Sacrifice in the Old Testament
Sacrifice in the Old Testament
‘The interpretation of Christ’s death as a sacrifice is imbedded in every important type of the New Testament teaching.’3 Sacrificial vocabulary and idiom are widespread. Sometimes the reference is unambiguous, as when Paul says Christ ‘gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering (prosphora) and sacrifice (thysia) to God’ (Eph. 5:2). At other times the allusion is less direct, simply that Christ ‘gave himself’ (e.g. Gal. 1:4) or ‘offered himself’ (e.g. Heb. 9:14) for us, but the background of thought is still the Old Testament sacrificial system. In particular, the statement that he died ‘for sin’ or ‘for sins’ (e.g. Rom. 8:3, RSV and 1 Pet. 3:18) self-consciously borrows the Greek translation of the ‘sin offering’ (peri hamartias). Indeed, the letter to the Hebrews portrays the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as having perfectly fulfilled the Old Testament ‘shadows’. For he sacrificed himself (not animals), once and for all (not repeatedly), and thus secured for us not only ceremonial cleansing and restoration to favour in the covenant community but the purification of our consciences and restoration to fellowship with the living God.
What did the Old Testament sacrifices signify, however? And did they have a substitutionary meaning? In order to answer these questions, we must not make the mistake of turning first to anthropological studies. To be sure, priests, altars and sacrifices seem to have been a universal phenomenon in the ancient world, but we have no right to assume a priori that Hebrew and pagan sacrifices had an identical meaning. They may well have had a common origin in God’s revelation to our earliest ancestors. But it would be more consonant with a recognition of the special status of Scripture to say that the Israelites (despite their backslidings) preserved the substance of God’s original purpose, whereas pagan sacrifices were degenerate corruptions of it.
Sacrifices were offered in a wide variety of circumstances in the Old Testament. They were associated, for example, with penitence and with celebration, with national need, covenant renewal, family festivity and personal consecration. This diversity warns us against imposing on them a single or simple significance. Nevertheless, there do seem to have been two basic and complementary notions of sacrifice in God’s Old Testament revelation, each being associated with particular offerings. The first expressed the sense human beings have of belonging to God by right, and the second their sense of alienation from God because of their sin and guilt. Characteristic of the first were the ‘peace’ or ‘fellowship’ offering which was often associated with thanksgiving (Lev. 7:12), the burnt offering (in which everything was consumed) and the ritual of the three annual harvest festivals (Exod. 23:14–17). Characteristic of the second were the sin offering and the guilt offering, in which the need for atonement was clearly acknowledged. It would be incorrect to distinguish these two kinds of sacrifice as representing respectively man’s approach to God (offering gifts, let alone bribes to secure his favour) and God’s approach to man (offering forgiveness and reconciliation). For both kinds of sacrifice were essentially recognitions of God’s grace and expressions of dependence upon it. It would be better to distinguish them, as B. B. Warfield did, by seeing in the former ‘man conceived merely as creature’ and in the latter ‘the needs of man as sinner’. Or, to elaborate the same distinction, in the first the human being is ‘a creature claiming protection’, and in the second ‘a sinner craving pardon’.4
Then God is revealed in the sacrifices on the one hand as the Creator on whom man depends for his physical life, and on the other as simultaneously the Judge who demands and the Saviour who provides atonement for sin. Of these two kinds of sacrifice it was further recognized that the latter is the foundation of the former, in that reconciliation to our Judge is necessary even before worship of our Creator. It is therefore significant that in Hezekiah’s purification of the Temple, the sin offering ‘to atone for all Israel’ was sacrificed before the burnt offering (2 Chr. 29:20–24). Further, it may be that we can discern the two kinds of offering in the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, although both are termed minha, a gift offering. The reason why Cain’s was rejected, we are told, was that he did not respond in faith like Abel to God’s revelation (Heb. 11:4). In contrast to God’s revealed will, either he put worship before atonement or he distorted his presentation of the fruits of the soil from a recognition of the Creator’s gifts into an offering of his own.
The notion of substitution is that one person takes the place of another, especially in order to bear his pain and so save him from it. Such an action is universally regarded as noble. It is good to spare people pain; it is doubly good to do so at the cost of bearing it oneself. We admire the altruism of Moses in being willing for his name to be blotted out of Yahweh’s book if only thereby Israel might be forgiven (Exod. 32:32). We also respect an almost identical wish expressed by Paul (Rom. 9:1–4), and his promise to pay Philemon’s debts (Philm. 18–19). Similarly in the twentieth century we cannot fail to be moved by the heroism of Father Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan, in the Auschwitz concentration camp. When a number of prisoners were selected for execution, and one of them shouted that he was a married man with children, ‘Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked if he could take the condemned man’s place. His offer was accepted by the authorities, and he was placed in an underground cell, where he was left to die of starvation.’5
So it is not surprising that this commonly understood principle of substitution should have been applied by God himself to the sacrifices. Abraham ‘sacrificed...as a burnt offering instead of his son’ the ram which God had provided (Gen. 22:13). Moses enacted that, in the case of an unsolved murder, the town’s elders should first declare their own innocence and then sacrifice a heifer in place of the unknown murderer (Deut. 21:1–9). Micah evidently understood the substitutionary principle well, for he soliloquized about how he should come before Yahweh, and wondered if he should bring burnt offerings, animals, rivers of oil or even ‘my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul’. The fact that he gave himself a moral instead of a ritual answer, and especially that he rejected the horrific thought of sacrificing his own child in place of himself, does not mean that he rejected the substitutionary principle which was built into the Old Testament sacrificial system (Mic. 6:6–8).
This elaborate system provided for daily, weekly, monthly, annual and occasional offerings. It also included five main types of offering, which are detailed in the early chapters of Leviticus, namely the burnt, cereal, peace, sin and guilt offerings. Because the cereal offering consisted of grain and oil, rather than flesh and blood, it was atypical and was therefore made in association with one of the others. The remaining four were blood sacrifices and, although there were some differences between them (relating to their proper occasion, and the precise use to which the flesh and blood were put), they all shared the same basic ritual involving worshipper and priest. It was very vivid. The worshipper brought the offering, laid his hand or hands on it and killed it. The priest then applied the blood, burnt some of the flesh, and arranged for the consumption of what was left of it. This was significant symbolism, not meaningless magic. By laying his hand(s) on the animal, the offerer was certainly identifying himself with it and ‘solemnly’ designating ‘the victim as standing for him’.6 Some scholars go further and see the laying-on of hands as ‘a symbolic transferral of the sins of the worshipper to the animal’,7 as was explicitly so in the case of the scapegoat, to be considered later. In either case, having taken his place, the substitute animal was killed in recognition that the penalty for sin was death, its blood (symbolizing that the death had been accomplished) was sprinkled, and the offerer’s life was spared.
The clearest statement that the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament ritual had a substitutionary significance, however, and that this was why the shedding and sprinkling of blood was indispensable to atonement, is to be found in this statement by God explaining why the eating of blood was prohibited:
For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life (Lev. 17:11).
Three important affirmations about blood are made in this text. First, blood is the symbol of life. This understanding that ‘blood is life’ seems to be very ancient. It goes back at least to Noah, whom God forbade to eat meat which had its ‘lifeblood’ still in it (Gen. 9:4), and was later repeated in the formula ‘the blood is the life’ (Deut. 12:23). The emphasis, however, was not on blood flowing in the veins, the symbol of life being lived, but on blood shed, the symbol of life ended, usually by violent means.
Secondly, blood makes atonement, and the reason for its atoning significance is given in the repetition of the word ‘life’. It is only because ‘the life of a creature is in the blood’ that ‘it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life’. One life is forfeit; another life is sacrificed instead. What makes atonement ‘on the altar’ is the shedding of substitutionary lifeblood. T. J. Crawford expressed it well: ‘The text, then, according to its plain and obvious import, teaches the vicarious nature of the rite of sacrifice. Life was given for life, the life of the victim for the life of the offerer’, indeed ‘the life of the innocent victim for the life of the sinful offerer’.8
Thirdly, blood was given by God for this atoning purpose. ‘I have given it to you’, he says, ‘to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.’ So we are to think of the sacrificial system as God-given, not man-made, and of the individual sacrifices not as a human device to placate God but as a means of atonement provided by God himself.
This Old Testament background helps us to understand two crucial texts in the letter to the Hebrews. The first is that ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness’ (9:22), and the second that ‘it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (10:4). No forgiveness without blood meant no atonement without substitution. There had to be life for life or blood for blood. But the Old Testament blood sacrifices were only shadows; the substance was Christ. For a substitute to be effective, it must be an appropriate equivalent. Animal sacrifices could not atone for human beings, because a human being is ‘much more valuable...than a sheep’, as Jesus himself said (Matt. 12:12). Only ‘the precious blood of Christ’ was valuable enough (1 Pet. 1:19).