I thought was going to comment on Lamb of the Free, chapter-by-chapter. Instead, I’ve written up my review for The Global Anglican, and copied it here for you. Free subscribers can read the first half; paid subscribers, the whole piece. Paid subscribers are also invited to a series of three book discussions with me and some of my friends and colleagues.
Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death
Andrew Rillera
Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2024 (ISBN: 9781783596508 pb, 285pp)
Modern Bible readers don’t understand Leviticus and, because we don’t, we have gotten basic biblical-theological concepts like “sacrifice” and “atonement” embarrassingly wrong. Steeped in Jacob Milgrom’s insights, and building on the more recent work on ritual im/purity from Jonathan Klawans (1997; 2005) and Matthew Thiessen (2020), Andrew Rillera offers a primer on the biblical logic of sacrifice, starting with the Torah and then moving through the prophets and the NT.
Rillera pitches each of his chapters both to academics and to intellectually curious Christians. He writes for academics: his footnotes are thorough and discursive, and he traces the development of his claims through the relevant literature. He writes for intellectual Christian: each chapter begins with a collection of between three and seven explicit theses, each one building on the previous. His case is clear, slow, and linear. A reader could pick a chapter, choose a claim, and look back through Rillera’s biblical citations to check them for herself.
First, Rillera tells us what sacrifice isn’t. By his lights, it is neither about substitution, nor death, nor suffering. He dedicates his second chapter to unpacking the logic of non-atoning sacrifices: those burnt offerings and well-being offerings offered regularly to attract and to invite God to share in a meal with the people. Communion with God matters most, and atonement sacrifices are slotted in to purge sancta (sacred space) in order to accommodate these communion meals. Rillera illustrates, “atonement is what is needed for this holy residence-restaurant to maintain its grade A health score. The place [and the people] all need to be in a state of purity for the sacred meals to happen” (34).
So, atonement isn’t fundamentally about guilt and forgiveness, but about addressing the ritual impurities that impede this communion. Atonement does address moral impurity, like murder, or minor ritual impurities, like those left by seminal emissions, but major ritual impurities that would cause a person to pollute sancta (sacred space). Per Rillera, what Christians often don’t recognize is that ritual im/purity isn’t fundamentally about food, sex, or behavior, but about finitude. Ritual purity “symbolizes becoming like God, who is infinite, has no beginning, does not procreate or have sex, and does not die. Ritual purity is a ritually tangible way to enact, ‘become holy, as God is holy’ (cf. Lev 11:44)” (77).
A final chapter addresses the New Testament’s use of Isa. 53 (esp. in pp 244-49). Rillera makes his case that, unlike the MT rendering of Isa. 53, the LXX rendering does not depict the servant as suffering in order to redeem others, but calls the readers to offer their own sacrifices for their own sins. This is the way that other literature of the Second Temple and Early Christian period (e.g. Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Romans, Revelation, 1 Clement) treats Isa. 53 along these lines. Not even 1 John or Hebrews—the two NT texts which identify Jesus with an atoning sacrifice—dip their brushes into Isa. 53 to do so.
While Rillera raises important questions, and injects our understanding of sacrifice and salvation with an (appropriately) heavy dose of Leviticus, I think he makes a handful of mistakes:
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