The idea and study of sacrifice in ancient Israel

Abstract

This article offers an introduction to the idea of sacrifice in Israel across the first millennium BCE, and presents data from both the first and second temple periods. In the first part of the article, I discuss three different types of evidence available for the study of sacrifice-archeological, comparative, and literary-the strengths and limitations of each form of evidence, and highlight recent trends in this area of study. In the second part of the article, I turn to a more direct discussion of the what, where, who, why, and how of sacrifice in ancient Israel. 1 | INTRODUCTION In this article, I will introduce the basic idea of sacrifice in ancient Israel, with a particular focus on the first millennium BCE. 1 This article proceeds in two parts. The first part discusses the different types of evidence and approaches for the study of sacrifice in ancient Israel. In that section, I give a brief overview of the types of evidence, along with a selected history of scholarship that points toward the latest trends in the study of sacrifice. For those who are interested in studying sacrifice further, the footnotes in this first section are meant to be a roadmap to both the most historically influential work and the cutting-edge research being done today. In the second section, I provide an overview of the what, where, who, when, and why of sacrifice, focused primarily on ancient Israel. There are a number of reasons for my choice of ancient Israel as the focus for this article beyond the fact that an overview of sacrifice across the entirety of the ancient Middle East is too massive a topic to treat in so little space. My focus on ancient Israel, in part, mirrors the fact that some of the foundational theories about how sacrifice works have been based on the study of ancient Israelite texts. 2 This may well be due to the seemingly systematic nature of the presentation of the ancient Israelite materials (similar to the also much-studied Vedic materials in this sense) compared with the more abundant but disparate textual evidence from Mesopotamia and the Levant. 3 It is, of course, also impossible to ignore the fact that the ancient Israelite materials have been so widely studied in large part because of their inclusion in the Bible. Indeed, the Bible is the context in which most This article provides an overview of sacrifice in ancient Israel during the first millennium BCE, and offers an introduction to literary, archeological, and comparative evidence for its study.

The centrality of individual petitions in temple rituals: Hannah, Solomon, and first-person psalms

“…But as he concedes, speech is not explicitly prohibited, and the extent of the affected precinct is uncertain. 2 Recently, the active role of the individual in sacrificial rituals has been highlighted by Liane Feldman (2020aFeldman ( , 2020b) who examines the system laid out in the Priestly Source for use at the Tabernacle in the wilderness. She argues against seeing the cult as the private purview of the priests; rather 'it is the people who enable the offering of sacrifices in the first place ' (2020b, p. 58).…”

“…The consumption is very carefully regulated and if the offerers do not follow those regulations, the entire sacrifice is invalidated. Even temple-based sacrifice is not something confined to an enclosed world of priests; it requires the active participation of nonpriests (Feldman, 2020a, p. 6).…”

“…Free-will offerings that occurred outside the calendar of national pilgrimages were important occasions for family groups and individuals. According to Feldman (2020a, p. 7), family visits to shrines included a main offering but also gave family members opportunities to approach the shrine to deliver prayers and vows, as in 1 Sam. 20.28–29, in which Jonathan attempts to excuse David’s absence from Saul’s court by referring to an annual family sacrificial feast in Bethlehem that David wanted to attend.…”