Introduction
I have written several pieces[i] explaining the fact that God, as He is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, did not want His people to perform sacrifices to Him. Yet the vast majority of the Pentateuch is all about sacrifices and offerings. Why?
Context
To get into this topic you need some familiarity with the dichotomy presented in the Hebrew Bible between God’s professed disdain for sacrifices (and assumedly the priests offering them), and an entire, highly detailed description of the same God prescribing an elaborate set of rituals centered on primarily animal sacrifices.
The sacrificial cult viewpoint is laid out in what I have termed the Levitical Torah – those portions of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers produced almost exclusively by the priestly source, a.k.a “P”.
The anti-sacrificial cult viewpoint is portrayed in many of the Later Prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, etc., as well as in the Deuteronomic core (the portions of Deuteronomy authored by the “DTR” sources: Dt 1-11, 27-29) and thought to be an approximation of what God declared to Moses in Moab. Several Psalms (e.g. 40, 50, 51) also disclaim the practice of sacrificing.
The Big Question
The issue I’ve been wrestling with is the obvious: If God didn’t want the sacrificial cult’s program, what’s it doing all over His Bible? And, just as importantly from my perspective, if God rejected sacrifices, why is Jesus of Nazareth, His reported “Son”, portrayed as a sacrifice? What am I missing?
I acknowledged some time ago that if God didn’t want the cult’s “P” material in His Bible, it wouldn’t be there. Why is it, therefore, there? What could have been His motivation for preserving it not just through ancient Israel’s history but also down through all of our history to this day?
Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of question that is going to find its answer in archaeology, studying other Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) texts, or looking for some hidden wisdom in either the early Christian writings or the Talmud.
This is a “mind of God” question. All we can hope for is that having studied the Bible over many years, we have at least a basic grounding in how God thinks about us and our issues, and what He desires for us. We’re left to speculate, based on this knowledge, what His motivation was, and yet now is. (Notice: It’s one thing for God to have allowed sacrifices to Him to get started 2500 years ago. It’s quite another to explain the practice’s preservation in the pages of everyone’s Bible today. He apparently wants it in His Bible.)
New Covenant as a New Epoch
I’ve written a few pieces[ii] from my Christian perspective on the implementation of the New Covenant prophesied by the Prophets. In a nutshell, I claim the New Covenant is inaugurated for a person when that person is transformed by God’s indwelling Spirit. For Christians, that occurs when they repent of their lives apart from God and place their complete trust in (and reliance on) God through allegiance to His son.
I continue to make the case as a point of insistence that this statement is empirically testable. You can interview as many Christ-followers (different than “Christians”, a term that has become nearly meaningless today) as you care to. You will without exception hear their stories of how before their turning and transformation they were one way — attached to the world and its concerns, and now they are completely different, uninterested in the things of the world and actively engaged with and seeking to serve their God.
Possible “Whys”
What are the possible reasons for the sacrificial cult phenomenon both in Israel’s history and in our modern Bibles if, in fact, God didn’t want such a thing?
Cleansing Model
One scenario I’ve thought about a great deal we might call the “Cleansing Model”. In “Uncleanness, Sin, and Holiness in the Hebrew Bible” I lay out (my understanding of) the basic thinking that went into Israel’s sacrificial system – why they thought it was necessary. The bottom line (perhaps contrary to our intuition) is that it was a method by which blood was harvested to be anointed/sprinkled on various items (and people) that were in the proximity of where they believed God’s presence to be – the Tabernacle (and later the Temple), to cleanse those items of any impurity that may have impinged on them from their presence amidst unclean, sinful Israelites.
By ensuring the sanctity of these items, they felt that they were removing any reason for God to be forced out, away from their midst because of the surrounding uncleanness and sin. And, they reasoned, keeping God with them, in their camp, was essential for their future well-being and prosperity. For ancient Israel, sacrificial blood was their “ritual Lysol” to maintain the sanctity of God’s habitation.
So, this first explanation relies on the concept of the cult’s (and its daily routine’s) obsession with ritual purity being implanted in people’s minds as a given: where God’s habitation must be clean/sanctified.
From this we come to Christ’s death, also seen by many as a sacrifice, and also seen as a prerequisite to the cleansing of God’s future home – us (about which I have written in “Why Jesus?”). And while this explanation checks off some boxes, in particular the one providing for God’s habitation in his children as the implementation of His New Covenant, and the Christian bedrock belief that “Christ died for our sins”, it still begs the question concerning God’s basic disdain for sacrifices in general.
I think we can all agree that, apart from instilling the concept of the sanctity of God’s habitation in Israel’s culture and lore, their sacrifices accomplished absolutely nothing.
But in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, far from accomplishing nothing, His death (according to my reading of the Bible) ushered in the pouring out of God’s Spirit into His people, starting at Pentecost. John 16:
7 Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.
The “Alternative-to-The-Law” Model
This model is based on the indisputable fact that the moral laws of God’s “Ten Words” are impossible for the natural man to live out due to his (our) flawed nature[iii]. It seems more than probable that there were those in ancient Israel who aspired to “help”[iv] their brethren nevertheless live in the presence of their God. How to do that?
Again, it seems highly likely that, recognizing the inability of the people to comply with the Words, they created a system that acknowledged this inability, and the sins that would inevitably occur, and a system of at least symbolically (or “ritually”) remediating them – the sacrificial system. Why sacrifice animals for this assumed remediation? Because that’s what everybody in the ANE did to placate their gods. Instituting such a thing wouldn’t have required a lot of creativity.
It’s also possible that this Levitical Torah didn’t take shape until during or after the Babylonian Exile, and in recognition of it. If that was its context (which some scholars argue), not only did Israel (and its religious leaders) have the recognition that they were going to fail to uphold the “Law of Moses”, but if God was going to destroy them for failing to uphold it, it was absolutely mandatory that they come up with a mechanism to, if not please God, at least (in their minds) mollify Him so that He wouldn’t destroy them again.
The Political Power Model
This is, perhaps, the least charitable scenario for Israel’s priests. Whenever the Levitical Torah took shape (pre-exile, exile, or post-exile), it presumes that those crafting it did so out of self-interest. When you slog through the Levitical Torah (again, the material identified as “P” by documentary hypothesis scholars), you quickly find that they are far and away the winners in the sacrificial system. For one, they didn’t have to work to feed themselves and their families other than in carrying out their priestly duties periodically (on a rotating basis with others of the Aaronite clan).
When people brought their animals or grain for offering to the Temple, in the vast majority of cases, the priests were the sole recipients of the resultant meat and grain. (“Peace” offerings were split with the offeror by the priests.) In addition, the priests were the recipients of the “first fruits” offerings, and a tenth of the annual tithe offering that went to the Levites.
What many who read their Bible don’t realize is that sacrifice and other offerings at the Temple were Judah’s economy in the late second Temple period. The economic activity of buying and selling animals, changing foreign currency to Temple coinage, etc. dominated the Judean economy. And, being on the receiving end of much of it, priests became conspicuously wealthy[v].
This scenario certainly checks all of the human frailty check boxes (self-interest, greed, desire for power, etc.). But it is the only scenario without the benefit of any apparent God agenda, other than, perhaps, documenting in its excruciating detail, the failure of man’s religion to draw him closer to his God. If He wanted to paint a more graphic depiction of the futility of human-crafted religious procedure, I don’t know how He could have done so more convincingly.
The Christ Corollary
If the temple cult had nothing to do with anything other than man’s greed and avarice, and sacrifice itself was rejected by God (regardless of who may have benefited from it), how do we explain Jesus’ death apart from the sanctifying model of the sacrificial system?
One way to look at it that I’ve considered is that acting as He did against the most powerful economic enterprise and its leaders of His day, He was going to be persecuted. In a way, it was no different than Jeremiah being put in a hole (Je 38), to kill him, for prophesying against the leaders of his day. If you call out the system (Mt 21:13, Je 7:11), the system is going to take its revenge on you.
So, was Jesus here to “die for our sins” (as even He Himself implies when He says His purpose was to give His life “as a ransom for many” – Mk 10:45), or was His death the natural outcome of declaring God’s will to an apostate, corrupt Temple cult? In other words, did God prescribe Jesus’ death in the way it occurred, or did He prescribe Jesus’ message, (and no doubt His resurrection?) as the harbinger of the impending pouring out of His Spirit “on all flesh” (Joel 2:28) to consummate His New Covenant, knowing that by proclaiming that message, Jesus would be in mortal danger and no doubt would die for it?
In this corollary to the self-interest model (in which greed and power-lust animate the creation of the Temple cult, and that Temple cult only demonstrates the futility of man-made religion vis-à-vis man’s relationship with his God), Jesus isn’t cast as a sacrificial “lamb”, per se. He is cast as the voice of God which man continued to reject and attack. And attack they did.
However, as we saw earlier, Jesus had this tantalizing statement just before His execution[vi]:
7 Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.
This was a reprise of His earlier statement, found in John 14:
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
It seems quite clear that Jesus understood He had to die, one way or the other, so that God could dispense His Spirit on those that committed their lives to Him. What that particular requirement was founded on is not at all clear from the Biblical text. Why did God need Jesus to live before He poured out His Spirit “on all flesh”? It seems Jesus’ life and subsequent death and resurrection was a “requirement”. But why? To be continued…
[i] You can get the background in these pieces: Wrestling With the Origins of the Pentateuch, Did God Want a Temple, Sacrifices or a Monarchy?, A Reassessment of the Source(s) and Authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, Who Wrote the Hebrew Bible?,
[ii] This set of pieces make the point that the New Covenant was implemented by the giving of God’s Spirit at Pentecost: The New Covenant…of Moses?, Interpreting the New Covenant, The “Fulfillment” of Scripture
[iii] Searching for (and Finding) the “Needle in the Biblical Haystack”: Following the Bible’s “Blue Thread”
[iv] Let’s just take the high road here. I realize there are other motivations of a different character that could be cited.
[v] Having excavated on Jerusalem’s Western Hill, a district housing most of the priests, I can attest that their homes were opulent compared to the typical Israelite’s home. The one we excavated had three ovens, its own Mikvah, and (a surprise to me) it’s own bathtub carved out of the limestone (see below photo).
