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In the Hebrew Scriptures, God gives quite specific directions on how to make sacrifices to him. We ask Jimmy Akin why God does this? What good does it do? And does God need all these sacrifices?
Cy:
How should we think about biblical sacrifices? Jimmy Akin, right now. Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending the Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and remember to subscribe to focus on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen, so that you’ll get a notice when new episodes are available and, if you would, please give us that five-star review that helps to grow the podcast.
It’s a little bit weird, in a way, if you think of it from a modern perspective, sometimes we don’t, but why does God, the eternal God transcendent in every way, why does He tell people, “Okay, here’s what I want you to do to have a good relationship with me. Go get yourself a lamb. Now, bring the lamb to the temple and kill the lamb and eat the lamb.” What is this all about? Why did this ever even happen? Why is this part of biblical history, all this stuff about sacrifice? Well, you start thinking about it, it’s weird, and if you start having weird thoughts you think, I need to ask Jimmy Akin, so that’s what we did.
Jimmy, I think for a modern person, the idea of particularly animal sacrifice is so foreign to us that we even have to have court cases about whether religious groups can do animal sacrifices or not, so I think I’d like to start by just asking you why did God in the Hebrew scriptures get involved in the animal sacrifice business at all?
Jimmy:
Well, one of the reasons that animal sacrifice seems strange to us today is because we’re a bunch of pampered moderns that don’t do our own butchering.
Cy:
Ah.
Jimmy:
To us, meat comes in packages from the store. It doesn’t come from the animals that you personally keep and then need to butcher when you want to eat meat, but his is a very unusual situation in human history. In the past, if you wanted to eat meat, you butchered it yourself, and since it’s difficult to get adequate nutrition with a purely vegetarian diet, the vast majority of people in world history have been very well acquainted with animals and slaughtering them is not a big deal and so they would be treated just like anything else. If you want to have a meal and you want to, let’s say, have over some friends or maybe a dignitary or something like that, you want to establish good relationships, you want to reinforce friendships, maybe you want to say you’re sorry for something that you’ve done, you throw a big party and you have a meal, and since meat is really tasty you butcher an animal or more than one and you share in that food as part of table fellowship.
Well, in the ancient world and even today, this is a principle that this sharing of our resources with another person as a way of either reinforcing good relationships or building good relationships when they’ve been damaged by something is something that we’ve always done and it’s built into human nature. You find this kind of reciprocity in every human culture, and so it’s natural for humans to take what they do with themselves and apply it to the divine as well, either God or the gods. Whether you worship the one true God or whether you worship other gods, if you want good relations with the divine or if you want to repair relations when they’ve been damaged, well, you do the same thing, you present a gift. You offer something to the person you want good relations with whether it’s a human or a God, and that offering, that gift you offer, is an offering or a sacrifice.
The concept of sacrifice is found in every human culture. Every human culture has a religion, every human culture has some form of sacrifice. It just is a question of what form does it take and that tends to be, it’s not exclusively based, but it tends to be based on what kind of resources do people have. In the past, people had primarily agrarian resources, so they would have animals, they would have plants, they would have drinks that they had made like wine or something like that, and they would then use these in parties among humans to build good relations or as gifts to humans to build good relations or as sacrifices to the gods to build good relations.
It’s not simply animal sacrifices. You’d also have sacrifices that were made of plant matter, you’d bring in part of your harvest. Let’s say you were growing wheat after the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic period. You’d also bring in wine or whatever other choice beverages you had for this as well. We find all of these being taken up in scripture where God working with the ancient Hebrew people, He’d given them human nature and all of this sacrifice stuff falls right out of human nature, and so given the cultural context at the time God, even though He himself doesn’t have any needs and so He doesn’t need sacrifices. He, at one point in the Psalms, tells the Israelites, “Even if I don’t need oxen, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you because the cattle on a thousand hills are mine,” but He’s willing to accept these from them as a human gesture that they want good relations with God and they want to say they’re sorry when they’ve sinned and things like that.
Cy:
Okay, the whole idea of sacrifice is, in a sense, where people all throughout history, even all throughout prehistory one would assume then, too, people treating the gods or the divine the way that they would treat one another or the way they would treat maybe the king or the chief or something like that.
Jimmy:
Yeah.
Cy:
You try to establish relations with them the same way you would with any important person.
Jimmy:
Right, with anyone you care about or with anyone that’s important in your life, this is just an extension of that same principle.
Cy:
Okay, are there any aspects of it that are transformed, then? Because so much is transformed with the kind of revelation of God to the Jewish people. Is it different among the Jews, in other words, than it is among the people around them?
Jimmy:
There are at least a couple of differences. One of them is the kinds of animals you sacrifice would vary from culture to culture.
Cy:
Okay.
Jimmy:
Even if you had a given type of, and obviously the plants would, too, because different plants grow in different parts of the world. Different drinks are going to be different. If you’re pouring out a drink offering, it’s going to be wine in one culture, maybe grape wine, let’s say, in the Middle East, it might be rice wine over in Japan. Partly, the animals that you offer will vary depending on what’s considered appropriate for the gods. Different cultures will have different animals that are considered clean or unclean. The Jewish people obviously had a variety of animals that were not considered clean, and therefore you wouldn’t present a pig to God. In fact, during the time of the Maccabees, the offering of pigs in the Jerusalem temple to apparently an idol of Zeus was considered a horrible abomination, because pigs were unclean and this was a Holy site and both the idol of Zeus and the pig were abominations to have in this place.
Interestingly, from the Greek perspective, the fact that Jews would often sacrifice sheep, that was something Greeks tended not to do. They thought that this was like dissing pagan gods to whom sheep were sacred animals, but that really wasn’t the headspace that the Jews were in because, to them, they just raised sheep. “We are shepherds,” and so it was just an ordinary animal to them. They weren’t dissing pagan gods by this. Another difference, and this is a very significant one, between the Israelites and some of their neighbors is they didn’t sacrifice human beings. Now, when you offer a gift to someone, especially if it’s a really important person and you really want good relations with them, you want to give them as expensive a gift as you can afford. If you’re meeting with, let’s say, a president or a pope, you don’t want to just give them a pack of gum.
Cy:
I see what you mean, yeah, right.
Jimmy:
You want to give them something nicer than that. There’s a tendency to say, okay, what’s the most precious thing I have and if I give the person the most precious thing I can give them, that signifies a lot of goodwill on my part and hopefully they’ll display a lot of goodwill back to me.
Well, the most precious thing a lot of people have is their kids, and so at various points in world history there have been cultures that have been built around sacrificing or that have involved sacrificing other human beings, sometimes captives captured in war. This was very common in Mesoamerica, for example. The Aztecs had a real human sacrifice thing going.
Cy:
An industry.
Jimmy:
Yeah, really extensive with captives captured in war very frequently. On the other hand, kids would get sacrificed in various cultures, and so we find strict prohibitions on human sacrifice and specifically child sacrifice in the Bible. This is a distortion of spirituality, this is evil, this is not something God wants, this is an abomination.
They needed to give those because some Israelites did this. They imitated pagan practice and they would actually do this. They would, as the phrase has it, make their children pass through the fire to Moloch. There was even a place you could see from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem down into the Kidron Valley, it was called the Tophet where this kind of sacrifice would go on. Needless to say, the prophets condemn it, and this is part of the background why the Kidron Valley or the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna became an image of hell because of this abominable practice that went on there.
Cy:
I see, right, right. Well, I imagine that in most societies, this is my image of it. You can correct me, but maybe there’s a God for the harvest and so when it’s getting near harvest time you make a sacrifice to that god. Did the Jews at any point get involved in that kind of thing? That is, “Yeah, we got God, we know the main God, but just let’s make a sacrifice over here for the harvest god for harvest season.” Do you see what I mean?
Jimmy:
Yeah, there are rhythms built into human life including annual ones like the time of harvest and so forth. There were Jews who made compromises with paganism and would worship pagan gods, but God also had a way of incorporating these natural rhythms into Israelite religion in a healthy way. For example, Pentecost was a harvest feast, and so part of what you would do as you got the harvest to recognize the fact that all of the harvest comes from God. He’s the one who’s running nature and keeping it operating the way it needs to so you can have your harvest. What you do is you would take the first bit of the harvest and reserve it for God, and this was what was called the first fruits. The first bit of your harvest, the first apples to ripen, the first wheat to harvest, to become ripe that you harvest, you take that initial quantity of it and reserve it for God.
That was one of the ways that the natural cycles that God built into nature were incorporated into Israelite life. For example, you take the first sheaf of wheat. You got all your workers, you’re going to harvest your wheat field. You cut the first sheaf and then you take that to the temple and give it to the priests, and the priests would then present it to God as what’s called a waive offering. They would carry it in front of God, and then after it’s been presented to God it gets to be eaten, because God doesn’t need it, it gets to be eaten by God’s officials, by his subordinate workers, by priests.
Cy:
Oh, this is a way of supporting priests.
Jimmy:
Yeah.
Cy:
Oh, yeah, oh, I got you. Okay, I do have to ask you this. This prohibition on human sacrifice that you refer to, it is very problematic when you come to the story of Isaac and Abraham. As a matter of fact, for some people, this is a deal-breaker. “I don’t want to believe in a God who had asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.” Can you put that, first of all God, the whole thing into context for us so we can understand what’s going on there?
Jimmy:
Yeah, there’s a question about how this story needs to be interpreted. If you take a straightforward, literal interpretation, at some point God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a way of testing his faith in God. Abraham was willing to do this, but there’s a question about what Abraham expected to happen. Did he really expect God to ask him to go through with this? Because God had given him the promise that he would have this line of descendants that would come through Isaac, so if he sacrifices Isaac how is that going to happen?
Well, one possible explanation that has been proposed is that Abraham expected that God would raise Isaac from the dead and so this wouldn’t be a permanent thing. In fact, this is suggested by the author of Hebrews that Abraham considered God able to raise the dead, and he did, in a sense, get his son Isaac back from the dead because God substituted an animal for Isaac. This, then, becomes a figure of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ where God has his own son sacrificed but then come back from the dead so it’s not a permanent thing. Obviously, that’s very different than what happens if you’re sacrificing to a pagan deity. Your child’s not coming back, and so it’s a different character to the act.
Ultimately, as we know from the story, God did not want Isaac to do this. He provided an animal as a substitute for Isaac and so Isaac was not sacrificed. This has been something that Jewish and Christian scholars have looked at and said this story, this account, is God’s way of teaching the Israelites that’s not what God ultimately wants.
Cy:
Yeah, don’t do that, yeah.
Jimmy:
Yes, God does want your devotion that puts Him above everything else but, no, He does not want you to literally sacrifice your children. Whether you take it fully literally or whether you look at the spiritual message, either way it comes out to, “This is not God’s plan for the children of Abraham. This is not what He wants.”
Cy:
Then, there’s no real reference to any, throughout the Hebrew scriptures after that, there’s no hint of even the possibility of child sacrifice.
Jimmy:
Well, there are accounts of people doing it but it’s always condemned.
Cy:
Yeah, okay, that’s what I’m getting at, yeah. Okay, I want to ask you, then, you mentioned the relationship between this as maybe a prefiguring or an image of God’s sacrifice of His own son, Jesus. It seems to me that, well, let me first establish something with you. Is it possible in the realm of logic and reason that God could’ve saved us in another means, or is this necessary by the rules of the logic of reality?
Jimmy:
According to Thomas Aquinas and, here, I would agree with this, God is not bound to forgive us in any particular way or to forgive us at all, so it’s His choice when we’ve sinned, it’s God’s choice to forgive us. Now, He’s made that choice and He’s chosen certain means to do it, but He could have done it in any way He wanted and He could have simply said, “Oh, you’re all forgiven,” and not even had a means by which He did it. He didn’t have to send Jesus to the cross. The reason He chose to send Jesus to the cross is to build on, there are several reasons, but one of them is to build on these elements that are part of human nature, because people all over the world understand the concept of gift giving and sacrifice and establishing good relations by these means and repairing damaged relations by these means. By building on this pattern, this is something people all over the world would be able to understand on an intuitive, emotional level once the details are explained to them.
It spoke to the Israelite people and it spoke to people more broadly, and that was one of the goals of the messianic age was to bring not just the Jewish people to heightened faith in God but also to bring the gentiles to faith in God. It’s part of the universality of the gospel, the image of Jesus on the cross offering himself, because he’s not just the sacrifice, he’s also the priest who’s offering the sacrifice. This is a self-offering, and so it shows us God’s love for us that He’s willing to do this. He’s willing to undergo this horrible ordeal on our behalf that demonstrates, this is another one of the reasons God chose it, this demonstrates God’s love for us.
It also, this is a third reason, it shows us the gravity of our sins, the fact that it took the death of the son of God to atone for them, shows us just how awful our sins against an infinitely holy God are, the ingratitude that we show an infinitely holy God when we do something gravely contrary to His will when we commit mortal sin. It takes this to atone for that. As the author of Hebrews says, the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sin. Bulls and goats have a little bit of value, but they don’t stack up to our sins. This requires something much more than that to really make atonement for that, and so that’s why God took that on Himself because we didn’t have the ability to pay that price, but He did and so He chose to do it out of his love for us.
Cy:
Did the earliest Christians who many, many of whom were Jewish people who would’ve been probably prior to their encounter with Christ making sacrifice or going to the temple in Jerusalem and offering whatever was needed to be offered, did they …
Jimmy:
Jesus and the disciples themselves did this. Jesus ate the Passover lamb with his disciples and that was one of the sacrifices. You went to the temple, you sacrificed the lamb, you brought it back home, and you had the meal.
Cy:
After the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, did they immediately stop participating in this?
Jimmy:
No, we have evidence that they continued to go to the temple. Now, you could say, well, maybe they just went there to pray, but we see more than that because if you read the book of acts there is a point at which St. Paul returns to Jerusalem after having been away for a long time and he’s bringing with him a gift to give to the Jerusalem church, a financial gift, to give to the Jerusalem church because they were poor. He meets with James, because all the other apostles have left at this point, but James is still there.
He’s functioning at this point as the Bishop of Jerusalem, Peter’s already gone to Rome, and James and the elders are there and they say, “Look, we’ve been hearing these reports about you that you don’t support the law of Moses and you’re teaching Jews to live like gentiles and saying don’t circumcise your kids and you’re undermining Jewish identity. We don’t believe this stuff, but because the rumors are out there we would ask you to give a demonstrable sign that you’re not trying to undermine Jewish identity. Here we’ve got these guys who’ve taken a vow and the time for their cleansing is coming up, and so go to the temple with them and make the appropriate offerings and that will demonstrate to people that you’re not trying to undermine Judaism.”
Paul consents to this and that’s actually what gets him arrested, because when he goes into the temple people recognize him and it causes a riot and rumors get started that he brought a gentile into the temple, which required the death penalty for the gentile even though he didn’t. In fact, we found a plaque archeologically. We found a plaque from the site of the Jerusalem temple that says, “Any gentile who goes beyond this point will have himself to thank for his speedy death.”
Cy:
Oh, man! Don’t miss that sign.
Jimmy:
Yeah, exactly, but Paul agrees to this and so he’s willing to participate in these rituals not because he believes they’re necessary but because he’s trying to not be disruptive of Jewish identity and trying not to hinder the spread of the gospel among Jewish people.
Cy:
Okay, then maybe we could talk about a Christian today, then. You say that throughout human history, throughout the history of the Jewish people, and even in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, this is all connected to human nature which wants to participate in this kind of gift giving, this way of honoring the divine. How do we as Christians participate in that? It can’t be just that God says, “Oh, forget it, that’s over. Human nature has changed.” There’s got to be some way in which we continue to participate in that sacrificial way of thinking about life.
Jimmy:
We actually participate in a number of ways. Now, the way that many people will think of first is through the Eucharist, because the Eucharistic sacrifice is the current outworking of Jesus’s sacrifice to the cross. The cross happened once for all, Jesus died once, he’s not dying again, but in heaven he continues to intercede for us with his father on the basis of what he did on the cross, and the sacrifice of the mass is the earthly outworking of that ongoing intercession that Christ is doing in heaven. As part of the Eucharist, people bring up the elements and that’s part of the way in which ordinary Christians today participate in a ritual of sacrifice. We also bring up other offerings. They take up the collection or the offering at mass.
Now, today, since we don’t live in a primarily agrarian society but one with a developed economy where people have money, people tend to give money. Although if you read some early liturgies from the early church before we had a monetary based economy, it’ll talk about people can bring up their bread and their olives and their cheese and stuff at this point, but today because money is more convenient for us, that’s what we tend to use for the offering although some people donate other things. They may donate stocks or land or something like that, usually not in the context of the mass but they make donations like that. Those are ways we do it.
Also, we find a parallel stream in the Bible of a kind of spiritual sacrifice in addition to the physical offerings that were presented at the temple. Praise, for example, is described as a sacrifice in scripture, because what you’re doing there is you’re offering something, the gift of praise to God, to establish good relations or repair damaged relations. You’re praising him for his goodness, and so praise becomes a kind of spiritual sacrifice. Also, and this is right there in Romans 12. Now, by the way, I want to comment on something. Some people associate sacrifice too closely with death. They think a death has to occur in order for something to be a sacrifice. We’ve seen that’s not the case here. People, when they offered the first sheaf of wheat, they just waived it for God. They didn’t destroy it, so it didn’t involve a death, or pouring out a drink offering like they did at the temple, nobody dies when you’re pouring out a drink offering. That’s just a symbolic way of giving it to God. Same thing with praise, praise doesn’t involve a death.
Well, in Romans 12:1, you have a very interesting passage. It actually seems to, in a way, hark back to an incident in the Old Testament. If you look in Numbers, Chapter 8, there’s a moment where God has the entire tribe of Levi, all of the Levites, presented to God as a waive offering to consecrate them to God’s service at the tabernacle. They obviously aren’t dying, they are a living sacrifice. They’re being presented to God so that they can serve Him. Well, we find in Romans 12:1 St. Paul telling his Christian audience, “Present your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, for this is your spiritual worship.” By living for God and consecrating our actions to God, we, like the Levites, are a living sacrifice that is presented to Him, and that’s part of our spiritual worship is by living for God. That’s also part of why in the prayers in the mass the priest talks about, “We’re presenting the entire people to God,” and so this has an echo there as well.
Today as Christians, we still perform sacrifices in a variety of ways. Sometimes we give monetary sacrifices, sometimes we donate time to helping people, to doing good works. That’s a way of presenting our bodies to God as his servant, so that’s part of our spiritual worship. We sacrifice our time, we sacrifice in the Eucharist, and we also sacrifice praise, so we have a bunch of ways in which sacrifice is still a part of our faith even though we no longer do the animal thing anymore.
Cy:
Thank you, Jimmy. I really appreciate you going through that with us very much.
Jimmy:
My pleasure.
Cy:
Yeah.
Jimmy:
Yeah.
Cy:
All right, well, we’ll see you again. We’ll do this again. I assume that this is not the last Focus you’ll ever do with us. You will do this again.
Jimmy:
I’m happy to sacrifice some more into this.
Cy:
Thanks, Jimmy.
I hope this has been a good episode for you. If not, offer it up as a sacrifice, that’s what you can do. Also, here’s another thing you can do, you can like and subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube. That helps to grow the podcast. You can send us an email if you want to communicate with us about future episodes, past episodes, this episode. Focus@catholic.com is our email address, focus@catholic.com. As always, we’d be very grateful if you could provide us with a bit of financial support so that we can keep doing this. You can do that simply by visiting the website, give.catholic.com. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.