Period (continued) – Period (continued)

Period (continued)

Now, although it is true, as G. F. Moore reminds us (.BBi iv. 4220), that ‘the whole public cultus is a means of propitiating God and obtaining remission for sin and uncleanness’ (Ezekiel 45:15, 17), it is equally true that the propitiatory efhcacy of sacrifice is represented by the Priestly writers as especially bound up with the blood of the sacrificial victim. When we ask the question. In virtue of what property does the blood make atonement?, we find the answer incidentally in the oft-quoted passage Leviticus 17:11. We say incidentally, because v. 11 really contains the answer to an entirely different question— Why is blood taboo as an article of food? Now the verse runs in RV: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life’ (that is in it). Strictly speaking, therefore, it is not the blood but the life that is in it that is the medium of propitiation. Beyond this we cannot go in our search for the explanation of the ‘how’ of atonement on OT ground.

Along other and extra-Biblical lines students have diligently sought for the ultimate basis of this efficacy of blood. It is doubtless to be connected with ‘the almost universal belief that blood is a fluid in which inheres a mysterious potency, no less dangerous when misused than efficacious when properly employed’ (G. F. Moore, EBi iv. 4218; cf. Trumbull, The Blood Covenant, passim; and Farnell, The Evolution of Religion,94 f.). Just because of its ‘mysterious potency," and its association with’ the great primeval mysteries of life and death’ (Farnell), blood was felt to be too sacred, and indeed too dangerous (see 1 Samuel 14). to be used otherwise than as the proper due of the Author of all life. It was at once the most persuasive of gifts at His altar, and the most potent cathartic by which the sinner was purged of uncleanness and sin.

The traditional view that the blood of the sacrifice atoned for the sins of the offerer, because the victim suffered the death which the sinner had incurred, is now rarely maintained. This theory of a pmna vicaria is untenable for these among other reasons: (1) The sins for which the OT sacrifices made atonement were not such as involved the penalty of death (§ 14). (2) Had ‘the guilt of the offerer been transferred to the victim by’ the laying on of hands’ — for the meaning of this rite, see § 9 — the flesh of the sacrifice would have been in the highest degree unclean, and could not have been eaten by either priests or people. (3) The idea that the Divine forgiveness was procured by the blood of the victim as its owner’s substitute is excluded by the admission, for the propitiatory sacrifice par excellence.

3 F of a bloodless offering in the shape of an oblation of flour (§ 14, end). Nevertheless, although the doctrine that the death of the victim was a vicarious punishment for the sin of the offerer is not to be found in the legislation itself, the thought was one that could scarcely fail to suggest itself to the popular mind — a conclusion to which it was doubtless assisted by the representation of the vicarious sufferings of the Servant in Isaiah 53.

Summing up the conclusions of this section on the significance of sacrifice in OT, we find it represented in all periods as a gift, mainly of homage to the Divine Sovereign, in the earlier period also as a rite of table communion with the covenant God of Israel, and finally in the later period as pre-eminently the appointed means of purification and expiation as the ■prelimiTiary to forgiveness, in other words of atonement.

Of the ultima ratio of sacrifice no explicit statement is found in OT. The explanation of the Priestly writers would doubtless have been — ‘God hath so appointed it.’ Beyond this we cannot go. The ‘conclusion of the whole matter’ may therefore be given in the words of Jesus ben-Sira: ‘See that thou appear not in the presence of the Lord empty; for all these things are to be done because of the commandment’ (35:4). . The final ground of the sinner’s pardon and restoration is thus not the precedent sacrifice but the free grace of a merciful and loving God. A. R. S. Kennedy.