Since its coinage in a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term "scapegoat" has become widely used. A groundbreaking search for the origins of this expression, Flesh Becomes Word traces the scapegoat to its origins in Mesopotamian ritual across centuries of typological interpretation and religious reflection, to its first informal uses in the pornographic and plague literature of the 1600s, and finally into the modern era.

David Dawson teaches at the University of Costa Rica in San José. He wrote Flesh Becomes Word while a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Department of French and Italian.