Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When any one of you* brings an offering of livestock to the LORD, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock. Leviticus 1:2
From the dawn of time, beginning with Cain and Abel’s sacrifice, continuing even up to now in some places, people have offered up bloody sacrifices upon altars to God, or the gods. What was so commonplace and proper to our ancestors seems so out of place, even disgusting, to moderns. We must work our minds and imaginations hard, very hard, to get to a place where we understand this primal human instinct to sacrifice, which has, for the most part, been driven out from our modern consciousness. Why should we do this? Because we believe something very vital to our knowledge of God and ourselves has been lost with it.
We have already determined that biblical worship, at its very core, is an act of sacrifice. (See The Sublime Climax: Genesis 22.) Leviticus dives right into the various sacrifices so important to their life of worship, beginning with the three most common ones in chapters one through three: the burnt offering (Chapter 1), the cereal offering (Chapter 2), and the peace offering (Chapter 3). Here we will focus on the first of these.
Three things jump out at us when we read about the burnt offering in Chapter One. The first is the expense of the sacrificial animal. The worshipper offered according to his means, whether it be an ox, or lamb, or a bird for the poor. The animal had to be the very best, a male without blemish. Worship was costly or it was not worship at all; the cost had to be felt. To offer anything less was to live in the illusion that God does not see, or that God was not real, or something less than one’s possessions and wealth. Throughout Scripture we see those who are condemned for sacrificing inferior beasts (See Malachi 2:6ff.), or praised for extravagant offerings (See II Chron. 7:5). Again, as we have seen in the above mentioned post on Genesis 22, God accepted Israel’s offerings on the basis of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son of ultimate value, and His provision of a ram in place of Isaac.
The second is how dramatic and very messy worship was, especially for the worshipper. The worshipper brought the animal and laid his hands upon its head, indicating a transference of guilt from him to that beast, called “vicarious atonement.” He then slit its throat and as it bled out the priest would take its blood and splash it against the altar. He then would flay and cut it into pieces and wash out the waste from the intestines and its dirty legs. The priest would then lay the whole upon the altar to be burnt. It was the worshipper that did the “dirty work,” for the priests were to remain as clean as possible in such a grotesquely violent and gory scene. This offering is called “holocaust” from the Greek holocaustos, meaning the whole is burnt.
The third is YHWH’s response to the offering. It is referred to as a “pleasing odor,” or “soothing aroma,” to YHWH. This has nothing to do with feeding a hungry god as in paganism. It has everything to do with God’s holiness. Because of God’s holiness and humanity’s constant evil, humanity, in this specific case, Israel, was in constant danger of annihilation, as we have seen with Noah’s sacrifice and the ensuing rainbow (Genesis 8:20ff.) The sacrifice did not remove the sinful nature of the worshipper, but it propitiates, or appeases, God’s wrath, so as to make fellowship with God possible, which pleases God (Wenham).
This burnt offering, this holocaust, taught the ancient Hebrews something critical about themselves; their sins brought them in mortal danger with their creator. The gravity of their malady was such that their worship provided an extremely visual and visceral drama of death. They deserve what their offering experienced in their behalf. But another perspective of the placing of the hands upon the beast was this: they offered themselves to God and to His service through the beast offered to God. It acts as a sort of confession where sins are dealt with and their resolve to live better lives acts as a penance. That beast must not be slain in vain.
The fundamental barrier keeping moderns from appreciating this is the almost total loss of recognizing their own personal sin and how it destroys relationships, both with God on a vertical level and with one another on a horizontal level. In the face of such indifference the text cries out to every generation with these introductory words “if any man of you brings …” (Leviticus 1: 2). The word “man” is the Hebrew ′ādām, linking us all, whatever generation we find ourselves, to our common human origin with our common problem of sin and death. The text is inviting every human who has a heart for reconciliation to act. Everything hangs on self-awareness, as Origen writes concerning the officiating priests who themselves were sinners in need of atonement:
But what is most admired in this type of priest? Not that he may not sin—because that is impossible—but that he knows and understands his own sin. For he who thinks he has not sinned never corrects himself. In like manner, he is more easily able to pardon those who sin, whose conscience is disturbed by his own weakness.
Homilies on Leviticus, Homily 2.
As we shall see, other offerings also atone for sins. This holocaust, however, is the most general and unspecific of the offerings and, therefore, the most commonly offered in ancient Israel. This offering would have been a very common part of life and worship to Jesus and His disciples. Jesus, as we see in the Gospels, would have connected very personally with this sacrifice as He meditated upon his role of bringing these offerings to an end in His own person. Everything about His incarnation, His perfection, His willingness like Isaac in the ‵aqēdā to be bound without questioning by his father, and sacrificial death for divine propitiation and the atonement of sins can only be understood through the eyes of this sacrifice.
Takeaway: In the biblical worldview, only a bloody, costly, sacrificial offering made atonement and propitiation for sin.
Questions:
- Using your imagination, place yourself at the scene of the sacrifice. What impresses you the most about this ritual?
- How would you compare this scene with what people generally experience in their worship in our culture?
- What does the word “propitiation” mean and how does it apply to your life and relationship to God?
Sources Used:
Origen, Homilies on Leviticus. Vol. 83 in “The Fathers of the Church.” Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1990.
Radner, Leviticus.
Wenham, G. The Book of Leviticus.