As I was researching the Day of Atonement I was struck by a memory of information from a previous unrelated search that relates to events that happened on the Day of Atonement in history.
A while back I had tried to determine the year and date Jesus died according to our modern (Gregorian) calendar. I looked up research done recently and found several lines of evidence pointing to April 6, 30 A.D. One of the lines of evidence for the year involved some strange events surrounding the priesthood and Temple for the 40 years after Jesus died.
Four miracles concerning the Second Temple in Jerusalem are mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud and at least two of them are relevant to the meaning of the Day of Atonement. The first one is somewhat of a two-part miracle.
On the Day of Atonement two nearly identical goats are brought before the priest. He draws lots to choose which goat is “for the Lord” and which is “for removal” (azazel in Hebrew). The goat “for the Lord” is sacrificed to cover the sins of the people of the land of Israel. The goat “for removal” has Israel’s sins pronounced upon its head and is sent into the wilderness, never to return (basically into exile).
By the time of Jesus it was considered a bad sign if the lot for the Lord came up in the left hand of the priest several times in a row.
The first part of the two occurred prior to Jesus’ ministry. There had been a particularly righteous high priest named Simeon who apparently functioned in the role for forty years. For every one of those years, on the Day of Atonement, the lot came up in Simeon’s right hand. This made the people of Judea confident that God had forgiven their sins for the year.
After his death the lot randomly came up in the following priests’ left or right hands.
The second part occurred once Jesus died. For the final forty years before the destruction of the Temple the lot comes up on the left hand of the high priest every year. Needless to say the confidence in the effectiveness of the sacrifice to cover their sins was not high.
The odds against either of these occurrences are astronomical.
The second miracle mentioned by the Rabbis is also of two parts and parallels the first, in that righteous Simeon and the death of Jesus are also involved. Another part of the ceremony as practiced in the Second Temple era had a red cord tied to each of the goats. If, at the end of the ceremony the cord remained red the sacrifice was considered ineffective for covering and removing of the sin. If by miracle it turned white, God was pleased and the sin was forgiven.
The rabbis tell us that during Simeon’s reign as high priest the cords always turned white. Following him, it sometimes turned white and sometimes remained red. By this time you have probably figured out what happened during the last forty years of the temple. They always remained red.
While a few thousand Jews accepted Jesus as their Messiah the majority refused to do so. For forty years they saw evidence that their sacrifices were no longer accepted and still refused to believe in Jesus for their salvation.
Forty years parallels Israel’s testing in the wilderness, but this time they started in the promised land and ended in the “wilderness” of destruction and scattering throughout the Roman Empire. In this instance the Day of Atonement served as a sign of God’s displeasure at their rejection of his Son, their Messiah and Lord.
Even so, there is a special place in God’s heart for the children of Abraham. God has promised to personally redeem Israel from its enemies in many places in the Hebrew Scriptures that we Christians somewhat inaccurately call the Old Testament.
Like the Apostle Paul in Romans 9 and 10, I look forward to a time when God personally returns to redeem his people Israel. What will surprise the modern Jewish people is just how personally God will do so.
John Valade 
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