I concluded the previous post with the claim that religious sacrifice, and religion, should be seen as a return-gift we make in exchange for the initial gift of life itself.
But why should such a ‘return-gift’ be either desirable or necessary?
Here, too, I believe, the social sciences have something to offer the Christian evangelist.
Sacrifice is a form of the gift. Anthropologists tell us that giving is the means by which all relationships are created and maintained.(6) Underlying the gifts that bind people to those whom their cultures & societies teach to regard as their fellow-beings, there are the gifts that bind people to their past – to their collective origins. Indeed, it is precisely through the gifts people owe, and relationships they entertain, with their ‘life-givers’ – the gods, ancestors, parents, wife-givers of their collective past – that they come to know precisely who those fellow-beings are to whom they must relate in the present. It is to the extent people acknowledge a common forebear that they relate to other people as their brothers and sisters. These gifts to the life-givers – gifts that underpin everyday social relationships – are what we call sacrifice.
Religious sacrifice, then, is about defining identity – something we all need to do.
Identity has a double reference here – as does the sacrificial practice that defines it. On the one hand, we refer to ‘an’ identity, when speaking of a particular group, people or community to which an individual belongs. On the other, we use the word identity (without indefinite article), when we want to refer an individual’s sense of belonging – and their need to belong – to such a group. The concept of identity stands, as it were, between the collective and the individual aspects of our experience, facing onto both. The practice of sacrifice is, therefore, both formative of collective identities – societies, peoples, etc., and, on an existential level, fundamental to our identity as human individuals.
In testimony to the role of sacrifice in the first of these aspects, scholars and historians over recent years have increasingly recognized the role of cultic centres in the development of societies.(7) At the same time, and in support of its role in the second, countless ethnographies by social anthropologists remind us that, on an individual level we are profoundly relational creatures; ‘who we are’ very much a question of ‘where we belong’. This explains both our compulsion to find meaning outside ourselves, and the attribution of that meaning to those divine beings to whom we see ourselves as indebted for this sense of belonging.
We could illustrate these fundamental characteristics of religion using evidence drawn from ethnographies of far-away places. Later chapters will do precisely that. However, the Bible itself is also a potential source of illustrative material – and one that has the additional benefit of being familiar to most readers. The early books, especially from Exodus to Deuteronomy, are largely occupied with an account of a religion, and its sacrificial cult. Of course, that religion happens to be, from the perspective of the Old Testament, the ‘one true religion’. It is, however, no less an instance of the phenomenon ‘human religion’ for being the one true religion – just as the chosen people of God is no less ‘a people’ for being chosen, and their scriptural text no less ‘a text’ for being scriptural. I propose, therefore, in the current chapter to approach that biblical account, as an anthropologist might, in order to illustrate the general characteristics of the phenomena of religion and sacrifice described above. The remaining chapters of our study will give me ample opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness with which I take the claim of the religion of the Bible to be uniquely true.
We will begin with the outward aspect of the religious phenomenon – as the basis of social and political identity; then, go on to discuss the inward and personal, aspect – as a response to human existential need.
Religious sacrifice as the basis of socio-political identity
The texts we are considering in evidence – the four books of the Pentateuch/Torah following Genesis – do not fit comfortably into any modern literary genre. In fact, they have an embarrassingly two-fold character, suggesting, on the one hand, a code of rules or norms, on the other, a historical narrative. In truth, both aspects are present: there are substantial sections of law; but these arise within a controlling narrative. This two-fold character invites contrasted readings. Either way, however, we find in them a blueprint for the life of a community centred on the practice of sacrificial cult.
Let us begin by treating the texts as primarily law.
Many readers have sought in them a system of rules for morality. To do so is to court disappointment. For to anyone who reads these four books at all closely, it fairly swiftly becomes apparent that the main focus of the rules here expounded is not personal morality as we would understand it. Substantial tranches of this ‘legal’ material concern, for example: within what degrees of kinship it is, or is not, permitted to have sexual relations; what foods it is, or is not permitted to eat; how to deal with cases of leprosy; the yearly pattern of festivals. There is a unifying thread that runs through this material; but it is not a moral or ethical one. It is rather the concern in all domains of social life with maintaining ritual purity and managing impurity. And purity, of course, is the requirement of the sacrificial cult. The people are required, as a condition of being the people that is ‘the people of God’, to ‘be holy’ as their God ‘is holy’. This is, in effect, the blueprint for a theocentric polity, a system for communal living, with at its heart, a ritual cult whose requirements ramify into every department of social existence. The punishment for innumerable transgressions, remember, is to be ‘cut off’ from the people – from the people, that is, whose defining characteristic consists in their being the people ‘of God’.
It is too easy, coming at this material from a modern perspective, to view such ‘theocracy’ as exceptional. The truth, I would argue, is rather that, for archaic (pre-modern) polities, this building of social existence on the foundation of sacrificial cult is rather the norm than the exception – though the comprehensiveness of written codification by these texts is probably unusual. In other words, our texts (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) describe a perfectly recognizable instance of religion as anthropology understands the term – a system of norms for community deriving from an obligation owed to its spiritual source – a collective identity with sacrificial cult at its heart.
But the degree to which the biblical texts exemplify the anthropological phenomenon of religion becomes still more obvious, when we read the texts not as law but as mytho-historical narrative.
That narrative’s main human protagonist, from the moment that religion first enters the biblical stage in a recognizable form, is not Moses, or any other individual, but the people or nation. In fact, the story of the institution of Mosaic religion turns out also, not coincidentally, to be the birth-narrative of the identity of the nation – a lengthy parturition that begins with Moses’ vision of the burning bush on Mt Sinai, and concludes, some twenty chapters later, with the ratification of the covenant. Our protagonist is not, from the outset, a ready-formed character – a Mr Pickwick, say – whom the narrative engages in a series of picaresque adventures, but a character whom we seem in the process of their first emergence and development – a David Copperfield, perhaps.
Of course, the story of God’s dealings with humanity does not begin in Exodus with the introduction of religion. It starts with the creation and the fall of man, and continues with God’s response to that disaster in the calling of Abraham and his descendants. But it is with the institution of a people and a nation that the promises to the Patriarchs find the first beginnings of a fulfilment. This is the point where the divine plan gets properly underway to retrieve humankind from its state of depravity. Prior to Exodus 3 (Moses’ vision of the burning bush) it is scarcely possible to speak of a people or nation, properly so-called. Genesis contains the history of a family. Exodus, prior to the revelation of God to Moses, speaks of the remote descendants of that family. They have multiplied greatly; but, do not at this point constitute a socio-political entity. They are tribesman and shepherds in the district of Goshen, occupying an apparently liminal status in respect to the Pharaonic state that has allowed them to be enslaved by an unfriendly ruler.
Yet the story of Exodus retells the birth of a people and nation from these unprepossessing beginnings. What was the cause of this remarkable development?
The story of the people of God turns out to be the perfect exemplification of the hypothesis we proposed at the beginning of this chapter as to the role of religion in the forging of communal identities. Underlying and motivating the process of social and political formation to which we allude is the people’s relationship to God. The people/nation that we observe coming into existence in the course of these chapters is a people whose whole identity consists in their being a people of God – His chosen people. The lengthy birthing process kicks off with the divine calling of a leader, Moses. The revelation of the god ‘of your ancestors’, initially in the burning bush, at once entails a summons to the Hebrews to come out and be distinct – culturally and socially. We see this again in Moses’ rejected demand to Pharaoh that his Hebrew slaves be allowed time to go out collectively into the wilderness in order to worship their god. In both cases, the religious goal effectively brings about – or aims to bring about – the institution of a new socio-political unit through its literal and physical setting apart from the rest of Egyptian society. This process of self-imposed separation is subsequently reinforced by various cultural and ritual markers – ultimately by the Passover that distinguishes the people of God in the most conspicuously imaginable way as the only group not to suffer the death of their first-born. This last episode brings the socio-political birthing process to its climax with the exodus itself – an expulsion that is also a deliverance.
However, the process initiated with the revelation of the burning bush only finally concludes with the sealing of the covenant. This takes place at Mt Sinai where Moses’ initial project of wilderness worship, thwarted by Pharaoh, finally reaches its goal. One of the common subordinate functions of blood-sacrifice (to be discussed later in this study) is the creation of an extended kinship through ritual symbolism – a kind of symbolic ‘birth’ which can extend human relationships beyond those of biological reproduction to lineage, clan, or nation. In Exodus 24, a sacrifice of just this kind inaugurates the covenant or treaty/agreement between God and his future people. Following a reading of the Law, the assembled multitude promises to observe its provisions as their side of the covenant. When they have done so, Moses
… took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, ‘See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words’.
The covenant is thus sealed with the blood of sacrifice, and a people (God’s people) ceremonially brought to birth through their being sprinkled with the sacrificial blood. They are now kindred by virtue of their incorporation into a single nation owing their existence to God – not as an ancestor exactly, but as one who has called them into existence – an adoptive ancestor, perhaps …. an ancestor through covenant.
Religious sacrifice as the basis of personal identity and a response to existential need
The birth of God’s people occurs with the covenant sacrifice at Sinai; its curious sequel brings us conveniently to the other aspect of religion – its indispensability to our personal identity.
So let us go on with the narrative.
Strangely this ritual birth doesn’t feel like anything very conclusive – you could easily miss the episode altogether, sandwiched as it is between a section of law containing the Ten Commandments, and a second section dealing with cultic provisions for the worship of the tabernacle. In effect, the covenant episode interrupts Moses’ audience with God on Mt Sinai, dividing it into two sections, of which the second goes on for several further chapters. Moses has therefore, at this point, already received some major non-cultic provisions of the law, including the Ten Commandments; but has yet to receive the detailed provisions regarding the cult. A consequence of this is that the people swear to be bound by provisions of the covenant prohibiting idolatry (i.e. the first two of the Ten Commandments), before they have received the provisions specifying the correct form of religion. In effect, they agree to a prohibition of bad religion before receiving provisions for the good. No indication is given of the length of Moses’ first sojourn on Sinai; but the second is said to take a full forty days and nights.
Why the delay? From what we learn in subsequent chapters, one might imagine the delay to be a result of the length and intricacy of the tabernacle specifications. Nothing here is left to the vagaries of the human imagination; it is as if God meant to drive home the lesson that the proper forms of revealed religion are not discoverable by any human faculty. This lesson is amply borne out by the events to ensue. For when the Israelites prove unable to restrain their religious instincts for the full length of Moses’ absence on Sinai, the result – worship of a ‘golden calf’ apparently improvised out of their human imagination – evidently doesn’t correspond to what God had intended. Thus, ironically, the delay required for the full delivery of a humanly undiscoverable blueprint turns out to be the cause of the people’s first idolatry.
The story speaks, I think, to the need that the Israelites, like all of us, experienced for a religious object through which to ground their identity and sense of belonging together as a people. Here, the need seems to arise out of an instinct so fundamental and so urgent that it forestalls the provision of right religion. Maybe, without such a collective religious project, the surplus wealth contained in those gold ornaments which the newly liberated Hebrews had borrowed from the Egyptians (hitherto, a seemingly redundant element in the narrative) would inevitably have become a cause of rivalry and dissension. In any case, like a betrothed couple, too long forbidden a legitimate outlet for their instincts by a long-delayed marriage who start fornicating with other people, the people’s pent-up religious instincts, denied a divinely-sanctioned expression, seek fulfilment in inappropriate forms. So it is, then, that those gold ornaments find their way, as if by a spontaneously instinctual movement, into an idol. As the future priest, Aaron, responds to the indignant Moses: ‘I said to them, “Whoever has gold, take it off”; so, they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’ Gold, then as now, marked status and the attribution of value. It is almost as if the metal itself had some mysterious affinity with the idolatrous propensity of its bearers.
The impression is thereby given that human nature is somehow spiritually labile, and that our propensity to attribute value to whatever gives us a collective spiritual goal constitutes a kind of unremitting gravitational under-tow threatening always to draw us into orbit around some new star in the firmament; its only remedy the true religion that centres us on God Himself. Idolatry, so it seems, is the most natural thing in the world.
How the story ends
A brief concluding word on the final outcome of this missed rendez-vous between raw religious instinct and its proper God-given expression.
God explains to Moses His intention to destroy the people and start over again with Moses himself. This, by the way, further endorses the biblical priority of religion over society. God’s words imply that, given a right relationship to God (such as that of Moses himself), the future basis for societal formation exists; God will, if necessary, bring a new people out of the loins of his righteous prophet. But without a basis in that right religious relationship, nothing is possible socially. The people will perish.
Moses responds by offering, priest-like, his own life in the place of the people’s. God refuses Moses’ intervention, just as Moses had rejected God’s invitation to be a new Abraham. The resulting impasse could be succinctly stated as follows: either God no longer ‘goes with’ the people and they cease to be known as ‘His’; or, he ‘goes with’ His people, and they are ‘consumed’ by his wrath. How can such a God be present to such a people? How – to put things metaphorically – can a frail human instrument witness to such a Presence without bringing about is own destruction?
The answer turns out already ready to have been given – and it points us forward to the subject of our next chapter. That answer is a socio-religious structure for containing and mediating God’s ‘Holiness’, through a system of interposed spaces and hierarchies. In short, the divinely-ordained and grace-given socio-symbolism of the tabernacle cult and its rituals.
- Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1922); Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (1996); Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth (2002); Jacques Godbout & Alain Caillé, The World of the Gift (1991)
- On the dependence of community on the origins of cult, any number of interesting and accessible examples given in Neil MacGregor’s copiously illustrated Living with the Gods (2018)