The Sacrifice of Praise (Heb. 13:15)

a big 'ol paper

Tomorrow morning, Amber and I fly to San Diego to deliver papers at AAR/SBL. This week, I had the delight of taking a 7,500 word paper down to 3,800 words to make it fit my 25-minute presentation slot. If you’re going to be in San Diego, come say hello! If you’re not, here’s my presentation:

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In the Epiclesis to the book of Hebrews (13:1-25), in a rare moment of positive liturgical instruction, The Author exhorts his audience to offer the “sacrifice of praise” (θυσίαν αἰνέσεως). Liturgical scholars often use this term as a reference for the Eucharist, which the Church has blithely called a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in their liturgical rites. Unconcerned with this liturgical tradition, critical commentators restrict the term’s semantic range too tightly to permit such a use. Richard W. Johnson’s conclusion, albeit softly put, is representative of these commentators: “[the] ‘sacrifice of praise’ is more closely akin to ‘spontaneous expression’ than to ritual sacraments.” Because the liturgical scholars do not, in their discussions of the sacrifice of praise, show their exegetical work, their reading simply fails to withstand the scrutiny of what is called critical exegesis, perhaps compelling critical readers to take the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως at Heb. 13:15 to be Johnson’s exclusively ‘oral’ and ‘spontaneous’ expression of praise. 

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the liturgical tradition of taking the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως to refer to the Eucharist can overcome the problems posed by critical readers. I will argue not only for the plausibility, but also the preferability of reading the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως as an embodied ritual. The most salient datum, and the departure point for this paper, is that θυσίαν αἰνέσεως is also the term which translates the “thanksgiving offering” instituted at Lev. 7:12 in the LXX, and further developed across the Old Testament (OT) and the intertestamental literature. 

First, I will introduce the thanksgiving offering as it is configured in the OT and intertestamental literature since, as is often the case, commentators on Hebrews have neglected to consider the thanksgiving offering as a distinct and theologically significant liturgical concept. As I do, I will address two problems with identifying the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως at Heb. 13:15 as an embodied, ritual act of praise that resembles the thanksgiving offering. The first problem is that The Author appears to restrict the range of interpretive options for the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως by defining it appositionally as an offering of spontaneous praise (“that is, the fruit of lips...”). The other problem is that The Author appears to criticize not only the Levitical cult in particular, but the concept of ritual in general (e.g., “be strengthened by grace, not by foods”).

Second, I will argue that, well before 13:15, The Author has already brought up the thanksgiving offering in his quotation of Psalm 22:22 at 2:12. 

Third, and finally, I will argue that the polemical structure of the Epiclesis does not generally criticize Jewish worship, or even more generally criticize ritual worship, but actually suggests the embodied, ritual interpretation preferred by liturgical scholars. Modern interpreters of Hebrews have been in danger of committing both hasty and unnecessary errors of supersessionism, clearing more ground for Jesus’ new covenant than has been necessary. 

1. The Thanksgiving Offering at 13:15

The phrase, θυσίαν αἰνέσεως, straightforwardly translated “the sacrifice of praise” at 13:15, is the same phrase used in the LXX to render the “thanksgiving offering,” introduced at Lev. 7:12. The psalmist commends offering these sacrifices of thanksgiving. Later in the Hebrew Bible, the technical term zebach todah is shortened to “thanksgiving” and is most often rendered in the plural, “thanksgivings.” These consistent references show that θυσίαν αἰνέσεως is a technical term for a specific ritual concept, introduced in its basic, legal form in Leviticus and developed as a distinct rite throughout the canon and over time. The Author’s use of this technical term from the LXX to commend a particular form of Christian worship suggests that he understands Christian worship to stand in conceptual continuity of some kind with this tradition. My question in this first section is, Is this continuity merely metaphorical, or is it concrete? 

The thanksgiving is introduced for the first time at Leviticus 7:12 as one of three species of “peace offerings” (7:11-36). Peace offerings have also been called “communion meals” because the meat may be eaten not only by priests but also by lay Israelites. Notably, neither the Scriptures nor the intertestamental literature ever describe peace offerings as playing any part in rites of expiation or atonement. Rather, it is a distinguishing mark of peace offerings that they are never offered for sin. Because, from the outset, the peace offerings lie outside the expiatory system, the rabbinic tradition understands the thanksgiving as a rite that will endure into the future world. Milgrom paraphrases this tradition helpfully: “In the world to come all sacrifices will be annulled, but thanksgiving will not be annulled.”

The thanksgiving, like the vow offering, always “expresses gratitude for a concrete act of divine grace.” This distinguishes these two kinds of peace offerings from the general, undesignated peace offerings which, per Gary Anderson, amounted to nothing more than an “accepted manner for slaughtering any animal that was to be used for human consumption,” and were offered up and eaten domestically nearly from the very outset of Israel’s national history.

The thanksgiving is further distinguished from other species of peace offering in that, while what was left over from the vow and freewill offerings could be eaten the following day, only the food from the thanksgiving could not be left over until morning. By the next morning, the thanksgiving was considered unclean (7:15) and those who ate it “[bore their] own iniquity.” In the Talmud, the mere intention of consuming part of the thanksgiving outside of the designated ritual time would render the sacrifice unacceptable. 

Consider the father of the prodigal son. He offers up, say, a 600-pound fatted calf that yields 300 pounds of meat. The one-day restriction, according to Deuteronomy 16, required the father to share the remaining portions not only with the rest of his household—including his servants—but also the sojourner, the local Levites, and the fatherless and the widows in his town. The leftover restrictions are commonly understood to have put pressure on the thanksgiving meal to become a distinctly and expansively communal rite in a way that other species of peace offering would not.

Liturgical historians and Psalms scholars point out that the thanksgiving was developed into a formal rite with several distinct parts:

1. The thankful initiator of the rite prostrates himself (Ps. 138:2). 

2. A number of relatives and acquaintances who expect to eat the meal stand around him (Ps. 22:26). 

3. Then, with a sacred goblet in his hands (Ps. 116:13), and prior to the actual sacrifice, he sings his song with a loud voice.

In some cases, the presiding Israelite was a king; in others, he was a common Israelite of some means. Kings thanked the Lord for national deliverances as well as for personal ones. A priest would have made the offering, and many Scriptural texts call the offeror to share their food with the poor. Together, these gathered persons “make up ‘the congregation’, ‘the great assembly’,” that we read about in the Psalms.

Despite the prevalence of this embodied ritual concept, most biblical scholars do not understand the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως at Heb. 13:15 to be at all continuous with this liturgical institution, preferring to interpret the term both anti-physically and anti-ritually. As I have mentioned, they raise two apparently insurmountable issues.

First, they note that The Author has just claimed, at v. 9, that it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, “not by foods.” If The Author does in fact oppose “foods” to “grace” in then a non-physical interpretation of the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως would seem to be necessary.

But the food of the thanksgiving rite is not the “food” to which the text refers. The following verses are too specific to permit such a conflation: “We have an altar from which those who officiate in the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp.” (13:10-11) The “food” of v. 9 that does not strengthen is the meat of the sin offering, only ever eaten by the priests, in keeping with the ritual requirement in Lev. 6:26: “The priest who offers it as a purification offering shall eat of it.” This comment about “foods” is not an argument against embodied ritual worship in principle, or Leviticus’ ritual institutions in general, but against the sin offering in particular, and against continued participation in the expiatory system as practiced in Jerusalem. By conflating expiatory sacrificial food with non-expiatory sacrificial food, these scholars have neglected the diversity of Leviticus’ ritual institutions, and the rabbinic projection of the endurance of the thanksgiving into the ‘future world.’ 

Second, they point out that, the term, θυσίας αἰνέσεως, is immediately followed by the words, “that is,” and then “the fruit of lips.” If The Author explains “sacrifice of praise” appositionally as “the fruit of lips,” it would make sense to interpret the thanksgiving metaphorically, as mere words, nothing more than the fruit of lips that acknowledge God’s name. The solution to this problem is less immediately apparent.

Grammatically speaking, there is no getting around the fact that The Author explains θυσίαν αἰνέσεως as an oral offering of praise called “the fruit of lips.” However, this does not require readers of Hebrews to understand this oral praise as conceptually exclusive of ritual offering of an animal. As others have demonstrated, the thanksgiving rite expressly includes a song of deliverance: animal, cup, and song.

This makes the common appeal to Ps. 50:12-15 particularly ironic. The “thanksgivings” in many of the Psalms, including this one, is not a distinct liturgical institution from the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως in Leviticus, but either a development of that Levitical institution or a constitutive element of the rite into which it developed. Notice the ritual elements described in the text of the psalm: For one, verse fourteen refers to two species of peace offerings instituted in Leviticus 7: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the most high.” The inclusion of not one, but two species of peace offerings suggests that the psalmist has this pair of Levitical institutions in view. The psalm continues: “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” The thanksgiving rite was instituted for the very purpose of glorifying God for concrete acts of deliverance. The θυσίαν αἰνέσεως of Heb. 13:15 certainly refers to oral praise, but this need not be understood as a reference to non-ritual oral praise, nor to oral praise unaccompanied by a physical offering; rather, I take it to refer synecdochally, as Bott and Swetnam have suggested, to the sung element of the rite.

The “sacrifice of praise” and the “fruit of lips” are used the same way in the intertestamental literature as well. In the absence of a temple, the community at Qumran discusses “blessing God [with the offering] of the lips” at fixed ritual times (1QS 9:26), and it describes occasional times at which the righteous man would offer the “offering of the lips… the fruit of praise and the portion of my lips” (10:6, 8). 

The Psalms of Solomon also depict the righteous man offering “a new psalm with song in gladness of heart, the fruit of the lips with the well-tuned instrument of the tongue” (Pss. Sol. 15:5). This offering, like the thanksgiving of Scripture, is occasioned by an act of God’s deliverance: “When I was in distress I called upon the name of the Lord, I hoped for the help of the God of Jacob and was saved” (Pss. Sol. 15:1). 

When The Author refers to the “sacrifice of praise” and the “fruit of lips,” he participates in a tradition of celebrating a form of worship that could be offered independently of a defunct, corrupt, or otherwise unavailable temple in Jerusalem. 

Peter Stuhlmacher argues that interpreting the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως of Heb. 13:15 as an embodied ritual is not only logically consistent but historically plausible as well:

The regulations for the sacrificial meal of thanksgiving in Lev. 7:11-12 and the personal piety of thanksgiving in the postexilic period anchor such poetic forms as the individual laments and the thanksgiving songs… [and] provided Jews with a fixed ritual framework for celebrating a person’s deliverance from death by a sacrificial meal. This type of private sacrificial cult continues to be spoken of until the time of the Mishnah.

Stuhlmacher goes on to claim that the early Jewish Christians understood their eucharistic worship to be in fact the ongoing “sacrificial thanksgiving meal of the risen one, celebrated by the exalted Christ himself.” That Hebrews explains the θυσίαν αἰνέσεως appositionally as the “fruit of lips,” which is the oral praise of God, does not require the reader to understand that praise as either abstracted from or in opposition to the sacrificial meal of thanksgiving instituted in Leviticus.

2. Jesus’ Thanksgiving Offering at 2:12

Well before 13:15, The Author has already alluded to the thanksgiving offering in his quotation of Psalm 22:22 in the center of the passage about the Son’s participation in humanity at 2:9-18. 

Many commentators have made the point that the purpose of Heb. 2:9-18 is not simply to demonstrate that Jesus is human, but to demonstrate what kind of human Jesus is. Jesus is not only a human in abstract, metaphysical categories, but in embedded, liturgical ones as well. The quotation from Psalm 22:22 reads, “I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” Commentators pay attention to the aspects of proclamation of the Lord’s name, location within the congregation, and the act of praise. But it’s important, also, to recognize the specific proclamation, congregation, and praise that Psalm 22:22-31 has in view:

The proclamation to which the psalm’s speaker refers is a proclamation about God regarding the concrete act of delivery he expects from his distress. After the psalmist is delivered, the content of the proclamation will be a reassertion of God’s rule over all nations, including those who seek his life.

The congregation in the psalm is not a generic gathering of worshiping persons, but a specifically-occasioned gathering of “the afflicted,” “those who seek him,” “all the families of the nations,” “all the prosperous of the earth,” “even the one who could not keep himself alive,” and “posterity” whom the sufferer has gathered around himself to share in the ritual meal by means of which he will thank the Lord for his deliverance.

The praise is not a generic praise song, or specifically a spontaneous one, but a Thanksgiving Song along the lines of Jonah’s song, occasioned by a particular and concrete act of deliverance from the Lord. 

Understood in the context of Psalm 22, the Jesus configured in Heb. 2:9-18 is not just a faithful brother, but a royal figure who, in anticipation of his deliverance by God, vows to offer up his thanksgiving in the midst of a congregation which will then eat the meal and then join in his Thanksgiving Song along with him. 

That Hebrews 2:9-18 depicts Jesus offering a thanksgiving meal, strengthens the case for understanding 13:15 as an exhortation to Christians to offer up the same kind of sacrifice, as it says, “through him.”

The significance of this is not only that the thanksgiving has appeared two times in Hebrews, but that it has appeared at two related moments. 

For one, these two verses, 2:12 and 13:15, are the only two places in the epistle that mention singing, and the relationship between the two passages is significant for discerning the epistle’s positive liturgical vision. 

For another, in his depiction of the Son’s humanity, The Author doesn’t just use a psalm citation, he puts the psalm in the son’s mouth. 2:11 reads, “For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,” followed by the quotation from Psalm 22:22. By doing this, the author implicitly, albeit clearly, identifies Jesus as the speaker, or at least one speaker of Psalm 22. 

The Author puts a psalm in the Son’s mouth a second time, at 10:5, where this time the author has quoted Ps. 40. The text introduces this quotation this way: “Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said...” The point is that the Son speaks the psalms.

This is the last time The Author puts a psalm in the Son’s mouth but, at 13:6, he puts Ps. 118 in the Church’s mouth. It is not insignificant that, of all the psalms Hebrews could have put in the Church’s mouth, it uses Psalm 118, a psalm which has been classified as a royal thanksgiving song. 

The “confidence” that Hebrews urges the Church to have is the “confidence” to identify themselves with Christ by speaking words which, based on the The Author’s already having placed the psalms in the Son’s mouth at Heb. 2:11 and 10:5, properly belong to Christ. The Author calls the Church not just to say Israel’s psalms, but to say Christ’s psalms, and specifically the Thanksgiving Songs he sings at the occasion of his own deliverance, as if they were their own: “So with confidence we can say, ‘The Lord is my helper’” (13:6).

Heb. 2:12 introduces Christ, the Singing Champion, who offers up the thanksgiving sacrifice, singing his own Thanksgiving Song; 13:6 exhorts the Church to join him in another Thanksgiving Song, and 13:15 may be taken to refer to the Church continually offering up their Thanksgiving sacrifice through him.

3. The Polemical Context of the Epiclesis 

The Author’s Epiclesis (13:1-19) clearly has a polemical edge. But does it have embodied, ritual offerings in its crosshairs? Making four observations about the text, I argue that neither embodied ritual in general nor sacrificial food in particular are being criticized. 

First, the structure of vv. 9-16 suggests that the heart of the exhortation is some kind of “bearing.” While vv. 9-12 are governed by a negative imperative, and v. 16 is governed by another one, both vv. 13-14 and v. 15 are governed by hortatory subjunctives based with the liturgical term φέρω, or “to bear,” as their root. In v. 13, it is φέροντες, “Let us bear his shame.” In v. 15, it is ἀναφέρωμεν, “let us bear up the sacrifice of praise.” The emphasis on the verb φέρω encourages a liturgical reading. 

Second, this “bearing up” is to take place “outside the camp.” “Outside the camp” is a significant location in Hebrews that evokes an already significant location in Leviticus that is called by the same name. In Leviticus, the phrase “outside the camp” appears thirteen times. “Outside the camp’ is where the sin-offering bull was to be burned (Lev. 4, 8), where those who were in a temporary state of uncleanness were to live (Lev. 14), where the scapegoat was sent (Lev. 16), and where the blaspheming half-Israelite was sent and stoned (Lev. 24). In this passage, which associations of  “outside the camp” does The Author evoke? Almost certainly the sin offering, and possibly the scapegoat as well. But other details of Heb. 13 suggest that he may evoke the case of the blaspheming foreigner at Lev. 24:10-13.

The figure in that story was a half-Israelite (v. 10). Quarreling inside the camp with a full-Israelite, he says something which the narrator calls a blasphemy of the Name (v. 11). Some men bring him to Yahweh, who pronounces a judgment: He is to be brought “outside the camp” (v. 14) and put to death. What’s more, so shall it happen to any man who blasphemes the Name in the camp (v. 16), or who otherwise does injury to his neighbor (vv. 17-22). The sons of Israel respond to Yahweh’s judgment by bringing the man “outside the camp” and stoning him (v. 23). 

Like this man, Jesus quarrels with sons of Israel in Jerusalem, he is accused of blasphemy, some men bring him to the authorities for a sentence, and he is put to a shameful death outside the camp. The Author exhorts his audience to follow Jesus outside the camp, not blaspheming the Name but giving thanks to it, and not doing injury to their neighbors but doing good.

Third, The Author claims that this new cult of reproach- and praise-bearing that is located “outside the camp” has an exclusive altar, “an altar from which those who officiate in the tent have no right to eat” (v. 10). “Those who officiate in the tent” refers to the priests who continue to eat sin-offerings in Jerusalem. Explaining exclusive altars, commentators cite Josephus, who attests that there was a common notion of an “exclusive altar” outside Jerusalem. The Essenes, for example, who did not affiliate themselves with Jerusalem’s altar, offered up their own offerings on altars such as these. Whether The Author is referring to a particular altar known by his audience, or a particular kind of altar known to his audience, the simplest way to read the claim, “We have an altar,” is its literal sense: We have a physical altar at which we offer physical sacrifices to God.

Fourth, the fact that The Author characterizes this exclusive altar as one from which Jerusalem’s priests “have no right to eat,” plainly implies that their altar has food. Otherwise, such a word of prohibition would either be unnecessary. 

Taken together, these observations suggest that The Author is drawing from Leviticus in symbolic ways to portray his audience as a new kind of cult with its own positive liturgical theology. Whereas the tabernacle (or tent, or temple) was once the place for “bearing up” sacrifices on an altar, now the bearing up must take place “outside the camp.” Whereas the terms of Aaron’s priesthood had required Israel to offer up sacrifices for sin and make atonement through their high priest year after year, now Jesus is a high priest who is at least his own sin offering, offered once for all. Whereas the quarreling foreigner who had blasphemed the Name had been convicted and sentenced to death outside the camp, now Jesus, and The Author’s readers are exhorted to go outside the camp, voluntarily bearing reproach, and giving thanks, specifically to his name. Whereas the food of the sin-offering had been reserved for priests, the food of the thanksgiving offering is for the laity, the new sacrifice-bearing priesthood. The Author does not renounce the Levitical world; he renounces Jerusalem by reimagining elements of the Levitical world. And perhaps the prophecy is not untrue which says that, “In the time of the Messiah all sacrifices will cease, but the sacrifice of thanksgiving will not cease.”

From this point, the interpretive leap that Church Fathers and some liturgical scholars make from “sacrifice of praise” to “the Eucharist” is much shorter and more plausible. Ritually, the Church is a community of Christ’s brothers and sisters, bearing his shame and suffering with him outside the camp; vocalizing psalms, like Psalm 22, as they suffer at the hands of their neighbors; and offering up praise in the congregation, in an embodied ritual, and in songs of thanksgiving. Hebrews does not preclude the Church from offering up spontaneous expressions of oral praise, but neither does it preclude her from interpreting this passage as describing embodied, ritual worship.