The Origin of Israelite Sacrifice

059

Sacrificing animals to God—a major activity in the Temple—must certainly seem odd to us in the 21st century. Where did the practice come from? The Israelites didn’t invent it.

Scholars have hypothesized its origin in prehistoric times, not long after the domestication of plants and animals. Others argue for a Greek origin as reflected in early Greek literature.

The most convincing evidence, however, comes from Mesopotamia. Here we have not only, as in Israel, the canonical (literary) formulations of how sacrificial rites are to be performed, but also economic texts providing accounts of events after the ritual and objectively recorded, detailing the expenses of each step in the ritual against the possibility of a future audit by a higher authority. These records leave no doubt that in Mesopotamia, animal sacrifice, though ostensibly a mechanism for feeding the deity, was at best a thinly disguised method for sanctifying and justifying meat consumption by human beings—a privilege routinely accorded to priesthood, aristocracy and royalty, and sporadically, notably on holidays and holy days, to the masses of the population.

Mesopotamian mythology provides the key insight. A common thread runs through both Sumerian and Akkadian myths about the relationship between gods and men. It is that men were created to relieve the gods of the need to provide for their own food. In the words of the noted Assyriologist W.G. Lambert, “The idea that man was created to relieve the gods of hard labor by 060 supplying them with food and drink was standard among both Sumerians and Babylonians.”¹

For example, in the Sumerian myth known as “Cattle and Grain,” man was created (literally “given breath”) “for the sake of the sheepfolds and good things of the gods.”²

This thought even finds a faint echo in the primeval history of Genesis: After the creation of man (Genesis 2:15), “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.”

In a Sumerian epic, crown prince Lugalbanda is saved from death and proceeds to prepare himself a banquet meal to which he summons the four greatest deities in the Sumerian pantheon—An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursag. Lugalbanda pours libations of beer and wine, carves the meat of the goats, roasts it together with the bread, and lets the sweet savor rise to the gods like incense. The intelligible portion of the text ends with these two lines:

So of the food prepared by Lugalbanda

An, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag consumed the best part.

Thus the highest deities of the Sumerian pantheon—three gods and one goddess who traditionally represent and govern the four cosmic realms—physically partake of the best of the meat at a sacred meal convoked in their honor. Presumably, then, they sanction the slaughter of the animals that has made this consumption of their meat possible.

This interpretation of the text, deciphered only in the early 1980s, is reinforced by numerous other fragmentary Mesopotamian myths. In short, in Mesopotamia, the sacrificial cult was understood as a means of feeding the gods. Beginning at the end of the third millennium B.C.E., the sacrifice was literally made to feed the statues of the gods in their temples.

In Israel, however, anthropomorphic conceptions and representations of the deity were proscribed. There the worshiper participated in the consumption of the earliest sacrifice (the paschal sacrifice). Later cultic legislation explicitly provided priesthood and laity with a share of the sacrificial offerings.

For example, Leviticus 4 gives detailed instructions for the expiation of inadvertent sins by means of the sacrifice of an ox, a bull, a goat or a sheep, depending on whether the inadvertent violation of God’s commandment was by a priest, the community as a whole, a chief, or any other person. In each case, the sacrifice removes the guilt of the sin. For expiating corresponding sins of omission, see the laws in Numbers 15:22–31.

Thus Israelite sacrifice, though in origin designed, as in Mesopotamia, to sanctify the act of consumption, ultimately came as well to sanctify other human activities and to atone for other human transgressions.³

Sacrificing animals to God—a major activity in the Temple—must certainly seem odd to us in the 21st century. Where did the practice come from? The Israelites didn’t invent it.