Bloody Bible revisited

Dennis Pardee’s Ritual and Cult at Ugarit collects texts that are relevant to Ugaritic cult, especially sacrificial cult. He ends the book with a helpful survey of the similarities and differences between Ugarit and the Bible. One of the differences has to do with the use of blood.

“The blood and the fat of sacrificial victims, of great

importance in the sacrificial system of the Hebrew texts, are entirely
absent from the Ugaritic texts.” It’s impossible to know fully what this means, since the difference “may reflect the different genres,
that is, the Ugaritic texts prescribe the principal features of certain rites
of which the details would have been known to the practitioners, whereas the
literary perspective of the biblical texts requires that many details be
stated explicitly. . . . because of the silence of the
Ugaritic texts on these details, we have no way of determining the
concrete facts and a
fortiori the ideology behind them” (237).

Pardee also notes that the two cults differ in their attention to sin: “Viewed from the biblical perspective, the important function there of the sacrificial system as
serving to cleanse . . . or to expiate . . .  sin . . . and iniquity . . . is largely
missing from the Ugaritic record. . . . the concept of ridding
from sin was not alien to the cult, nor was the concept of sin//evil as being at the origin
of bodily suffering.” Again, the significance of this difference is not altogether clear: “either because of the genre differences mentioned
above or because of differences of ideology, or both, the preoccupation
with sin and cleansing therefrom
characteristic of the Hebrew texts is not visible in Ugaritic” (237).

The caution is necessary, especially with regard to possible generic differences between the texts. Perhaps we can be slightly bolder: If we had Leviticus in the same fragmentary state as the Ugaritic ritual texts, would sin and blood be absent? 

What Pardee says of Ugaritic cultic texts is not true of other collections from the ancient near east. Yitzhaq Feder argues in Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual that there are “profound similarities in procedure, rationale, and circumstances” of Hittite and Israelite rituals of expiation: “the blood rites in both cultures consist of an act of smearing blood on an object, frequently cultic, as a means of removing metaphysical threats, such as sin and impurity, which will evoke divine retribution unless action is taken. The Hurro-Hittite blood rite – the zurki – is regularly accompanied by an offering of cooked fat, often from the same animal, called the uzi rite. This practice is strikingly similar to the sin offering.” He claims that the “dynamic” is similar in that both operate by a metonymic logic: “the ritual patron benefits from the expiator rite by means of an associative connection between himself and the object.” In both cults, further, these rites are performed for “expiation of unintentional sin, purification of a defiled temple, and the consecration of a new cult structure” (2).

If Israel was bloody, at least among the Hittites they could find some bloody cousins.