Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 27:108 (Oct 1870)
Article: The Significance Of The Jewish Sacrifices
Author: Anonymous

BSac 27:108 (Oct 1870) p. 593

The Significance Of The Jewish Sacrifices

In the Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1859, an Article appeared on Jewish Sacrifices. The Article which follows is meant as a sequel to that. The materials for it have been derived from the chapters of Bähr’s Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus which relate to sacrifices. The writer undertakes to do nothing more than exhibit Bahr’s views, assuming no responsibility as to their correctness.

Two classes of religious rites were prescribed in the Levitical law — sacrificial rites and rites of purification. The former were obviously the more important and significant; the rites of purification, for the most part, deriving, their efficacy from the sacrifices with which they were required to be connected. It is with sacrifices exclusively that we are now concerned.

The origin of sacrifices is not to be referred to the time of Moses. They are known to have been in use in the patriarchal age, and even at a period yet more remote — that of Cain and Abel. And, indeed, the allusion to sacrifices as performed by Cain and Abel is in such terms as to give ground to the supposition that they were not then performed for the first time. In short, sacrifices seem to have been the earliest, the most general, and certainly the most significant form in which religious homage has been expressed. The form of the sacrificial rites, at the earliest

BSac 27:108 (Oct 1870) p. 594

date at which we find any traces of them, is substantially the same as that which has prevailed in all subsequent periods. The objects meant to be offered in sacrifice were burned in certain sacred places. Yet, along with the general uniformity, some diversity was allowed. No fixed, definite rules were observed. Every man who offered a sacrifice did what the nature of the rite seemed to him to require, or what his own inward religious feeling prompted.

The Levitical law, which in general did away with whatever wore the aspect of caprice and arbitrariness, aimed especially to give a definite form to those rites in which its own significance may be said to have been concentrated, and which contained within themselves every element of religious homage — the rites of sacrifice. It laid down the most minute rules in reference to these; so that what had hitherto been most simple became much more comprehensive and more variously expressive. The most trivial features of these rites seem to have been very carefully attended to. Those who esteem all sacrifices as a mere outward ceremony, or as the outgrowth of superstitious views of the nature and character of the Divinity, will be apt to regard what we have here said was done by Moses as a step backward towards the darkness and ignorance of a barbarous age. But, unless we are to r...