Rabbinic Judaism, Stephen Geller suggests, is the “triumph of Deuteronomy and the Word.” After the fall of the temple especially, the place of the cult was taken by prayer and the liturgy. The literary temple became far more important than any possible future building. And with the end of the temple system, Judaism lost interest in blood: “As a religion, it abhors blood” (121). He adds the arresting point that the bloodiness of the temple system found more of a... Read more
Why, Stephen A. Geller asks, does “P” consider blood a necessary agent for achieving forgiveness and the re-creation that is atonement? He answers by noting the sequence of Leviticus 16-17, which moves from the bloody cleansing and reestablishment of the sanctuary to the command that butchering be done in the sanctuary to prohibitions on eating blood. In various details, he detects a reference back to the post-flood scenes of Genesis 8-9, where Noah, a new Adam, is told that man... Read more
Stephen A. Geller offers an intriguing reading of the day of atonement rituals. He points out that, for all the attention given to the scapegoat, one of the unique features of this day’s rites, it is not said that the scapegoat atones for sin. What puts the kafar into Yom Kiuppur is blood. Nor is there any reference in Leviticus 16 to forgiveness, as there is in the rituals for individual sacrifice. Picking up hints from Jacob Milgrom, Geller argues that... Read more
Blood atones. That’s rooted in the created fact that life is in the blood, but in the Bible this doesn’t mean that blood is a kind of magical moral detergent. How then can it atone? It atones because God has “given” it for atonement: “I have given [blood] to you on the altar to make atonement for your lives” (Leviticus 17:11). It is an appropriate atonement for life because it is life-blood. The Creator created it with the potential to... Read more
Stephen Geller opens an essay on blood in “P” by stating that he is treating the Pentateuch as a literary unit. What the “priestly editor” produced, he argue is not “patchwork aggregate signifying nothing” but “a work meaningful in the whole, a tapestry more than the sum of its woven strands, a truly fit object of literary analysis” (97-8). He offers this spirited elaboration of the point: “It might be argued that such coherence as one claims to find in an... Read more
Someone asked me recently if my Gratitude includes a section on Barth. It doesn’t, and I’m sure this is not the last time I will turn sheepish as I confess to a large, unconscionable gap in the book. It doesn’t make up for the oversight, but here are some summary comments on Barth’s treatment of notion that we have our “being in gratitude” (Church Dogmatics, 3.2, section 44). Barth discusses gratitude under the heading of “man as a creature of God,” but... Read more
Rivers have a unique place in biblical cosmology. Though watery, rivers are unlike the sea, which always threatens to overwhelm the land. Channeled, water becomes life-giving. They keep land fruitful, set boundaries between peoples or join them as liquid roads. A river is water brought into service to human needs, water reconciled with land. Rivers appear in the theophany of Habakkuk 3. In an exodus reference, the prophet asks if Yahweh raged against rivers or the sea, and sent his... Read more
In his contribution to The Neighbor, Zizek offers this typically contrarian, typically extreme, description of the impact of God’s command to love the neighbor: “What gets lost in this ‘critique of ethical violence’ is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic – in short as an impossible/real Thing that ‘makes the law. . .... Read more
Michel Anteby’s Manufacturing Morals is an “ethnography” of the Harvard Business School. It’s an odd book, very insight-the-HBS, but along the way he develops the intriguing notions of “vocal silence.” Routine seems to rob individuals of responsibility. But most routines, Anteby points out, require some degree of responsible judgment: “Police officers can . . . selectively include or exclude pertinent details in their arrest reports. . . . hiring and budgeting routines can take on various meanings depending on who performs... Read more
Are Christians obsessed with sex? Yes we are, and for good reason. Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In