It doesn’t take long for students of the Bible to recognize the level of significance Scripture places on blood sacrifice. While many daily Bible reading plans have gone to the book of Leviticus to die, most Christians are at least familiar with Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement” (NRSV). Most know that in the Law of Moses, the blood of animal sacrifices is used to make atonement for sinners in Israel, and that this foreshadows the gospel in some way. But beyond this basic info, there is a whole host of questions and misunderstandings surrounding sacrifice in Leviticus. What did sacrifices actually do? Why were they effectual? Why was the blood particularly significant? These questions are all very important; and unfortunately, we sometimes have a tendency to let our biases and assumptions fill in those gaps rather than letting the biblical text speak for itself.
I won’t be able to spell out all the intricacies of atonement in this post (not even close!). But, at the risk of leaving you with more questions than answers, I would like to offer two quick corrections to popular misunderstandings about sacrifice in Leviticus. No doubt, more than two could be offered (there are so many ways sacrifice is misunderstood!); but I think these two are fundamentally important. My first corrective is pretty simple; my second will require some more unpacking. At any rate, I hope to be as simple and precise as I can be in what follows. [For a far more detailed exposition, I’d direct you to my master’s thesis on the conceptualization and theological significance of blood in the Pentateuch (specifically Chapter 2), available here.]
Here’s the first corrective: sacrifice doesn’t always atone for sin. So often, sacrifice and atonement are conflated and talked about as if they’re the same thing; but five different kinds of sacrifice are prescribed in the first several chapters of Leviticus—and of these five, only two (the sin offering and the guilt offering) are specifically designed to address the problem of sin. Atonement was only a secondary (or arguably tertiary) purpose for sacrifice in the Pentateuch. Sacrifices were primarily about establishing and/or maintaining communion with God.
For example, the first sacrifice prescribed in Leviticus is the whole burnt offering (Lev 1); and Israel’s primary sacrifice was the daily whole burnt offering (the tāmîd̲). This daily offering was designed to be “a pleasing aroma, a food offering” (Exod 29:41) that would invite and maintain God’s presence in the sanctuary (Exod 29:42–45). God didn’t need to be literally fed, of course—but this ‘meal’ imagery helps us to see the sacrifice through the lens of table fellowship; it was about communion, honor, and relationship.[1] The daily offering didn’t facilitate atonement for Israel’s transgressions; rather, Israel’s transgressions actively threatened what the daily sacrifice did facilitate: God’s sustained presence in the sanctuary.[2]
The whole burnt offering was also prescribed for priestly ordinations (Exod 29, Lev 8), major feasts (Num 28–29), petitions to God (Num 23), and vows (Num 6). While it occasionally appeared in purification contexts (Lev 12, 14–15), it was most often seen in non-atoning contexts. Jacob Milgrom, a world-renowned Leviticus scholar, submits that the whole burnt offering functioned fundamentally as an ‘entreaty,’ since entreating the Lord seemed to be the common denominator in each of its varying contexts.[3] The grain offering (Lev 2), frequently offered in conjunction with the whole burnt offering, was also primarily non-atoning. This offering was conceptualized as a gift or tribute (minḥāh) to God—which is why it has sometimes been called the ‘tribute offering.’
The peace offering (or well-being offering) prescribed in Leviticus 3 was a celebratory offering used to signify thanksgiving, vow fulfillment, and/or God’s deliverance. It shows up during momentous celebrations (e.g., Israel finally entering the land in Deut 27:1–8, the walls of Jerusalem getting rebuilt in Neh 12:35–41), altar/temple dedications (e.g., Josh 8:30–31, Judg 21:4, 2 Sam 24:25), and the covenant inauguration ceremony of Exodus 24. In all such contexts, the peace offering has no discernible atoning function.
In the vast majority of cases, then, the first three offerings prescribed in Leviticus do not atone for sin. That’s not their primary purpose or function. The two offerings that do function that way are the sin offering and the guilt offering, which will be addressed briefly below. You might notice, however, that in the case of whole burnt offerings and peace offerings, animals are still slaughtered and their blood still shed—even when atonement isn’t taking place. This brings me to a second and closely related corrective: sacrificial atonement in Leviticus is not about penal-substitutionary death. What do I mean by this?
In the instructions given for whole burnt offerings, peace offerings, and sin offerings, there is a mandatory rite in which the offerer leans one hand on the head of the animal before it’s slaughtered. The meaning of this rite is never explained in the text; but many interpreters have assumed that it represents the transference of sin—such that the slaughter/death of the animal substitutes for the slaughter/death of the offerer. In other words, the offerer deserves death, but the offerer transfers the sin onto the animal and the animal dies in the offerer’s place. In this understanding, the locus of atonement is the death of the animal.
This sounds intuitive enough; but it simply can’t be true. Why? Here are a few of the biggest reasons:
- Perhaps most importantly, the text never says this is the case. Slaughter is never accorded any kind of explicit ritual significance in the book of Leviticus, nor is it described as a vehicle of God’s punishment.
- Second, the sin offering is not able to atone for high-handed sins deserving of capital punishment (e.g., Numbers 15:27-31); it’s designed to atone for unintentional and/or non-defiant sins.
- Third, in the sin offering specifically, atonement is always effected by what the priest does. This is significant because the priest does not slaughter the animal; the offerer does. If the slaughter/death of the animal was the locus of atonement, then the offerer (not the priest) would be the one effecting atonement; but the biblical text always attributes atonement to what the priest does with the blood after the animal has already been slaughtered by the offerer.
- Fourth and finally, as we have already seen, whole burnt offerings and peace offerings typically happen in contexts where sin is not being addressed and atonement is not taking place. Why would a transfer of sin and a substitutionary death need to happen in these non-atoning contexts? Moreover, the guilt offering (Lev. 5)—which is designed to atone for sin—never explicitly requires a hand-leaning rite. This means that the hand-leaning rite is present in non-atoning contexts and absent in atoning contexts. It makes no sense, then, to conclude that the rite relates directly to atonement.[4]
Most likely, then, the one-handed rite was done simply to declare the offerer’s ownership of the animal at the start of the ritual.[5] It did not function to transfer sin, nor did the slaughter of the animal substitute for the slaughter of the human offerer.
How did sacrificial atonement in Leviticus actually work, then? That’s a loaded question, and I simply won’t be able to do it justice in this post. That said, I don’t want to leave you in suspense, either; so I’ll offer you a far too cursory explanation. Hopefully, I’ll be able to return to this topic in more detail at some point in the future.
In the book of Leviticus, blood is conceptualized as a sacred lifeforce. It is so sacred, in fact, that its sanctity is contagious—and it is therefore able to cleanse and sanctify the things it touches (cf. Lev 6:27; 17:11). Sins and impurities are also conceptualized as contagions; but rather than cleansing and sanctifying, they profane and defile. When an Israelite sins, that sin attaches itself to the sanctuary—almost like a magnet—and leaves an invisible stain.[6] And if too many sin-stains accumulate in the sanctuary, they threaten to drive away God’s presence. During the sin offering, the priest purges (kipper) the offerer’s sin-stain in the sanctuary by applying contagiously sacred blood to it. When this happens the stains are purged and the offerer forgiven. For this reason, some have referred to sacrificial blood as a “ritual detergent”[7] or “cultic cleansing agent.”[8] I like the way Abby Kaplan simplifies things: “Sin is like dirt; blood is like soap.”[9] In essence, the sin offering is Israel’s way of cleaning up the messes they’ve made in God’s house—because if the house gets too filthy, God might want to leave. Again, all of these ideas seem very strange to our modern sensibilities, but they wouldn’t have been so strange to ancient Israelites.
Much more could be said—and you can read my thesis, linked at the beginning, for much more detailed info. But here’s the rub: sacrifice in Leviticus is primarily about a relationship with God; it’s not just about atonement. Sin does threaten one’s relationship with God, however, and so God makes space for atonement. That’s where the sin offering (Lev 4–5) and guilt offering (Lev 6–7) come into play. But in Leviticus, the logic of sacrificial atonement is not that God needs someone to be killed and so an animal faces the music. Rather, the logic is that life is needed—to purge the stains of sin and overcome the curse of death; and God graciously makes that life available to God’s people (Lev 17:11). Thanks be to God!
[1] Christian A. Eberhart, The Sacrifice of Jesus: Understanding Atonement Biblically (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 64.
[2] Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism, Kindle ed. (New York, NY: Oxford, 2010), loc. 1113.
[3] Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 3; New York, NY: Doubleday, 1992), 175.
[4] Granted, the transference of sin is the explicit meaning of the hand-leaning rite during the scapegoat ritual on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16); but in that specific context, the meaning is clarified and not presumed, two hands are used instead of one, and the animal is sent out into the wilderness rather than killed. In each of these respects, the text presents the two-handed rite as qualitatively different than the one-handed rite.
[5] Eberhart, Sacrifice of Jesus, 64.
[6] Jacob Milgrom, “Israel’s Sanctuary: The Priestly Picture of Dorian Gray,” RB 83 (1976): 394.
[7] Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 254.
[8] Christian A. Eberhart, “Blood. I: Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. Hans-Josef Klauck (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 206.
[9] Abby Kaplan, Misreading Ritual: Sacrifice and Purity for the Modern‑Day Gentile (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, May 25, 2022), 69–83.
Jared Dale Greer 
Leave a comment