Pure violence: Sacrifice and defilement in ancient Israel

Harvard Theological Review

Volumn 94, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 133-155

  Klawans, Jonathan ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649277635     PISSN: 00178160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0017816001029017     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. I use the word "sets" here advisedly. Much of my own work has argued that the Hebrew Bible presents us with two purity systems: the "ritual" one, which is concerned with natural and unavoidable defilements, and the "moral" one, which is concerned with the defiling force of sexual transgression, idolatry, and murder. See Klawans, "The Impurity of Immorality in Ancient Judaism," JJS 48 (1997) 1-16,
2. and H. H. Rowley, "The Meaning of Sacrifice in the Old Testament," in From Moses to Qumran (New York: Association Press, 1963) 67-107.
3. A more detailed survey of biblical sacrificial rituals can be found in Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 415-56
4. Richard D. Hecht, "Studies on Sacrifice, 1970-1980," Religious Studies Review 8 (1982) 253-59;
5. and Ivan Strenski, "Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90's," Religious Studies Review 22 (1996) 10-20.
6. For a sensitive treatment of priestly rituals building largely on the work of Victor Turner, see Frank H. Gorman, Jr., The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990).
7. Important discussions of the terminology of sacrificial rituals and texts can be found in Gary A. Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel: Studies in their Social and Political Importance (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987)
8. and Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and Some Cultic Terms in Ancient Israel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974).
9. For an analysis of ancient Israelite sacrifice through the lens of gender studies, see Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10. Victor Turner, "Sacrifice as Quintessential Process: Prophylaxis or Abandonment?" History of Religions 16 (1977) 189-215.
11. Anderson, "Sacrifice and Sacrificial Offerings (OT)," 871.
12. Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
13. For purity rules as expressing notions concerning body and cosmos, see Douglas, Purity and Danger
14. and Baruch A. Levine, The JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989).
15. and Edmund Leach, "The Logic of Sacrifice," in Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Connected (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 81-94;
16. For an excellent methodological discussion of the significance of Purity and Danger with regard to the study of sacrifice in general and Greek sacrifice in particular, see G. S. Kirk, "Some Methodological Pitfalls in the Study of Ancient Greek Sacrifice (in Particular)," in Le Sacrifice dans L'antiquité: huit exposés suivis de discussions (ed. Olivier Reverdin, et al.; Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1981) 41-80.
17. See Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 1003.
18. cf. also Ronald S. Hendel, "Sacrifice as a Cultural System: The Ritual Symbolism of Exodus 34, 3-8," ZAW 101 (1989) 366-90. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
19. René Girard, "Generative Scapegoating," in Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins, 73-105;
20. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977);
21. cf. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).
22. On Girard and his work, see Burton Mack's introduction to Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins, 6-22;
23. See also Hecht, "Studies on Sacrifice, 1970-1980," 257-58;
24. Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) esp. 15-17;
25. and Ivan Strenski, "At Home with René Girard: Eucharistic Sacrifice, the 'French School' and Joseph De Maistre," in Religion in Relation: Method, Application, and Moral Location (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993) 202-16.
26. For a critique of this kind of approach, see Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel, 14-19
27. Cf. Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program Within a Cultural History of Sacrifice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) 15-25, 163-72;
28. cf. also Chilton, "The Hungry Knife: Towards a Sense of Sacrifice," in Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, Jesus in Context: Temple, Purity, and Restoration (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997) 91-108.
29. Chilton, The Temple of Jesus, 25.
30. Girard, "Generative Scapegoating," 121;
31. Things Hidden, 231;
32. See e.g., Girard, Things Hidden, 158;
33. cf. the critique in Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 327-28, n. 30.
34. Boyarin's comments could also apply to supersessionistic comments by one of Girard's followers; see Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, 175-76.
35. Generally on Jesus' death, see John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995); see esp. 36.
36. Compare the comments of Vernant, "A General Theory of Sacrifice," in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. 291.
37. For a recent survey of scholarly approaches to ritual impurity, see Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (Sheffield: JSOT, 1992) 75-83.
38. For a critical discussion of the impurity as death theory, see Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 182-86, and 248, n. 16.
39. For a critique of Milgrom's approach in the context of a more general discussion of the dietary laws, see Walter Houston, Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993).
40. See for instance, Emanuel Feldman, Biblical and Post-Biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1977) 13-30.
41. Regarding the ancient Israelite system, this view can be traced back at least as far as Alfred Edersheim, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services as They Were at the Time of Jesus Christ (London: Religious Tract Society, 1874) 348-50.
42. See Anna S. Meigs, "A Papuan Perspective on Pollution," Man 13 (1978) 304-18,
43. On the centrality of death to the Zoroastrian impurity system, see Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) 16-19.
44. Death also figures prominently in ancient Greek conceptions of impurity, see Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 32-73.
45. In ancient Egyptian religion, for instance, corpses were purified in order to secure their safe passage into the next world, but corpses were not considered a source of ritual defilement for the living. Indeed, corpses were brought into sanctuaries; see Aylward M. Blackman, "Purification (Egyptian)," ERE 10 (1919) 476-82.
46. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, "Pollution, Purification, and Purgation in Biblical Israel," in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. O'Connor; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1983) 399-410 esp. 401;
47. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992) 189;
48. and David P. Wright, "Unclean and Clean (OT), " ABD 6:729-41, esp. 739.
49. On the more general question of the role of gender in the ritual purity system, see Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 178-82,
50. and Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 38-41.
51. Wright, "Unclean and Clean," 739;
52. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake, 189.
53. Sacrifice, 20; cf. 84-85.
54. Generally, on God as divine warrior, see Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 91-215
55. and Patrick D. Miller, The Divine Warrior in Early Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
56. Generally, on the concept of holy war see Gerhard Von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1991);
57. de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 258-67;
58. and Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
59. cf. Von Rad, Holy War, 42.
60. Eilberg-Schwartz cites Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) 332-39. These observations are astute, but the thought is never fully developed. See also 134-36, where Eilberg-Schwartz presents his general approach to sacrifice which, though not strictly Girardian, remains entrenched in a conception of sacrifice as scapegoating.
61. and Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1979).
62. Wenham, Leviticus, 55.
63. For a useful and readable survey of the complex philosophical debates on metaphor and their impact on contemporary understandings of religious language, see Dan R. Stiver, The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol, and Story (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), esp. 112-33.
64. On the linguistic side of the question, see Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
65. and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).
66. See also Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances, esp. 32-36, 58;
67. and Stiver, The Philosophy of Religious Language, 112-133.
68. Caird, Language and Imagery, 185-97.
69. With regard to the Hebrew Bible specifically, see Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism, 119, 122-26.
70. Some prefer to understand rituals as metonymic rather than metaphorical. On the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 35-40.
71. For a theory of sacrifice as metonymic, see Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 222-28.
72. On blood symbolism, see Hendel, "Sacrifice as a Cultural System," and Stephen A. Geller, "Blood Cult: An Interpretation of the Priestly Work of the Pentateuch," Prooftexts 12 (1992) 99-124;
73. For discussions concerning the divine presence in ancient Israel, see Kaufmann, Toledot ha-Emunah, 5. 473-76;
74. Levine, "On The Presence of God in Biblical Religion," in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (ed. Jacob Neusner; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968) 71-87;
75. On the term "tabernacle," see Cross, Canaanite Myth, 298-300.
76. Levine, "On the Presence," 80;
77. and "On the Presence," 79-80;
78. Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings, 91-126.
79. Anderson builds on Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) 227-29, 296.
80. For a different view on sacrifice as a means of maintenance, see Gorman, Divine Presence, 7-8
81. On this distinction, see Klawans, "The Impurity of Immorality," 1-6
82. See, e.g., Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage, 134-36;
83. Kaufmann, Toledot ha-Emunah, 2. 560-74;
84. Levine, In the Presence, 22-27;