Sacrifice and the Temple I

We began reading Naphtali Meshel's scholarly article, "Sacrifice and the Temple.[1]" In it, Meshel presents the various sacrificial practices during the Herodian period of the Second Temple, and their relationship to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It's a compelling subject, invoking the reality of blood, death, and the sacred.

A memory stands out. At the time, I was attending Rabbi Marcel Zemour's excellent classes in Antibes. A conversation with him had bothered me, however: he believed in the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (on the Temple Mount), and I asked him if sacrifices should resume there. Looking me in the eye, he answered, "Yes." I had never really accepted this point of view: the sacrifices in the Temple always seemed to me to be barbaric, archaic rites, surpassing the עֹלָה, the burnt offering of Isaac, or the διάσπαραγμός, the diasparagmos of Pentheus, only by the replacement of humans by animals. Making a show out of sprinkling blood and burning meat in the name of God seemed to me simple cruelty to animals, and I found in Hosea and others support to think that those rituals were simply outdated:

"For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God, more than burnt offerings" (Hosea 6).

Now it is time to think it over. First by revisiting my judgement on the Temple’s essential attitude toward animals (I), then by trying to find how this can help to give a moral direction in the problem of how we treat the animals that we eat (II).

Occasions for sacrifice were numerous at the end of the Second Temple period (let's say, at the time of Jesus). One of the major sacrifices—perhaps the most common, although it is difficult to know—was the זֶבַח שֶׁ֫לֶם, the zevach' shelem, the peace or well-being offering. It involved slaughtering the animal, sprinkling its blood on the altar, setting aside a small portion for God and the priests (as a kind of tax), and returning almost the entire sacrificed animal to the one offering the sacrifice.

One could consider this sacrifice (we are only interested here in animal sacrifice, which is the most problematic in our so-called "green" era) as equitable: full sacrifices (burnt offerings) are reserved for exceptional cases, and it is believed that payment in the form of a reasonable portion given to God and the priests can lead to a balanced situation where the animal is not sacrificed in vain but performed in a ritual form to be consumed by families: a shechita, a slaughter heralding the daily kashrut of modern Jewish life, in a more ceremonial setting.

Perhaps God's numerous protests, as in Hosea, relate to an imbalance—to which Jesus' overturning of the merchants' tables refers. We can imagine a situation where priests had become too voracious, where animals were sacrificed in vain (out of touch with responsible consumption), where families were subjected to crushing guilt, favoring full sacrifice as the only remedy for ever-increasing cases of impurity, and where fiscal and ideological pressures were imposed jointly by Roman and religious authorities.

By following this hypothesis, we can more easily understand Jesus, Hosea, Isaiah, and the others: they did not desire the destruction of the Temple and/or a cessation of sacrifices, but a priority given to the heart, the center of being (mercy, the measurement of the distance between God, us, and our neighbor) over the eyes and the stomach (the corrupted application of a public law that leads to the deregulation of the senses).

No abolition, but the confirmation of both Temple sacrifices and personal religion through a reprioritization in accordance with the biblical spirit and divine will.

C.

[1] In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Oxford University Press, 2017.