Lev. 4:27-31 (Lamb of the Free, Ch. 1)
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I’m working on a review of Andrew Rillera’s new book, Lamb of the Free: Recovering Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’ Death.
His claim: We can’t get “penal substitutionary atonement” from reading the Torah—the New Testament writers didn’t either, so we can’t get even get it from them. The first part of the book is a summary and application of (Milgrom’s) insights into the Levitical sacrificial system, with a dose of ritual studies.
Turns out, most Bible readers don’t pay enough attention to the details of Leviticus to understand how Leviticus its institutions work. The consequence of our lack of attention is a common and pervasive misunderstanding of how God deals with sin, which leave us to our own devices—he has America’s incarceration system in view.
But since Rillera pays close attention to Leviticus, I’d like to pay close attention to him. If you’d like to join my reading group, become a paid subscriber or send me a note!
Here’s my sense of Chapter 1.
Chapter 1: What (OT) Sacrifice is not
In the first chapter, Rillera argues three1 theses which, for the sake of both your understanding and mine, I’ll work through here, in my own words. They proceed from a close reading of Leviticus, particularly Ch. 4 and 17, with expertise in the ritual material of the rest of the Torah, and with help from ritual studies.
Sacrifice isn’t about substitution.
You’ve heard about the “scapegoat” (Lev. 16) or the “sin” and “guilt” offerings (Lev. 4; 5-6) being accepted as a substitute for the sins of the people. Somehow, the blood of this animal satisfies God’s desire for the blood of the sinner. However,
When the Torah calls for capital punishment or a sinner being “cut off,” it provides no option for an intervening sacrifice. Substitution isn’t legally possible.
What’s more, human blood “defiles” the altar. This makes ‘substitution’ a strange word to describe what an animal’s blood would be doing.
And God abhors human sacrifice. Again, this makes substitution a strange category.
So why are offerers called to lay their hands on the animals they bring to the priests? Isn’t it to identify with the animals in order to communicate that the animal is being offered in their place?
No.
The hand-laying gesture is also required for peace sacrifices (Lev. 3:2, 8, 13), which have nothing to do with sin. The hand-laying gesture doesn’t mean, “This is me,” it means, “This is mine.” And on busy sacrifice days, that may have been as practically significant as it was ritually significant.
Sacrifice isn’t about death.
Yes, the animal is killed, but No, that’s not the point. To understand this, we need to understand “ritual ontology,” or, what the grammar of a sacred ritual says about what that thing is within the bounds of sacred space and time. (I’m not going to talk about the Eucharist, but keep that in mind for help.)
Here’s how Jonathan Smith (1980) explains it:
Ritual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables (i.e., the accidents) or ordinarily life have been displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.
The biological fact of animal sacrifice is that there’s a dead (killed) animal. In fact, to kill an animal outside a ritual context is tantamount to murder: “If anyone… slaughters… outside the camp… he has shed blood, and he shall be cut off” (Lev. 17:3-4).
If sacrifice was about death, the priest should kill the animal. But he doesn’t. The guilty person does it, killing the animal himself out by the outer altar. The priestly ritual doesn’t start until the animal’s “life,” ritually understood as its blood, has been obtained by the priest, along with the fat. Read the description of a sin offering at Lev. 4:27-31 for yourself and you’ll see:
If any member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands, when they realize their guilt and the sin they have committed becomes known, they must bring as their offering for the sin they committed a female goat without defect. They are to lay their hand on the head of the sin offering and slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering. Then the priest is to take some of the blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. They shall remove all the fat, just as the fat is removed from the fellowship offering, and the priest shall burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the Lord. In this way the priest will make atonement for them, and they will be forgiven.
Sacrifice isn’t about suffering.
Rillera summarizes a paper from Hebrews scholar, David Moffitt.
The key observation: to make a sacrificial animal suffer “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God, since a sacrificial victim that suffered physical damage from abuse would no longer be amōmos (without blemish).”
The key conclusion: “There is no hint that the animal is made to suffer, nor that the victim is an object of abuse or wrath. Inflicting suffering on the sacrificial victim is not a part of the biblical sacrificial system, and, while sacrifices can serve in part to protect the people from the danger of God’s wrath breaking out against the guilt they have incurred (e.g., Num 18:5; cf. Sirach 34:19), the items offered to God are never themselves depicted as objects of that wrath.”2
That’s what it’s not. But what is it?
That’s the focus of Chapter 2…
He says he argues four theses, but it’s really just three.
My quotation from Moffit’s paper is a little longer than Rillera’s.
Reading this book for a second time in a book club right now, Jack. Did you - or do you plan to - write summaries and reflections about the other chapters as well?