The answer to this question is that the human is an essentially relational being. That is to say our ‘being’ chiefly lies, not in ourselves, but in our relationships to others, social, political, or cultural. Human individuals are nodes in a network of such relationships. What or who we are isa matter of where – i.e. to what and to whom – we belong, socially, politically, or culturally: in short, it is a matter of identity. We are members of such & such a family, nation, fandom, religion
How does that explain sacrifice? Well, on the concrete level, our ‘relationships’ (where they are not merely nominal – as in the case of a family member one never speaks to) reflect our expenditures of money, time and effort – our investment of ourselves. Expenditures serving to produce and reproduce our identities – that is what is meant by ‘sacrifice’.[i] We could be speaking of charitable donation, our spending as consumers, the dedication of our free time or disposable income. Where it serves the purpose of cementing our belonging within the communities that give our lives meaning and purpose, that is sacrifice. Our ‘gods’ are the addressees of this expenditure. There are a number of Christian ‘sociological’ studies of contemporary consumer capitalism that have sought to chart the forms of such expenditure in ‘secular’ society and the diversity of their addressees.[ii] (The frequency of ‘idolatry’ in their titles reflects the Christian negative perception of such identities where they usurp the absolute priority owed to the identity Christians have ‘in Christ’). ‘Sacrifice’ in this sense is evidently how we find fulfilment as relational beings. There have, of course, always been occasional individuals who refuse to spend or belong. But general attitudes to the ‘miser’ in our society – and his/her prominence in our literary culture as a negative type – evidently demonstrate, not the unreality, but the overwhelming importance to our humanity, of the human need which existence of the miser appears to deny.
The sacrifice of archaic (i.e. non-modern) societies known to us from ethnographic studies (given summary definition in our previous post) is a specific instance of the more generic concept I have just outlined. But, in the case of pre-modern societies, the identities served by such sacrifices, and the ‘gods’ to which they are addressed, differ from those of today. First, those identities are generally prescribed by tradition and often take the form of kinship groups: the identity of lineage or clan, for example – or even the nation. In all of these cases, the addressees of the expenditures that cement these identities will be ancestors, recent or remote. This is the form of sacrifice presupposed by anthropologists and alluded in the anthropological definition of sacrifice given in my previous post. Expenditures on the ancestor, perceived as the group’s source of being, bind the descendants to the identity that they share. (The Latin word for religion (religio) means ‘to bind’ in this sense). The sharing of a common ‘father’ renders his off-spring ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ in relation to each other.
But the most important difference between archaic and modern identities lies elsewhere. Where there are multiple identities that define an individual in the non-modern world, those identities tend to have their place in a nested hierarchy, with some identities seen as more fundamental to the individual than others: the family nests within the lineage, the lineage in the clan, the clan, perhaps, within the nation. The result is a relatively unified and coherent worldview in which the obligations attaching to these identities are aligned with each other. Christianity is something of an extreme example of this. Naturally, Christians in the modern world have multiple identities, like everyone else. But the identity that they have ‘in Christ’ is supposed to be the most fundamental – the absolute ‘ground zero’ in relation to which all other identities must take their place. Where the primacy of our identity ‘in Christ’ finds itself challenged, competing identities assume, for the Christian, the aspect of what the Bible terms ‘idolatry’. An ‘idolatry’ is, indeed, nothing other than a competing source of identity (i.e. competing with Christ) that is overvalued.
Now what we find in the contemporary secular realm, is an ideological opposition to the kind of official hierarchical ordering of identities familiar to the non-modern world, as also in Christianity. Not only do we attach value, in each individual, to their potentially unique and distinctive agglomeration of identities, but, underlying this potential for the embodiment of an infinite variation at the individual level, we share a more fundamental moral commitment to the principle of individuation itself as a source of ultimate value. This is what is meant, in practice, by the contemporary Western celebration of diversity. It is a far cry from the moral world of non-modern societies. Still, it remains the case, for modern as for non-modern societies, that, as relational beings, we humans need identity. The image of the individual as a node in a potential network remains valid for the one as for the other. But the nature of networks assume a very different form in the two cases.[iii]
Religion as commonly understood
So much then for my generic explanation of ‘religion’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘god’. For such fusty-seeming and arcane terms, we can, if we like, substitute clunky equivalents like ‘identity’, ‘identity-related expenditure’, ‘source of identity.’ Or else, we can simply continue using the old words – ‘religion’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘god’, while recognizing we are doing so in a broader ‘anthropological’ sense.
It will be evident by now that, on this account of religion, there is no very sharp distinction between religion, on the one hand, and social, political or cultural identities, on the other. In practice, ‘religion’ largely coincides with ‘identity’. We are speaking in both cases of social, socio-political and cultural phenomena.
All this, I appreciate, is very different from the conventional view according to which religion is not primarily about identity at all. Religion, as generally understood, is a domain of chiefly ‘inward’ or ‘spiritual’ experience that affects us, first and foremost, as individuals. Christian social institutions have their role, of course – but largely as the means to bring together people who share the same inward conviction, not for their own sake. Sceptical non-believers, for their part, question whether this mode of inward experience (of which they seem to have been deprived) corresponds to any objective (i.e. scientifically provable) reality beyond the believer’s own mind. And believers then respond with counter-arguments that seem to endorse the non-believer’s assumption that the reality in question, if genuine, must exist independently of our experience (i.e. ‘objectively’) in the same manner as atoms or stars exist.
What is disconcerting here is how the two sides of the argument share and corroborate the other’s presuppositions. For both, religion must be either ‘objective’ (i.e. real) or ‘subjective’ (‘unreal’). There is no recognition, on either side, that religion could be one of those things that are real because we believe in them – realities that we might therefore describe as inter-subjective – like identity, for example. There is also, on both sides, the assumption that, where Christianity is concerned, ‘community’ is not the essential thing. Both would acknowledge that the need for community and belonging is be very real. But the sceptic would view this ‘desire to belong’ as a temptation to be resisted in the interests of maintaining one’s intellectual integrity; while the believer would respond with the ever more vehement assertion of the priority, for any genuine Christian, of considerations of truth over mere derivative benefits – such as community and belonging.
Religion in the Old Testament
I propose, in the remainder of this post, to demonstrate that, of these two definitions of religion – let us call them the anthropological and the everyday definition – it is the former that corresponds to the reality of the religious phenomenon we find exemplified in the ethnographic record. I could have used any number of examples. But for the reasons stated earlier on, I will confine myself here to the case of the religion of the Old Testament.
We will duly find that, in this instance, religion and identity are terms that can be deployed almost interchangeably – as our anthropological definition would have led us to expect. Used in the anthropological sense, the term religion presupposes the understanding of the human individual as relational – i.e. deriving their being from the network of relationships in which they stand as a node. Identity can be seen – from the perspective of the network – as a focus of allegiance that brings together multiple individuals. Examples of ‘identities’ might be: ‘the Roberts family’, ‘the Freemasons’, ‘the British state’. In this sense, the word is used with an indefinite article: i.e. each of the above is ‘an identity’. Alternatively, identity can be seen – from the perspective of the node – as the property of the individual distinguished by a set of such allegiances: e.g. the identity of ‘an individual, named Donald, who is a British freemason, bearing the family name of Roberts’. In the latter sense, we use ‘identity’ without the indefinite article. In the same way, we speak of ‘a religion’ when referring to a specific religious allegiance (e.g. the Mormon church, Islam); and we speak of ‘religion’ (no article) when referring to that aspect of an individual’s life characterized by such allegiances (as opposed to other aspects such as work, family, and education).
The double reference (an identity/a religion vs. identity/religion) suggests that our terms stand on the boundary between the collective and the individual aspects of our human experience, facing, as it were, onto both. This reflects the fact that religious practice (i.e. sacrifice) will be both formative of collective identities – societies, peoples, etc., and, on an existential level, fundamental to our identity as human individuals.
Religion as the basis of ‘an identity’
This is what we see when we come to consider the case of religion and religious sacrifice in the Old Testament. The texts that will chiefly concern us are the books of Jewish ‘Law’ (excluding Genesis): Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
Most Christians would, if asked, describe the contents of this section of their Bibles in one of two ways. On the one hand, it contains a narrative: the story of the escape from bondage in Egypt, of Moses’ reception of the Law from the hand of God on Mt Sinai, of the people’s wanderings in desert prior to arriving in the Promised Land. On the other, it contains a code of rules for living – the minutiae of which hardly seem relevant today, though the overall principles are sometimes claimed to be foundational for contemporary society.
Closer study of the texts will reveal that these books are far more relevant to the issues that concern us here than this superficial reading would suggest.
First, the narrative turns out to be a story whose principal character is a collective rather than an individual one. I mean, of course, Israel, or ‘the people of God’ – a collective entity whose precise character somewhat eludes attempts at classification in terms of ‘religion’, ‘nation’, or ‘ethnicity’ – and, for this reason, seems to lend itself to our more open-ended designation as ‘an identity’. Moreover, Israel, at the point we meet her, is not, as it were, a character fully-formed. Rather, the Bible actually offers an account of Israel’s first emergence – from her origination in the designs of her divine progenitor, through the long gestation in Egypt, to the dramas of her birth and early formation in the wilderness.
As for the ‘code of rules for living’, this turns out to be not quite what it might appear. To seek in this material a system of rules for morality is to court disappointment. Substantial tranches of this ‘legal’ material concern, for example: the degrees of kinship within which 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 all this; but it is not primarily a moral or ethical one. It is the concern in all domains of life with maintaining a ritual purity that is the requirement of the sacrificial cult conducted at its heart. Here too – in respect to the legal as with the narrative content – we come back to one of the universal generic notions discussed earlier: namely, expenditure that produces an identity by binding individuals to its perceived source – that is to say, in more traditional terms, sacrifice addressed to a god. The length and detail of the ‘legal’ specifications arise, as we shall see in our next chapter, from the demand that such expenditure demonstrate the correct allegiance (to Yahweh, and no other) by taking the proper, divinely prescribed form. In other words, everything here comes back to sacrifice. The people demonstrate their identity as ‘the people of God’, by maintaining the purity requirements of their sacrifice, or, as the Bible puts it, ‘being holy’ as their God ‘is holy’. This is, in effect, the blueprint for a theocentric identity founded on a sacrificial cult whose requirements ramify into every department of social existence. This is reflected in the penalty for innumerable transgressions, which is to be ‘cut off’ from the people – from the people, that is, whose defining characteristic consists in being ‘the people of God’.
It is too easy, coming at this material from a modern perspective, to view such ‘theocracy’ as exceptional. The rigour and comprehensiveness of its codification may be. But the notion of a common life based on norms deriving ultimately from common obligations to its spiritual source – in short, of socio-religious identity – such, I would argue, is the norm, rather than the exception, in non-modern societies. And, in this respect, the biblical material can serve to illustrate universal human behaviours responding to universal needs.
Especially pertinent, however, to the illustration of our generic concepts of religious identity and sacrificial expenditure is the ‘birth-narrative’ itself, and the way it shows these things to be, in effect, but two sides of one coin.
To repeat, that narrative’s chief human protagonist, from the moment that religion first enters upon the biblical stage, is not Moses, or any other individual, but Israel, i.e. ‘the people’. And the narrative is, as already stated, a birth narrative – at least, initially. That lengthy gestation begins with Moses’ vision of the burning bush on Mt Sinai, and concludes, some twenty chapters later, with the ratification of the covenant.
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 an Israelite identity (‘the people’) that the promises to the Patriarchs find the first beginnings of a fulfilment. This is the point where the divine plan to retrieve mankind gets properly underway. Prior to Exodus 3 (Moses’ vision of the burning bush) it is scarcely possible to speak of ‘a people’, 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-religious identity. 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 socio-religious identity from these unprepossessing beginnings. What was the cause of this remarkable development?
The story of Israel – the people of God – turns out to be the perfect illustration of the importance of relationship to one’s source of identity, as expressed in personal and communal investment in it. Underlying and motivating the process by which the formation of this identity takes place is the relationship to its source. The people 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 a new form of religious investment – for them 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 brings about – or aims to bring about – the institution of a new socio-religious identity through a literal setting apart from the rest of Egyptian society. The process of self-imposed separation is subsequently reinforced by various ritual markers – ultimately by the Passover sacrifice, which distinguishes the people of God in the most imaginably conspicuous way as the only group not to suffer the death of their first-born. This last episode brings the birthing process to its climax with the exodus itself – an expulsion that is also a deliverance.
Yet, what is initiated with the revelation of the burning bush is only finally consummated 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.[iv] In Exodus 24, a sacrifice of just this kind inaugurates the covenant or treaty/agreement between God and those who will, from now on, constitute His people. Following a reading of the Law, the assembled multitude promises to observe its provisions. 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 identity owing its existence to God – not as an ancestor exactly, but as one who has called them into existence. Perhaps, an adoptive ancestor …. an ancestor through covenant.
Religion as the basis of ‘identity’
The birth of God’s people occurs with the covenant sacrifice at Sinai; its curious sequel brings us conveniently to the other, personal, side of religion – its indispensability to our identity.
So let us go on with the narrative.
Strangely, this covenantal birth ritual doesn’t feel very conclusive – you could easily miss the whole episode, sandwiched as it is between a section of law containing the Ten Commandments, and a second section dealing largely with cultic provisions for the sacrificial cult. 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 provisions of the law, including the Ten Commandments; but has yet to receive the detailed instructions for the conduct of the sacrificial cult. A strange consequence of this is that the people swear to be bound by provisions of the covenant prohibiting bad religion (i.e. idolatry) (i.e. the first two of the Ten Commandments), before they have received the provisions specifying the good kind. No indication is given of the length of Moses’ first sojourn on Sinai; but the second is said to last a full forty days and nights.
Why this delay? From what we learn in subsequent chapters, one might imagine this to be a consequence of the length and intricacy of the specifications for sacrificial cult. Nothing is left to the vagaries of the human imagination; it is as if God had intended to drive home the lesson that the proper forms of revealed religion are undiscoverable by purely human means. If so, then that lesson is amply borne out by 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 – a form of sacrificial expenditure forged from their own imagination – evidently doesn’t correspond to what God had intended. Ironically, then, 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, experience for a religious object through which to ground their identity and sense of belonging. It is as though the need arose out of an instinct so fundamental and so urgent as to forestall the provision of a proper form of religious sacrifice. 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 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, Israel’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!’ The metal itself is described as sharing the idolatrous propensity of its bearers.
Human nature is thereby represented as being spiritually labile. Our propensity to attribute value to whatever gives us a collective spiritual goal constitutes, for this text, a kind of unremitting gravitational under-tow ever threatening to draw people into orbit around some new star in the firmament. Its only remedy? The true religion that centres us on God Himself. Idolatry turns out to be 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 corroborates the association of socio-religious identity with properly directed sacrificial expenditure. 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. 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 His Presence without destruction?
The answer turns out already to have been given – and it points us forward to the subject of our next post. 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 sacrificial cult of the tabernacle.
Summary (1)
Tell me where you belong, I will tell you who you are!
All religions, including Christianity, centre on the sacrificial expenditures of money, time and effort – and the associated investment of self – through which we relate as human beings to the perceived sources of our identity. Religion ‘binds’ us (the etymological meaning of the Latin ‘religio’) emotionally and relationally to these sources.
All relationships are established through such expenditures. Our sacrificial expenditures are no different; but are distinguished by being dedicated, not to personal relationships, but to collective identities. Sacrificial expenditures maintain these identities by binding us to the objects that constitute their source. These objects are often ancestral spirits. The sustenance of these ‘gods’ through sacrificial expenditure creates the identities which bind people to each other. In premodern societies the ‘divine’ objects – and the identities associated with them – tend to be hierarchically ordered so as to produce a coherent sense of belonging. Modern society, with its insistence on diversity as a positive good, stands apart from the norm in its repudiation of the hierarchical ordering of personal identities.
[i] I use the term ‘expenditures’ (sacrificial and other) in reference to what anthropologists and sociologists have, since Marcel Mauss, referred to as ‘the gift’. The latter term is potentially misleading outside specialist discussions: first, because, like sacrifice, it has an ‘anthropological’ meaning that is far broader than the word ‘gift’ as used in everyday language would lead us to suppose; second, because ‘the gift’ in modern consumer culture takes a very specific form that it has nowhere else. The literature on ‘the gift’ is extensive. Some studies discuss the relation of sacrifice’ to other forms of the gift: e.g. Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, Polity Press, 1999 [1996]; Marcel Hέnaff, The Price of Truth, Stanford U.P., 2010 [2002]. On the gift in modern consumer culture, James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities, Routledge, 1995
[ii] Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, Seabury Press, 1975; J.A. Walter, A Long Way from Home, Paternoster Press, 1979; Bob Goudzwaard, Idols of Our Time, IVP, 1981; Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers, Fortress Press, 1986; Craig Bartholomew & Thorsten Moritz, Christ and Consumerism, Paternoster, 2000; Christopher Wright, ‘Here are Your Gods!’ IVP, 2020; Tara Burton, Strange Rites, PublicAffairs, 2022
[iii] For an interesting account of the functioning of identity and religion in contemporary culture, Tara Burton, Strange Rites, PublicAffairs, 2022
[iv] For illustration and extensive discussion of this specific type of sacrifice, Suzanne Kuechler, Malanggan, Routledge, 2002