_LAWS OF SACRIFICE_
DEUT. xii.
It is a characteristic of all the earlier codes of law--the Book of
the Covenant, the Deuteronomic Code, and the Law of Holiness--that
at the head of the series of laws which they contain there should
be a law of sacrifice. Probably, too, each of the three had, as
first section of all, the Decalogue. The Book of the Covenant and
Deuteronomy undeniably have it so, and the earlier element which
forms the basis of Lev. xvii.-xxvi. not improbably had originally
the same form. If so, we may assume that the order of the precepts
has in a measure been determined by the order of the commandments.
On this account the laws for the cultus would naturally come first.
For just as the first commandment is, "Thou shalt have no other
god before Me," and the second forbids all idolatrous images,
so the laws begin with provisions meant in the main to ward off
idolatry. Israel's great calling was to receive and to spread the
truth concerning God. That was the centre of the sacred deposit of
Divine and revealed truth committed to that nation; and it is most
instructive to see how, not only in historical statements, but even
in the form in which early Israelite legislation is handed down to
us, the Decalogue dominates all the details of it. It formulated
in as concrete a shape as was possible the Divine demand that
Israelites should love God and their neighbour, and _therefore_ the
legislative provisions and statutes begin with ordinances dealing
with sacrifice.
To us in modern times it may seem almost bathos to connect such an
antecedent with such a consequent; but it seems so, only because
we have difficulty in apprehending the meaning and importance of
sacrifice in primitive religion. For sacrifice had in Israel a
meaning and importance of its own, and a present value at every
period, which in no way depended upon its typical or prophetic
value as pointing forward to the sacrifice of Christ. It supplied
the religious needs of men even apart from the clearness of their
knowledge about its ultimate purpose. Sacrifice, especially in
its simplest meaning, was in heathenism absolutely essential as a
means of approach to God. To come before a great _man_ without a
gift was in ancient days an outrage. It was therefore inevitable
that men should approach their gods in the same manner. Sacrificial
gifts expressed the dependent's joy in a gracious lord, and also
the homage and reverence due from a subject to a king. Further, as
all good things were regarded as the gifts of the gods to their
worshippers, the sacrifices conveyed thanks for good gifts received,
and joined the gods and their worshippers by a common participation
in the Divine gift which connected them as eaters at the same
table. But sacrifices had a higher reach of expression even than
that. As they were brought to the gods they were the symbols of the
self-devotion of the offerer to the service of his god; and where
there was need of propitiation because of offence consciously given,
or offence felt by the deity for unknown reasons, these gifts took
on in some measure a reconciling or propitiatory quality.
Now the Old Testament sacrifices had in them, unquestionably, all
these elements: but as Yahweh was high above all heathen deities in
moral character, they also took on a depth and intensity of meaning
which they could never have on the soil of heathen religious
conceptions. Along this line of sacrificial ritual, therefore,
all the spiritual emotions of Israel flowed; and to hold that
sacrifice had no real place in the religion of Yahweh would be
almost equivalent to saying that neither love, nor penitence, nor
prayer, had any real place in it either. All these found utterance
in sacrifice and along with it; and it has yet to be shown that they
had any regular and acceptable utterance otherwise. To regulate
sacrifice and keep it pure must, therefore, have been one chief
means of guarding against the degradation of Yahweh to the level of
the gods of the heathen.
But there is another and very important reason for it. Both in the
days when Moses parted from his people, and also in the time of
Manasseh, the people stood confronted by very special danger just at
this point.
At the earlier period they were about to enter upon intimate contact
with the Canaanites, their superiors in culture and in all the arts
of civilised life, but corrupted to the core. Further, the Canaanite
corruption was focussed in their religious rites and worship, and
evil could not fail to follow if the people suffered themselves to
be drawn into any participation in it. For if Professor Robertson
Smith be right, the central point of ancient sacrifice was the
communion between the god and his worshippers in the sacrificial
feast. They became of one kin with each other and with the god, and
this close relationship made the communication of spiritual and
moral infection almost a certainty.
In Manasseh's day again it was natural that legislation on the
same subject, and warnings of even a more solemn kind, should be
repeated. A prophetic lawgiver writing at that date had before him,
not only the possibility of evil, but actual experience of it. The
laws and warnings of the earlier code had been defied and neglected.
The faith of the chosen people had been miserably perverted by
contact with the Canaanites; the whole history of prophecy had
been a struggle against corrupt and insincere worship; and now the
monstrous sacrifices to Moloch and the invasion of Assyrian idolatry
had degraded Yahweh and destroyed His people, so that scarce any
hope of recovery remained. In bracing himself for one more struggle
with this desperate corruption, the Deuteronomist naturally repeated
in deeper tones the Mosaic warnings. The command utterly to uproot
and trample under foot the symbols and instruments of Canaanite
worship, he brings, from the less prominent place it occupies in the
Book of the Covenant, to the first place in his own code. To break
with that and all other forms of idolatry, utterly and decisively,
had come to be the first condition of any upward movement. The
degrading and defiling bondage to idolatry into which his people had
fallen must end. With trumpet tongue he calls upon them to break
down the Canaanite altars, dash in pieces their obelisks, and burn
their Asherim with fire.
To some moderns it may seem that such excessive energy might, with
better effect, have been expended upon the denunciation of moral
evils, such as cruelty and lust and oppression, rather than of
idolatry. We have grown so accustomed to the distinctions drawn
by the Church of Rome, and in later times by the neo-classicists,
between worshipping God through an image or a picture, or in any
natural object or natural force, and the actual worship of the image
or picture or natural object itself, that we have sophisticated our
minds. But the author of Deuteronomy knew by bitter experience that
such subtle, and, in great part, sophistical distinctions had no
application to his people and his time. Their worst immoralities
were, he knew well, rooted in their idol-worship. For idolatry
in any form binds all that is highest in man to the sphere of
nature, _i.e._ of moral indifference. Just as a conception of God
which rigorously separated Him from nature, which made His will
the supreme impelling force in the world, and which conceived His
essential attributes to be entirely ethical, was the fountain of
the higher life in Israel, so a lapse into idolatry of any kind
was the negation of it all. No doubt some moral life would have
remained in Israel, even if the lapse had become universal. But,
even at its best, this natural morality of self-preservation has no
future and no goal. It does not lead the van of human progress; it
merely comes after, to ratify the results of it. Only when social
morality is taken up into a wider sphere than its own,--only when
it is conceived as the path by which man can co-operate with a
sublime purpose lying beyond himself,--can it maintain itself as
the inspiration of human life, impelling to progress and guiding
it.[71] Now, so far as history teaches, this energy of moral life
has been attained only where the conception of God which makes
moral perfection to be His essential nature has been accepted and
cherished. But no natural religion can rise to that; hence idolatry
must always be destructive of ethical religion. It must destroy
faith in the moral character of God.
[71] Cf. Riehm, _Old Testament Theology_, p. 25.
Further, it must destroy the moral character of man. In the last
resort all idolaters are equally acceptable to their god, if
only they bring the prescribed gifts and accurately perform the
prescribed ceremonies. The lewd and the chaste, the cruel and
the merciful, the revengeful and the forgiving, are all equally
accepted when they sacrifice. Non-moral or positively immoral gods
can care nothing about such differences. Of this fact and its
results no man acquainted with the history of Israel could doubt.
The main zeal of the prophets was at all times directed against
those who were steeped in moral evil, but were zealous in all that
concerned sacrifice, and against the amazing folly of a people who
thought to bind the living God to their cause and their interests
by mere bribes, in the shape of thousands of bullocks and ten
thousand rivers of oil. This conception was bound up essentially
with idolatry. But the evil of it was intensified in the Semitic
idolatries with which Israel specially defiled itself. Their cruelty
and obscenity were unspeakable. Now by Israel's idolatry Yahweh was
made to appear tolerant of Moloch and Baal, as if they were equals.
Every quality which the Mosaic revelation had set forth as essential
to the character of Yahweh--His purity, His mercy, His truth--was
outraged by the society which His worshippers in Manasseh's days had
thrust upon Him. No reform, then, had the least chance of stability
till the axe was laid at the root of this wide-spreading upas tree.
Deuteronomy, therefore, grapples first and grapples thoroughly with
the evil, and strikes it a blow from which it was never to recover.
The inspired writer repeats with new energy the old decrees of utter
destruction against the Canaanite sanctuaries; for though these were
for the most part no longer in Canaanite hands, the High Places
still existed; and the principle of that old prohibition was more
clamant for recognition and realisation than it had ever been in the
history of Israel before.
Then he goes on to proclaim the new law, that no sacrifice should
any longer be offered save at the one central sanctuary chosen by
Yahweh. There is no such provision in the Book of the Covenant, and
there is no hint in the legislation of Deuteronomy that its author
knew of the Tabernacle and its sole right as a place of sacrifice.
From beginning to end of the code he never mentions the Tabernacle
nor the sacrifices there; and in the very terms in which he
permits the slaughter of animals for food in vv. 15, 16, and 20-25,
though he obviously repeals a custom which has been embodied in the
Priestly Code as a law (Lev. xvii. 3 ff.), he makes no reference
to that passage. Consequently this at least may be said, that he
may quite conceivably have been ignorant of Lev. xvii. 3 ff. In
ignorance of it, he might write as he has done; and if not ignorant,
it would be much more natural to refer to it. When we add to this
negative testimony the positive testimony of verses 8 and 13, which
we have already discussed in Chapter I., there would seem to be
little room for doubt that the priestly law on this subject was not
before the writer of Deuteronomy. Consequently we are justified in
regarding this as the first written law actually promulgated on this
subject. Hezekiah had attempted the same reform; but he had, so far
as we know, neither published nor referred to any law commanding it,
and his work was entirely undone. The Deuteronomist, more convinced
than he that this step was absolutely necessary to complete the
Mosaic legislation on idolatry, and filled with the same inspiration
of the Almighty, completed it; and though a reaction followed
Josiah's enforcement of this law also, its existence saved the life
of the nation. Its principles kept the nation holy, _i.e._ separate
to their God, during the Exile, and at the return they were dominant
in the formation of the "congregation."
Certainly there is no lack of earnestness in the way in which
these principles are urged. With that love of repetition which
is a distinguishing mark of this writer, he expresses the
commandment first positively, then negatively. Then he brings in
the consequential alteration in the law regarding the slaughtering
of animals for food. Again he returns to the command, explaining,
enlarging, insisting, and concludes with a reiteration of the
permission to slaughter. Efforts, of course, have been made to
show that this repetition is due to the amalgamation here of no
fewer than seven separate documents! But little heed need be given
to such fantastic attempts. It is, once for all, a habit of this
writer's mind to shrink from no monotony of this kind. There is
not one important idea in his book which he does not repeat again
and again; and where repetition is so constant a feature, and
where the language and thought is so consistent as it is here, it
is worse than useless to assert separate documents. The writer's
earnestness is sufficient explanation. He saw plainly that, so long
as the provincial High Places existed and were popular, it would
be impossible to secure purity of worship. The heathen conceptions
of the Canaanites clung about their ancient sanctuaries, and,
like the mists from a fever swamp, infected everything that came
near. Inspection sufficiently minute and constant to be of use
was impracticable; there remained nothing but to decree their
abandonment. When the whole worship of the people was centred at
Jerusalem, corruption of the idolatrous kind would, it was hoped,
be impossible. There, a pious king could watch over it; there,
the Temple priesthood had attained to worthier ideas in regard to
sacrifice and the fulfilment of the law than the priests elsewhere.
Josiah accordingly rigorously enforced this new law.
Such a change, aimed solely at religious ends, did not stop there.
In many ways it affected the social life of the people; in vv. 15,
16, and 20, 24, the author meets one hardship connected with the
new law, by allowing men to slay for food at a distance from the
altar. According to ancient custom, no flesh could be eaten by
any Israelite, save when the fat and the blood had been presented
at the altar. During the wilderness journey there would be little
difficulty regarding this. In the desert very little meat is eaten;
and so long as life was nomadic there would be no hardship in
demanding that those who wished to make sacrificial feasts should
wander towards the central place of worship rather than from it.
It has been disputed whether there was in those days a tabernacle
such as the Priestly Code describes; but there certainly was,
according to the earliest documents, a tent in which Yahweh revealed
Himself and gave responses. As we have seen, there must have been
sacrifice in connection with it; and though worship at other places
where Yahweh had made His name to be remembered was permitted,
this sanctuary in the camp must have had a certain pre-eminence. A
tendency, but according to the words of Deuteronomy nothing stronger
than a tendency, must have shown itself to make this the main place
of worship.
When the people crossed the Jordan into the land promised to the
fathers, and had abandoned the nomadic life, great difficulty must
have arisen. For those at a distance from the place where the
Tabernacle was set up, the eating of meat and the enjoyment of
sacrificial feasts would, by this ancient customary law, have been
rendered impossible, if the attendance at one sanctuary had been
obligatory. Only if men could come to local sanctuaries, each in his
own neighbourhood, could the religious character of the festivals at
which meat was eaten be preserved. The nature of men's occupations,
now that they had become settled agriculturists, and the dangers
from the Canaanites so long as they were not entirely subdued and
absorbed, alike forbade such long and frequent journeys to a central
sanctuary. The conquest must consequently at once have checked any
tendency to centralisation that may have existed; and there is
reason to believe that the acceptance of the Canaanite High Places
as sanctuaries of Yahweh was in great part caused by the demands
of this ancient law concerning the "zebhach." In any case it must
have helped to overcome any scruples that may have existed. But when
the Tabernacle and Ark were brought to Zion, and still more when
the Temple was built, the centripetal tendency, never altogether
dead, must have revived. For there was peace throughout the land and
beyond it. No danger from the Canaanites existed; and the political
centralisation which Solomon aimed at, and actually carried out,
as well as the superior magnificence of the Solomonic Temple and
its priests, must have attracted to Jerusalem the thoughts and the
reverence of the whole people. What Deuteronomy now makes law may
have then first arisen as a demand of the Jerusalem priests. At all
events, the very existence of the Temple must have been a menace to
the High Places; and we may be sure that among the motives which led
the ten tribes to reject the Davidic house, jealousy for the local
sanctuaries must have been prominent.
But the separation of the ten tribes would only strengthen the claim
of the Temple on Zion to be for Judah the one true place of worship.
The territory ruled from Jerusalem was now so small that resort to
the central sanctuary was comparatively easy. The glorious memories
of the Davidic and Solomonic time would centre round Jerusalem. Any
local sanctuaries would be entirely dwarfed and overshadowed by
the splendour and the, at least comparative, purity of the worship
there. Priests of local altars too must inevitably have sunk in
the popular estimation, and even in their own, to a secondary and
subordinate position, as compared with the carefully organised and
strictly graded Jerusalem priests. Even without a positive command,
therefore, the people of Judah must have been gradually growing
into the habit of seeking Yahweh at Jerusalem on all more solemn
religious occasions; and though the High Places might exist,
their repute in the Southern Kingdom must have been decreasing. Of
course if a command was given in the Mosaic time which had been
neglected, the tendencies here traced must have been stronger
and more definite than we have depicted them. When the prophetic
teachings of Isaiah which proclaimed Jerusalem to be "Ariel," the
"sacrificial hearth," or "the hearth of God," were so wondrously
confirmed by the destruction of Sennacherib's host before the city,
the unique position of Zion must have been secured; and after that
only those who were set upon idolatry can have had much interest
in the High Places. Hezekiah's effort to abolish these latter is
quite intelligible in these circumstances; and we may feel assured
that, as Wellhausen says,[72] "The Jewish royal temple had early
overshadowed the other sanctuaries, and in the course of the seventh
century they were extinct or verging on extinction."
[72] Wellhausen, _History_, p. 420.
Along with this there must have grown up a measure of laxity in
regard to the provision that all slaughtering for food should take
place at the sanctuary. Many would doubtless go to Zion, many would
continue to resort to the High Places, and a number, from a mere
halting between two opinions, would probably take their "zebhachim"
to neither. Consequently the law before us would by no means be so
revolutionary as Duhm, for instance, pictures it. He says: "I do
not know if in the whole history of the world a law can be pointed
to which was so fitted to change a whole people in its innermost
nature and in its outward appearance, at one stroke, as this was.
The Catholic Church even has never by all her laws succeeded in
anything in the least like it." But we have seen evidence of a very
strong and continuous pressure to this point, at least in Judah.
History during centuries had justified and intensified it; so
that in all probability the true worshippers of Yahweh found in
the new law not so much a revolution as a ratification of their
already ancient practice. To idolaters, of course, its adoption
must have meant a cessation of their idolatry; but the change in
the people and in their life would, though extensive, be only such
as any ordinary reform would produce. Duhm overlooks altogether
the very small territory which the law affected. A long day's walk
would bring men from Jericho, from Hebron, from the borders of the
Philistine country, and from Shechem and Samaria to Jerusalem. If
Deuteronomy made a revolution, it must have been confined within the
modest limits of substituting a whole for a half-day's journey to
the Sanctuary.
Moreover it is a mistake to say that sacrifice at one central
sanctuary "took religion away from the people," as Duhm says. If
spiritual religion be meant, it ultimately brought religion more
vitally home to them. For when the priestly system was fully carried
out, the demands of household religion were met, as the post-exilic
Psalms show, by the adoption of the practice of household prayer
without reference to sacrifice, and finally by the institution
of the synagogue. A more spiritual method of approach to God was
substituted for a less spiritual in the remote places and in
the homes of the people. And the public worship even gained. It
became deeper, and more penetrated with a sense of the necessity
of deliverance from sin. It is true, of course, that in the end
Pharisaic legalism perverted the new forms of worship, as heathen
externalism had perverted the old. But in neither case was the
perversion a necessity. In both it was simply a manifestation of
the materialistic tendency which dogs the footsteps of even the
most spiritual religion, when it has to realise itself in the life
of man. It is enough for the justification of the whole movement
led by Josiah to say that it held the Judæan exiles together; that
it kept alive in their hearts, as nothing else did, their faith in
God and in their future; and that on their return it gave them the
form which their institutions could most profitably take. Further,
under the forms of religious and social life which this movement
generated, the true, heartfelt piety which the prophets so mourned
the want of became more common than ever it had been before.
The establishment of the central altar as the only one was the main
object of this law; but there is much to be learned from the very
terms in which this is expressed. They breathe the same love for man
and sympathy with the poor which forms one of the most attractive
characteristics of our book. The gracious bonds of family affection,
the kindly feeling that should unite masters and servants, the
helpfulness which ought to distinguish the conduct of the rich to
the poor, and above all the cheerful enjoyment of the results of
honest labour, are to be preserved and sanctified even in the ritual
of sacrifice. "Thou shalt rejoice before Yahweh in all that thou
puttest thine hand unto," is here the motto, if we may so speak, of
religious service. That, indeed, is to be made the opportunity for
the discharge of all humane and brotherly duties; and the religious
life is at its highest when the worshipper rejoices himself, and
shares and sheds abroad his joy upon others. The love of God is
here most intimately blended with love of the brethren. Masters
and servants, slaves and free, the high and the low, are to be
reminded of their equal standing in the sight of God, by their
common participation in the sacrificial meals; and the poorest are
to be permitted an equal enjoyment of the luxuries of the rich in
these solemn approaches to Yahweh. The Deuteronomist here reaches
the highest stage of religious life, in that he shows himself in
nowise afraid of human joy. As we have seen, he knows the value
of austerity in religion. He is well enough aware that war against
evil is not made with rose-water. But then he is equally far from
the extreme of suspecting all affection not directly turned to God,
of regarding natural gladness as a ruinous snare to the soul. This
finely balanced, this just attitude to all aspects of life, is a
most notable thing at this epoch in the history of the world, and
considering the circumstances of the time it is little short of
a marvel. It is true, of course, that the religion of Israel was
always finely human. It could run into excesses, and was marked by
many imperfections; but asceticism, the doctrine which holds pain
and self-denial to be in themselves good, when it did intrude into
Israel, always came from without. Nevertheless the heartiness and
thoroughness with which all gracious human feelings and all kindly
human relations are here taken up into religion is remarkable, even
in the Old Testament. More, perhaps, than anything else in this
book, it shows the sweetening and wholesome effect of demanding
supreme love to God as man's first duty. "If any man come to Me
and hate not his father and mother," says Christ, "he cannot be My
disciple,"[73] and many purblind critics have found this to be a
hard saying. But all who know men know, that when God in Christ is
made so much the supreme object of love that even the most sacred
human obligations seem to be disregarded in comparison, the human
affection so thrust into the background is only made richer far than
it otherwise could be.
[73] Luke xiv. 26.