat that departs, the reading the Septuagint and Vulgate chose, giving English the word scapegoat.
1 Enoch fills the silence: Azazel leads the watchers' corruption, teaching men swords, shields, and breastplates, and women bracelets, eye paint, and dyes, and the world was changed. For this, Raphael binds him hand and foot and hurls him into darkness in the desert of Dudael under jagged rocks until judgment, and against him write down all sin. Dead Sea Scroll fragments tie him to the Nephilim cycle. The spelling itself may have been doctored, shifting the aleph to strip the name of its theophoric -el and erase a god.
The claim: Azazel was once a desert power, parallel to YHWH in the ritual, one goat each, and Leviticus is the record of his demotion, not his nature; the scapegoat is tribute paid to an ex-deity so thoroughly defeated that his only remaining office is landfill for sins. Verdict: the parallel structure, for YHWH, for Azazel, plus the wilderness address and the possible name-doctoring make demotion a serious reading, not a fringe one. But a serious reading of silence is still a reading of silence. The goat knew where it was going. We don't.
If the goat was for Azazel, who was collecting?