Canter Bridge

The system of sacrifice delineated here would have familiarized the average Israelite with death before YHWH.

That was its most salient feature.

The fruits of soil and flock rise up through the agency of Israelite worshipers to create in the heavens a pleasant fragrance.

It is a violent and unsightly way to please God, unless one considers that the impress that one’s life makes upon the world is the cradle of something very good, something aromatic as it wafts into the Creator’s presence.

It is harder to accept the waste. Some child’s bones might have been strengthened by a few more mouths full of mutton in a lean year. That grain might have coated Grandpa’s gullet and eased his descent to the grave.

If, however, the wider context of Israelite conviction that the Lord is good is taken into account, the perspective changes. Then sacrifice—whatever its concrete effect upon the deity—might be a supreme act of trust by dispossession of resources that in a world managed by human beings could be put to some pragmatic use. Perhaps this is what human beings most need, or at the very least one of the inputs we need quite badly.

A stream of Jewish Bible interpreters will argue that such a perspective on the Levitical system could only emerge from a society that had lurched so therapeutic that it had lost its capacity for reading ancient texts on their own terms. If it is not about me at the outset, this argument might go, it has got to be made about me by the time I’m finished reading.

Such a critique of many modern readings is eminently respectable and densely packed into the magnificent ouevre of Harvard’s Jon Levenson. It can also be too harsh.

One can contemplate what sacrifice does to the people by way of a theological reading of this text as well as by its therapeutic version. Without denying that sacrifice does something for the deity—the text considers this assumption beyond debate—one must ask why the element of voluntary loss on the part of human worshippers looms so prominently in the interpersonal landscape of this passage.

I believe the reason is self-evident: there are two parties on stage here, each of them groping towards an amenable relationship in the wake (historical criticism may require us to think of a rather long wake) of the covenanting event at Sinai. Both bring needs, of a sort, though just what a divine need might be is beyond seeing with clarity.

Sacrifice accomplishes something for both partners in that long, dialogical conversation that is the history of God with his people, engrafted for us in the anthology of written testimony that is the Bible.

Divine-human proximity is an exceedingly costly ambition.

Burn up that grain. Lay your hand on that lamb and then cut its throat. It’s good for you.

You’ll see.