Sacrificial terms

Christian Eberhart of Lutheran Theological Seminary gave a presentation on the nature of sacrifice. I’m not a stickler for method, but there were basic methodological problems with Eberhart’s approach. He started from a definition of sacrifice from Wolfhart Stegeman, which laid out four meanings of the word “sacrifice” in modern European languages.

From that, he tried to place various biblical words on a chart containing these modern meanings. His conclusion that “sacrifice” in modern usage covers things that the Bible distinguishes was fine as far as it went, and he was correct on some details: qorban does mean “something brought near” and minchah means “tribute.” He reached the conclusion that the key element of “sacrifice” was not blood but burning; rites where blood is manipulated but nothing is burned are not “sacrifices” in the biblical sense.

But the procedure was backwards from the beginning. The criterion for deciding whether something was “sacrifice” or not was not anything in the Hebrew text – it was not based on the presence of the word “sacrifice.” The Hebrew word for “sacrifice” (tzavach) does not function as an umbrella term for all the offerings. “Burnt offerings” are not “sacrificed” but simply killed, and grain offerings are of course not “slaughtered.”

One result of his procedure was that he separated the “sacrificial” from “non-sacrificial” rites, classifying the Passover and Day of Atonement rites as among the latter. That effectively removed these two rites from consideration when he attempted to explain the rationale of the rites of “sacrifice.” There nothing in “P,” he said that tells us explicitly that blood is essential to the atonement; but he’d have to revise that conclusion if he had recognized the continuity between what he describes as “sacrifice” and what he describes as “non-sacrifice.”

A better procedure is to work from the biblical terminology itself, and allow that to determine the way we use the terms.