Torah for Christians: Biblical Sacrifices
TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON FIVE EPISODE NINE
SACRIFICES
Give me a goat! Give me a lamb! Give me a bird! What’s that spell? Biblical sacrifices! I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and on this episode of Torah for Christians, we are going to explore the notion of sacrifice in the Bible. Let’s get started.
MUSIC
Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr
The word sacrifice means to give something up. For example, we can sacrifice time to volunteer for our favorite causes. We can sacrifice a kidney to transplant into the body of a person who needs it. Or we can sacrifice money, to donate to a cause or to help a family member.
But in the Torah, sacrifice has a very different meaning. Instead of giving something up, Biblical sacrifice, in Hebrew Korban, means to draw near to God. Israelites would bring an offering to an altar, at first in a designated shrine, then later in the Temple in Jerusalem to draw near to God. In almost every commandment to bring a sacrifice, the goal was to offer a pleasing aroma to God. This was our way to commune with the Eternal.
We’ll leave the olfactory question for a moment and first focus on the different ways to draw near to God that the Torah describes. And there are many, detailed primarily in the Books of Leviticus and Numbers.
There are two primary types of sacrifices, ritual and personal. The ritual sacrifices are communal and include the various offerings for the holy days, as well as Shabbat and daily sacrifices. In the Temple, the Israelites offered a Tamid, daily sacrifice as well as a Minhah, afternoon sacrifice. On Shabbat and Festival holy days, we also offered a Musaf, an additional sacrifice in honor of the day. There was no evening sacrifice, most likely because of darkness.
Two of the two most important communal sacrifices were the sacrifice of the goat on Yom Kippur Afternoon and the offering of the Paschal lamb at the start of Passover. On Yom Kippur, the High Priest, after a period of personal purification, would choose by lot a goat to be sacrificed. He would lay his hands upon the goat and then slaughter it as an act of atonement. He would also lay his hands upon the second goat, who had a red ribbon tied to its horn, and confess the sins of the people upon it. Then, another priest would lead the goat into the wilderness, into a world called Azazel, where it would be pushed off a cliff. When the goat died, so did the sins of the people.
The other major communal sacrifice was the sacrifice of the Pascal lamb, in remembrance of the lamb that the Israelites ate on the night that the Angel of Death killed the first-born Israelites. The Torah commands us to sacrifice the Pascal lamb every year, eat the meat along with matzah and maror, bitter herbs, and recount the story of the Exodus.
On the other hand, there is a plethora of personal sacrifices. Israelites offered sacrifices to atone for intentional and unintentional sins, for thanksgiving, to become ritually pure, after birthing a child, on recovering from skin ailments and for many other reasons. And of course, one could offer a sacrifice – just because.
How did the individual Israelite cope with these many sacrifices? Growing up, I always thought that an individual farmer would have to shlep a goat or sheep all the way from Northern Israel to Jerusalem. That was a mistake. Instead, a person would come to Jerusalem and purchase an animal from the communal pen. This animal would be designated for that person, or persons. They were the only ones who could eat that animal once it was sacrificed.
Speaking of eating, the Bible places a great deal of importance upon tithing. Depending on the type of sacrifice, portions of the animal were reserved for Priests, Levites, and the poor. After those tithes were taken, in most cases the one who offered the sacrifice could eat the remaining meat.
Not everyone however could afford to purchase an animal. The Torah realizes this and with nearly every personal sacrifice, there is a sliding scale of purchases. The highest level of an offering was to purchase a bull to slaughter. Cattle was rare and expensive; not everyone could afford one. Most people dropped to the next level, offering a sheep or goat. If that person could not afford a mammal, he could bring a turtledove or pigeon. If that was too much, he could bring cakes, i.e., loaves of bread. Finally, if that was too much for a person to afford, and many people were truly and literally dirt poor, they could bring a handful of grain to show their love of God. Sacrifices then were not based on wealth, when only the wealthy could afford to draw near to God but instead, were based on desire and need. Before God, everyone was equal and everyone could draw near to God.
In a moment, we will talk about what happened to the Jewish people once the sacrifices ended. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
MUSIC
Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. If you are enjoying this podcast, I encourage you to go to our website, www.torahforchristians.net, where you can find previous episodes, which cover a variety of topics. You can also access them on various podcast websites, such as iTunes, Spotify and Google.
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Sacrifices served the Jewish people well. But to offer a sacrifice, there had to be a place to offer it; we could not simply set up an altar and then kill an animal. Deuteronomy commanded us to offer sacrifices only in a place which God chooses, namely the Temple in Jerusalem. Bringing sacrifices under the purview of the Priests only reinforced the control they had over the people after the return from Babylonian Exile. If indeed Leviticus came into being after the Exile, then we can understand why the Priests designed the sacrifices in the way that they did and also understand why the Priests, and only the Priests, could eat the choice parts of the animals.
But sacrifices became increasingly impractical. To take but one example, Jews living in Babylonia and Persia could not offer sacrifices in Jerusalem. At first, there was no Temple. But even after the Temple was rebuilt, many if not most Jews could not offer sacrifices because they lived outside the Land of Israel.
During Greco-Roman times, there were Jews thriving in Babylonia and Persia. But Jews also began to live in Alexandria, Greece and Asia Minor, in Rome and even as far west as Spain. Some of these Jewish communities are over 2,000 years old today and still vibrant.
But these Jewish Diaspora communities never committed to sacrifices. Perhaps some Jews would occasionally go to Jerusalem but after the destruction of the Temple, sacrifices ended. So, what to do? How could we remain Jews?
In the latter centuries before the dawn of the Common Era, Jews began to congregate to offer prayers instead of sacrifices. These prayer groups eventually became known as synagogues. This process was long, complicated and, to modern scholars, open to interpretation. But by the 3rd Century, CE, synagogues had replaced the Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE, as the way Jews drew near to God. Indeed, the synagogue today fulfills the same function as the altar, to offer Jews a way to worship God together. We even see a physical connection between Temple and synagogue, since every synagogue in the world has a Ner Tamid, an Eternal Light, hanging over the Holy Ark, a vestige of the altar fire that the Torah commands be kept burning at all times. When we look up to the Ner Tamid, we recall the Temple sacrifices.
By the start of the 1st Century BCE, we know that the Sadducees would retreat to a prayer room in the Temple to worship while the sacrifices roasted. They did so at the behest of the Pharisees, who had defeated them in an internal Jewish civil war a few decades after the Hasmonean victory over Greece.
Indeed, by the time that Judah HaNasi redacted the Mishnah in the early 3rd Century, the basic prayer structure was already part and parcel of the rabbinic worldview. And while the rabbis revered the ancient sacrifices and prayed for their restoration, they were under no illusions; as time went by, they realized that the Temple would not be rebuilt in their time – but only in the days of the Messiah, a day of God’s choosing.
In conclusion, while sacrifices were the primary way to draw near to God in Biblical times, we can see that even as early as the Babylonian Exile, Jews were moving away from relying exclusively on sacrifices as the only, or even preferred way to worship God. As the days of the Second Temple came to an end, prayer already was established as the primary way to worship God, amongst the Diaspora Jewish communities certainly but also in the Land of Israel. This reliance upon prayer lessened the impact of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; we could continue as a people and as a faith because we had moved beyond animal sacrifice.
While our prayers today still echo a desire to return to animal sacrifices in a rebuilt Temple, not all Jews actually desire this. We prefer prayer. But to be perfectly honest, were the Temple to be rebuilt, many Jews would rejoice but many more Jews, after seeing videos on Facebook and Youtube would, I believe, become vegetarians instead.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please like and review this and all of my podcasts on our website, www.torahforchristians.net or on iTunes. You can also subscribe to my Substack column, Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, on the website or directly on Substack.
Next week, we will talk about ethics .We don’t often think of ethics when we speak of the Hebrew Bible, but an ethical way of living is just as important to the development of Judaism as is law.
Again, thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and I wish you a wonderful week. Hinei Mah Tov… L’hitraot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this has been Torah for Christians.
