The discourse of social anthropology and religions studies encourages us to view the sacrificial religion of Israelites and Christians as we would the practices of any other people. It enables us to appreciate that what is described in the Bible responds to the same motivations as the sacrificial religion of other societies, and produces and reproduces human identity in much the same way. It may not be typical exactly, but it is nevertheless sacrificial religion as everywhere understood. It is, in short, anoffering back, or counter-gift. to a perceived source of individual and collective life.
The scriptural texts, however, introduce an additional dimension altogether absent from social anthropology. In Scripture, there is good and bad – proper and improper – religion. And to those whom the God chooses for his own, he reveals a proper form of sacrificial religion. In their case alone, the universal human propensity for human wealth and effort to lavish itself on some golden calf finds at last an appropriate outlet. That appropriate outlet is, of course, the worship of the only divine addressee that these texts recognize – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who is also the one and only god of the whole world.
This proper sacrificial religion turns out, as we have seen, to have been instituted at Sinai, revealed by God uniquely to His people as the answer to their religious needs. In respect to its divine authorship, it is contrasted, as we have seen, with the form of religion that emerges out of Aaron’s own imagination, and takes root spontaneously during Moses’ absence on Mt Sinai.
This clear opposition of proper and improper in the matter of religion can hardly not raise in the reader’s mind the question: what it is about one sacrificial religion rather than another that makes it appropriate to the monotheistic god. Is it, as suggested earlier, the mere fact of its being divinely revealed? Or is there anything about this particular religion that renders it so peculiarly appropriate to its addressee?
This is the question I propose to ask in the present chapter. The answer, as we shall see, lies somewhere between those two alternatives.
To assist our enquiry, I will make reference to a number of specific sacrificial acts recounted in passages of the Bible that precede its account of the covenantal institution of the people of God, and the official inauguration of the Mosaic religion. The second of these – the sacrifice of the Passover – is integral to the covenantal identity of the people of God, and subsequently taken up as a constitutive part of the sacrificial religion revealed to Moses; the first – the sacrifice of Abraham – forms no part of the sacrificial religion of the people, but was later seen as pointing forward to it, and even as offering it some supernatural warrant.
I shall begin, then, with Abraham.
The sacrifice of Abraham
This episode has an obvious relevance, because the question we have just posed – namely, what form of sacrifice would be appropriate to a monotheistic deity – would seem, to all appearances, precisely the question that was preoccupying Abraham when he contemplated the sacrifice of his own son (Genesis 22). Despite its description as a ‘test’, the (attempted) sacrifice of Isaac is evidently an intended act of worship addressed to Abraham’s god. Abraham is prompted by God himself, so it would seem, to offer back, through the sacrifice of Isaac, the very thing that God had promised at the moment of his initial calling: a numerous posterity through which all the nations of the world would be blessed.
Remind yourself once again of the definition of sacrificial religion we have been working with hitherto: an offering back, or counter-gift, to a perceived source of individual and collective life. Abraham’s act of worship on Mt Moriah certainly fits this definition; but the extent of his devotion as manifested in the value of the counter-gift, takes the idea to its limit. He may not offer back his own life exactly; but what he does offer is the thing that has given his life meaning hitherto, namely his son Isaac – a gift from God which would appear from the preceding chapters to have come to mean more to him than life itself. It is as if, in response to a god of such surpassing greatness, Abraham were attempting a return-gift commensurate with what he owed its addressee.
Take this sacrificial act as a paradigm of what worship entails when addressed to a monotheistic god, and make it the standard for sacrificial religion, you will surely be prompted to ask what it could possibly be about the form of sacrifice received at Sinai, and described by Exodus and Leviticus, that would make it appropriate to the expression of the kind of religious devotion we observe in the case of Abraham. .
There seems a disproportion between the two cases …. Until, that is, we recall that Abraham’s story doesn’t end where we have just left it. Actually, Abraham’s sacrificial action concludes, not with the slaughter of a human being, but with the sacrifice of a goat. The intention of Abraham is certainly to offer back to God everything that most matters to him. Its practical realization, however, turns out to require only the immolation of a beast of the flock. Indeed, in material terms, it costs Abraham nothing at all, since the animal is not Abraham’s own, but is miraculously supplied at the critical moment by what is (in every sense) an act of grace on the part of God Himself. As things turn out, Abraham gives proof of his readiness to do what he is not finally called on to do – what he is even forbidden from doing. And God, on his side, has His demonstration of Abraham’s devotion without the necessity of infanticide.
What makes this outcome possible is the divinely sanctioned capacity to ordain, in the face of an intention known only to God, ‘let this stand for that’, as a mathematician might say, ‘let such-and-such a sign represent infinity’.
Maybe, all religious symbolism does this. But, in Abraham’s case, we are struck: on the one hand, by the enormity of the intended act of devotion (which cannot be brought to fulfilment without the kind of human sacrifice the Bible elsewhere explicitly condemns); on the other, by the entirely providential manner in which the outward form of an alternative is eventually proposed. The very name attributed to the site of sacrifice (Jireh) means ‘God will provide’, and no doubt portends the ram that miraculously appears out of the thicket. A recent anthropologist comments in regard to rituals he observed in Melanesia: ‘One cannot give back the gift of life itself.’(8) That, of course, seems pretty close to what Abraham intends – and even, in a certain manner, he accomplishes. Yet the completion of his action requires an absolute separation between sacrificial intention and sacrificial outcome. God Himself must break into Abraham’s action and impose His own form upon it – by pure act of grace.
There is, I think, a link between this absolute separation of intention and outcome, and the grace-given form of the expression. It is only the possibility of such a providential outcome that can give Abraham’s sacrificial devotion its appropriate expression; and, in view of the possibility of such an outcome, no lesser degree of devotion would seem appropriate to the divine addressee that is God Almighty. In other words, the worship of such a god can only be mediated through divine grace and human faith.
How does what we see in Abraham’s case also apply to the worship of the Mosaic religion? The main similarity would seem to lie in the supernaturally-imposed form of ritual expression that both Abraham’s devotion, and that of the tabernacle’s worshippers, are forced to adopt. The case of Abraham, however, suggests a possible reason for this necessity: namely, the impossibility of the aspiration or obligation to make an offering commensurate with what is owed to its addressee.
Thus far, then, the answer to our question – what it is about the Sinai religion that renders it so peculiarly appropriate to the worship of the one, true god – would seem to incline us to the first of the alternative answers we initially proposed: that it lies in the mere fact of its being divinely ordained. However, the case of Abraham appears to relate this characteristic very particularly to the human impossibility of an aspiration that right religion must acknowledge but can’t fulfil without supernatural recourse.
The book of Exodus, however, recounts another sacrifice that links the Sinai religion to Abraham’s sacrifice in a way that is altogether more specific, and helps to explain its fundamental symbolism.
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The sacrifice of Passover and the tabernacle cult
You may recall the story of the Hebrews’ eventual flight out of Egypt. How, on the night of the final, and most devastating plague upon their Egyptian masters, the taking of the first-born, the Hebrews are instructed, as a means of avoiding the loss of their own first-born, to slaughter a lamb, daub its blood on the doorpost, and eat the meat in a prescribed manner.
On two occasions, the biblical texts juxtapose the provisions for this and all future Passovers, with instruction for giving of ‘first-fruit’ sacrifices, according to which the first of every harvest, and the first-born of every womb should be offered to God.(9) The obvious implication of this insistent juxtaposition (picked up by some recent studies) is that the taking of the Egyptian first-born should properly be seen as a due to which God is entitled – the ‘first-fruits’ as applied to the human, as to the animal, womb.(10) (In fact, the Egyptian first-born taken at Passover include livestock as well as humans). To this exaction the Hebrews are apparently also subject. But a special grace-given dispensation (which turns out to mark the final and most divisive stage in the process of their differentiation from the Egyptians as God’s people) allows the Hebrews alone to offer a lamb as a substitute.
The parallels with Abraham should be apparent. In both cases, we have a seemingly extreme religious demand reflecting what we owe in worship to the one source of our lives: the offering of the first-born. Then, in both cases, we have a symbolic resolution of the problem this poses for the survival of family and race – at least where God’s people is concerned. Their religion – and theirs alone – allows them to fulfil their religious obligation to the one and only god by replacing a child of the promise with a grace-given substitute. With the God’s people, as with Abraham, it is as though they had offered up their posterity, though without them actually doing so.
In fact, this system of sacrificial symbolism is exhibited, not only by the offering of Passover lambs, but by the dedication of the whole Levitical priesthood. Members of the tribe of Levi had no share in the promise of the land. The book of Numbers reveals that this is because they were collectively dedicated to God in substitution for the first-born of the Israelites who would have been taken but for their redemption by the Passover lambs. Numbers of those of serving age among the tribe of Levi were therefore reckoned up, as were the total of all Hebrew male first-born known to have been redeemed at the first Passover. Because the numbers do not quite match up, the difference is made up through a money offering, reckoned according to the equivalent stipulated by the Law for the life of an adult male. Thus, the symbolic role of priesthood itself reflects the principle of substitution whereby God’s due, and humanity’s ultimate aspiration, are recognized symbolically by the offering of a divinely-sanctioned equivalent for the sacrifice of the first-born.
As if in testimony to this underlying principle of sacrificial substitution, later Jewish tradition saw the institution of Mosaic cult as forestalled by Abraham’s sacrifice. The Jerusalem temple itself was popularly believed to be located on Mt Moriah. Later traditions also held the validity of the temple cult to be underwritten by the piety of Abraham – as well as that of his son, Isaac, who was supposed to have freely and willingly consented to his own sacrifice.(11)
In short, the religion of the Mosaic cult is already, pre-eminently, a religion of grace. It is a religion which doesn’t rein in its aspiration by scaling down its god; but accepts that the forms in which its aspiration are expressed, must, if they are to remain true to that aspiration, owe everything to a supernatural grace that allows one thing to substitute for another: in short, a system of symbolic equivalences that is divinely sanctioned. In this way, Israel can continue to offer up what otherwise she would be unable to offer up without ceasing to exist: her only son.
Between blueprint and realization
So much then for the blueprint. Where historically did it lead, this proper religion?
The blueprint may have rested on acts of grace; yet, for all this initial divine warrant, the blueprint it was destined to remain a blueprint. This becomes apparent from the narratives and prophecies that constitute much of the rest of the Old Testament.
There was indeed a temple built in Jerusalem where the ritual practices went on.
Yet, fundamental as such practices were, the religion specified by the blueprint required more than the exact performance of a set of ritual acts – just as Abraham’s sacrifice on Mt Moriah was more than the mere slaughter of a goat. It was intended to express an appropriate sacrificial response to the one god of heaven and earth. Its requirements, we have seen, extended the demand for personal and collective purity into every area of social behaviour. No doubt, given the conditions of the time, the realization of the blueprint also required a measure of political and politico-religious autonomy. This was why the terms of the covenant assured the people, on God’s side, that He would drive out the nations of Canaan, and protect them from their enemies.
To take up the cause of proper religion in an impious world was never going to be an easy call. Unsurprisingly, Israel did not live up to that vocation – or only very inconsistently. Her prophets warn her religion could not be emptied of devotion, nor her ritual divorced from holiness, without degenerating into meaningless rigmarole; yet this seems to be trap into which Israel was nevertheless destined to fall. Indeed, if the prophetic texts are to be taken at face value, even formally correct rigmarole was endangered by the temptation of the people’s rulers to adopt the sacrificial practices of their neighbours. Simultaneously, politico-religious autonomy was threated. As it turned out, Israel only slowly achieved the goal of driving out the nations. As soon as she came anywhere close, she was crowded out by rising Middle Eastern empires such as Assyria and Egypt.
The prophets are at pains to represent such political failures as the consequence of failures of religion rather than the other way round. Yet, it is not hard to imagine how the two could have been linked. Consider the example of King Ahaz when he wants the king of Assyria to support him in his struggle against the local power of Aram: he builds an altar after the model he has seen on his trip to the Assyrian king in Damascus.
At all events, from the Book of Judges onwards, there recurs, with growing insistence, the theme of God intervening to put things right in the shape of a chosen leader. And, with the cycle of divine intervention & swift relapse hardening into a pattern, this need for a divinely-ordained saviour becomes an increasingly future hope of a yet more decisive intervention on the part of an ever more messianic leader (if not God Himself), involving radical change affecting the hearts of the people as much as their political fortunes (‘a new heart’, or ‘a new spirit’). This process finally culminates in notions of messiahship which, if not themselves necessarily eschatological (= to do with the end times), certainly clothe themselves in eschatological language and imagery.
And here, with the notion of an eschatological Messiah, we come at last to Jesus.
- (8) Knut Rio, ‘Denying the Gift’ in Anthropological Theory 7.4 (December 2007), p.457
- (9) Exodus 13, 1-16; Numbers 28, 16-31
- (10) For this interpretation of the Passover sacrifice see: Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (1993): John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013)
- (11) See Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (1961); Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse (2008)