God spoke to Moses in the wilderness and said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Leviticus 17:11).
In the full light of 20th century medical science we now know that indeed the very center of our life system is the blood flowing through our veins. This was revealed to the Israelites thousands of years ago and blood sacrifice became a central part of their worship.
But blood rites were common throughout the ancient world. That would lead one to conclude that there was some basic, common belief regarding blood among ancient peoples which constrained them to use blood in various religious rituals. And, in fact, this has been commonly held among scholars since around the turn of the century. It was then that two scholars, Julius Wellhausen and W. Robertson Smith, put forward the assertion that the ancient Semitic world (or at least the West Semites) generally believed that “in the blood is life.” This assertion was never seriously challenged — that is, until recently.
Catholic scholar Dennis J. McCarthy, S.J., formerly of St. Louis University Divinity School and now of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, conducted an exhaustive study of blood rites among ancient peoples to determine if indeed there was a commonly held belief. The results of his study were first published in June 1969 (Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 88, No. 2) and then updated in June 1973 (Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 92, No. 2). His conclusion? After reviewing the evidence he stated: “We must, then, conclude that the evidence from the ancient Semitic and Aegean areas does not show a general belief outside Israel in blood as a divine element which served as the basic reason or explanation for sacrifice. As far as we know, the reservation of blood to God because it was life and so divine is specifically Israelite.”
Because of the vital importance of this study, we are here presenting a substantial portion of Dr. McCarthy’s reports.
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 106
Sacrificial Rites
“Turning to the evidence, we might expect that the ancient cultural leader, Mesopotamia, would attribute a divine character to blood, for blood, or at least human blood, was from the gods. They had created man by vivifying [giving life to] clay with the blood of a god slain for rebellion, but no conclusions for the cult seem to have been drawn from this. The Mesopotamian sacrifice was essentially a meal served to the gods, a ritual undoubtedly influenced by the Sumerians, who, as far as we know, did not associate blood with the clay of creation. To argue that this extrinsic [outside] influence changed the basic character of ritual among the Mesopotamian Semites does not seem possible. This might account for the concept of the sacrifice as banquet, but it leaves unexplained the unimportance of blood in their numerous purificatory and dedicatory rituals. This contrasts sharply with Hebrew practice, where blood was the universal purifier and consecrator. If this stems from a primitive Semitic belief in the divine nature of blood, an idea not unknown in Mesopotamia, it is difficult to understand how the Akkadians [Mesopotamians] and their Semitic successors could have stopped using so powerful a substance for ritual, if they had originally so done.
“Of course, since Akkadian naqu (‘pour’) is the ordinary word for ‘offer sacrifice,’ it is argued that the pouring out of a victim’s blood was so central as to denominate the whole sacrificial process. However, there is no positive evidence for the ritual manipulation of blood. The drink offering was an important element in the banquet offering and the act of libation [pouring out an offering] was certainly designated by naqu. Given the overriding conception of sacrifice as a meal, surely it is most likely that the drink offering, not an unattested use of blood, gave the name to the whole ritual.
“Hittite civilization offers an instructive parallel. Since the verb sipand — (‘pour’) also designated sacrificing, some conclude that blood had a central role in sacrifice. Once again, the texts are remarkably reticent about the use of blood. To establish its role one must fall back on interpreting ritual scenes on the monuments which do depict libations, but not necessarily of blood. In fact, as in Mesopotamia, the concept of sacrifice was that of offering the gods needed food and drink.
“The same it true in the other great center of early civilization in the easter Mediterranean basin. Egyptian religion was not one where
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 107
the blood of sacrifice played a significant role. Once more, the offerings were essentially royal meals for the gods. Man must maintain temples and festal meals to see to the care and feeding of the gods. The gods depended upon his offerings, but this support was not a ‘divine sanguinary [blood] substance’; it was simple food and drink. Thus the basic concept of sacrifice in the major centers of the more ancient civilizations, for all their diversity, is remarkably unitary. Sacrifice is offering food to the gods, and blood as such had no special, explicit part in it.
Purification Rituals and Apotropaic Rituals
“There is another class of rites, purification and apotropaic [warding off evil] rituals, perhaps not strictly sacrificial, but certainly not sharply distinguished from religious rites by the ancients themselves, if they made any distinction at all. Hence such rituals may be sources of evidence for beliefs about blood.
“Once again, our evidence is complex. In Mesopotamia, propitiatory rites and the like were inextricably mixed up with magic. Without getting into a discussion of the relation of magic to religion we can ask whether these rites treated blood as somehow divine and so efficacious [powerful]. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary gives no references to damu in incantation texts and the like. Furlani does refer to two apotropaic rites using blood. It also appears in omen texts, but as a mere physical sign on a par with lines on the liver, not as having a special meaning in its own right. Considering the mass of propitiatory texts and the like which are preserved, this infrequent mention of blood as such surely indicates that it had little importance in ritual.
“Red wool does play a part in some of the surpu purificatory rites, and this is assumed sometimes to be a surrogate [substitute] for blood, indicating its power. However, the manipulation of red wool takes away curses, hexes, and the like, as well as bodily pain. It is aimed at evil in general and therefore is not even sympathetic magic for trouble associated with blood and so life symbolized by blood. The text does not specify blood, nor does it give red pride of place. A Hittite substitution rite adds to our knowledge of this kind of thing. To protect the king an animal substitute for him is adorned with flocks of varicolored wool. These symbolize diseases, and we might assume that the red signifies blood or blood-red spots or the like. Perhaps so, but it is on a level with green, black, and white. Red
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 108
or blood has no special place or meaning in the Hittite ritual, nor, presumably, its Mesopotamian prototype.
“Still, it is sometimes said that there was a special purificatory power in blood because Akkadian kuppuru, like Hebrew kapper, means ‘purify with blood’ on the basis of the Babylonian New Year ritual text, where a slaughtered sheep is used to purify the temple. But line 354 says, ‘The incantation priest shall purify the temple with the corpse of the sheep.’ The body, not the blood, purifies, and even it does not confer purity like the blood in Leviticus 16. Rather it absorbs impurities, becoming so contaminated that it and the men who handled it were cast out of the holy precincts, carrying away impurity.
“The typical purificatory rite in Mesopotamian practice was washing or rubbing with water or oil or milk or the like, not with blood as in Israel. In fact, the Hittite ritual of Papanikri is unusual in cuneiform literature because it uses blood to purify. Blood was smeared on a building contaminated by bloodshed, and the removal of the new blood took away the contamination of the old. This is simple imitative magic. Blood is blood, and removing the new takes away the old. It is a specific for problems related to blood, not something specially and generally powerful in its own right.
“Thus, to say the least, there is little concrete evidence that blood is purificatory. Where are the parallels to Leviticus 17:11: blood is life given by God and so it has purifying power? It is rash to extrapolate this isolated theory into an explanation on the meaning of blood in rite and sacrifice in the ancient Near Eastern world, let alone religion in general.
Burnt Offerings
“However, there is still more evidence to be examined. There was another view (or method) of sacrifice in the ancient world. The rituals of Canaan and Greece shared some remarkable practices. Both had holocausts which, whatever their exact meaning, represent a different conception from that of the divine banquet. The thysia and slmm offerings with their peculiar allocation of parts of the victim to the god and the communal meal again show a different conception. Doubtless burning the divine portion represents feeding the god, but in a way not to be subsumed [classified] under one concept with laying the god’s table. But for us the question is whether the rituals
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 109
common to the Aegean [Greece] and Levant [countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean] give blood a special role.
“Of the two, Greek ritual is better documented. In fact, ordinary Greek sacrifice did not bother about the blood. It did not belong to the gods. Men ate it, e.g., Odyssey xviii, 44–49, and we know this attitude aroused revulsion among Jews later. More important, the cult of the dead and the netherworld did stress blood. In other words, blood is connected with death, not life. This needs following up, but it will be postponed until we finish the survey of other evidence.
“In western Asia we know that Ugarit had burnt offerings and peace offerings. But the Ugaritic texts show no special concern for blood in ritual. King Keret washes and reddens his arms ritually, but this is preparation for sacrifice. Whatever the purpose of this, what is significant for our context is precisely that it is not sacrificial blood which is used.
“For completeness we may mention our meager South Arabian information. The word for altar is mdhbh, there was burnt offering, and animal offerings were important. However, there is nothing explicit about the meaning or use of blood. Thus the Levant and South Arabia shared some ritual words and concepts, but the texts do not take us beyond this to a special meaning for blood in general.
Rituals Pertaining to the Dead
“This is not to say that ritual use of blood is unmentioned outside Israel. It is, in rituals pertaining to the dead or to the gods of death. This is found in the standard Babylonian form of the story of Etana (Marsh Tablet, lines 34–36):
Daily Etana beseeches Shamash:
‘Thou hast eaten, O Shamash, the fat of my sheep,
the netherworld has drunk the blood of my lambs;
the gods I have honored,
the ghosts I have revered.’
Blood belongs to the lower regions. If it revived its ghosts (we are not told), this would recall the idea that in the blood is life, though not in the biblical sense. Essentially blood belongs to the gods of death, not life.
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 110
“Blood plays an important role in Hittite rituals for communicating with the underworld, where it is the preferred drink of its denizens. The Hittite rite seems to have had congeners in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. Each area had a rite involving a pit with a name cognate to the Hittite a-a-bi. However, the Mesopotamian texts do not mention blood, though they describe the rite in some detail. That is, though there is some evidence from Mesopotamia connecting sacrificial blood and ghosts, the texts which treat directly of ways of dealing with ghosts do not concern themselves with blood. Is this an indication that there was no serious attribution of special magic powers to blood in this area? Does it indicate that the mention in the Etana story is only a sort of common sense observation: the blood of the sacrifice goes into the ground, the place of ghosts, and so naturally belonged to them? In any event, the contrast with the Hittite practice is noticeable: Mesopotamian necromancy neglected blood and Hittite emphasized it. If this is not simply owing to accidents of transmission, it is another sign of the disassociation of belief about the powers of blood from ideas of sacrifice, for the Hittites and Mesopotamians shared a common view of sacrifice as a provisioning of the gods but had different views about the importance of blood in its sphere.
“Other religious practices relate blood to the underworld. Indeed, Iliad xiv, 518 and xvii, 86 even equate blood with soul and life, but in a figure of speech based on the common observation that blood and life go together. In ritual, blood was used in the cult of the dead. The oldest evidence is Odyssey x-xi, where the ‘strengthless dead’ attain a semblance of life by drinking blood from the offerings, but all remains brooding and sinister (contrast Iliad xxiii 34: ‘Everywhere about the body blood ran by the cupful,’ which is merely an expression of Achilles’ heroic bounty at Patroclus’ funeral feast). This sinister aspect of the ritual use of blood appears in the very vocabulary of Greek. In the Boeotian dialect death rites were called ‘pourings of blood’ (haimakouriai) but in standard Greek enagismata, a noun built on the phrase en agei, ‘under a curse.’ These things were horrors, as in Euripedes’ picture of Death personified skulking about the tomb to suck the ‘gory clots of blood’. This picture is verified by Athenian vase paintings of the era. The older poem could still have the blood revivify the dead temporarily, the later brings out the feeling involved more vividly. Perhaps in the old idea there is something of blood as life, but it is eerie, partial, and at the opposite pole of true life.
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 111
“There is further evidence associating blood with sinister, if different, gods. The Hittite war god was drawn to blood. This attraction characterizes also the Canaanite Anat, a classic example of the combined war-love goddess, who glories in gore and drinks her brother’s blood. Rather than blood being representative of life and so of the beneficent divine in the ancient Semitic-Aegean world generally, such evidence as we have associates blood with death and its divinites.
“The Bible also associates blood with rites for the dead. Leviticus 19:28 and Deuteronomy 14:1 prohibit gashing oneself in mourning to keep Yahweh’s people from shedding blood in rites like those of their gentile neighbors. The theory that drought was connected with the death of the rain god explains the actions of the Baalist prophets in 1 Kings 18:28 in this light. Blood is connected with death.
Blood and the Oath Sacrifice
“The explicit role of blood in the oath sacrifice merits special notice. In its Greek form the rite was a conditional curse, and the victim which embodied the curse was destroyed, never eaten. Blood is emphasized in the rite. The term sphagia temnein, ‘cut bloody offerings,’ is a synonym for horkia temnein, ‘cut oaths.’ We actually have descriptions of the manipulation of the blood:
Seven men, fierce captains, slaughtering a bull and dipping their hands into its blood, swore by Ares, Enyo, and blood-thirsty Panic either to tear down the city of the Cadmeians and plunder it by force or to die and mix the earth with their blood (Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, 42–48).
They swore these oaths, after they had slaughtered a bull, a boar, and a ram over the shield. The Greeks dipped a sword and the barbarians a spear into the blood (Xenophon, Anabasis 2:2, 9).
“The rite is clear and clearly traditional. The poet and the pious historian are describing the same thing. It involves sacrifice, the use of a shield, and contact with blood. Aeschylus makes the symbolism clear: either the parties are to accomplish what they commit themselves to or they are to die. This is a conditional self-curse in which the curse is re-inforced by a symbolic action. The general idea of such an action is, of course, widely known, but the Greek form is special because it is explicitly a sacrifice and blood is the symbol of death.
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 112
“The Old Testament too associates sacrifice, blood, and covenant in Exodus 24:5–8, but it does not adopt the darker symbolism of blood. The external form of the rite is much like the Greek. Animals are slain, the blood is collected, and the participants are joined by contact with the blood. However, the significance is different in the two cases because of the kinds of sacrifice involved. The Greek was not thysia, a feast. It could not be, for it invoked death symbolized by blood. Such things belonged to the nether powers; they made the sacrifice tabu, not the center of feasting.
“On the other hand, in Exodus the sacrifice is a zebah, the Hebrew rite homologous [similar] with thysia and so involving the participants in a sacrificial banquet. It was literally a feast, and because of this the association with death characteristic of the Greek parallel is broken. Hebrew practice is like the other in its externals, but the connotations of blood are, as far as the evidence goes, peculiarly its own, because it is associated with a sacrifice which could be consumed. That is, it was salutary and not, as in Greece, tabu. It was a symbol of something with which one sought association, not, as in the Greek parallel, of death with which one did not seek communion.
“This is an especially clear case of the separateness of Hebrew attitudes to blood and sacrifice. The similarities are so close that the divergences stand out. Both Israel and Greece knew the oath as a conditional curse which could be acted out in ritual. The oath-taker identified himself with the slain animal if he were to violate his oath. This sort of thing is also found among Arameans and Assyrians, but it is not identified with sacrifice. In fact, in one case it is explicitly denied that the rite is a sacrifice. In contrast, the Greek and Israelite rites are alike in being sacrifices. Yet only the Greek employs the darker symbolism of blood. Hence the Greek oath-sacrifice is consistent. It is an acted-out oath in which the parties identified themselves with the death of the victim through contact with its blood. However, when blood and sacrifice are given an explicit role in Israel’s covenant ritual, the connection with death disappears. Perhaps this happened because Israel always associated blood with life in a ritual context. Perhaps it was because Yahwism allowed no sacrificial usages parallel to the sphagia, no association with darker powers, but only a sacrifice associated with life because it belonged to the living God. But whatever the explanation, the fact is clear. Covenant blood had a different meaning in Israel from what it had in Greece. The contrast between the gloomy character of the sphagia
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 113
and the festal zebah, associated as they both were with blood in otherwise similar circumstances pointed up the special character of the Hebrew attitude: blood is life.
Conclusion
“This survey of the actual data from the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world does not offer any real support for a theory of sacrifice based on the sharing of a divine substance, blood. In fact, it shows a complexity hard to reduce to any common denominator.
1. There were two general concepts of offerings to the gods prevalent in the area. One, Hittite, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian saw them as simply provisioning the deities. The other, Greek, Levantine, and perhaps South Arabian, burned the god’s share. Seemingly the gods needed this portion too, but the basic idea is quite different from laying a table and waiting for the god to consume the food. Further and to our purpose, neither concept generally attributes importance to blood as such.
2. Blood is attractive to certain powers, but these are associated with unpleasantness, war, and death. The meaning of blood in this sphere is ambiguous. It may temporarily revivify, but in an eerie way. Blood is associated not with true life, but with its pale and ghostly counterpart. This concept of the power of blood crosses the lines of the different concepts of sacrifice we have seen, for it appears in Mesopotamia as well as in Greece and the Levant.
3. Hebrew ritual is much concerned with blood. It must be reserved to God, and it is a purifying agent. This is explained by the fact that ‘in the blood is life’; so blood belongs to the divine sphere.
4. The Hebrew treatment of the oath sacrifice points up the symbolism of blood peculiar to Old Testament texts. This is so because it resembles Greek usage in external form, but it gives blood a very different meaning — life and not death.
“We must, then, conclude that the evidence from the ancient Semitic and Aegean areas does not show a general belief outside Israel in blood as a divine element which served as the basic reason or explanation for sacrifice. As far as we know, the reservation of blood to God because it was life and so divine is specifically Israelite.”
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 114
These Old Testament sacrifices spoken of by Dr. McCarthy were but a foreshadowing of that which was to come. In the New Testament we read: “All this is symbolic, pointing to the present time. The offerings and sacrifices there prescribed cannot give the worshipper inward perfection. It is only a matter of food and drink and various rites of cleansing — outward ordinances in force until the time of reformation. But now Christ has come, high priest of good things already in being. The tent of His priesthood is a greater and more perfect one, not made by men’s hands, that is, not belonging to this created world; the blood of His sacrifice is His own Blood, not the blood of goats and calves; and thus He has entered the sanctuary once and for all and secured an eternal deliverance” (Hebrews 9:9–12, NEB).
As we have physical life through the blood, so, too, we have spiritual life through the blood — the blood of Jesus Christ. His sacrifice for our sins on Calvary was the culmination of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind. “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but by the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (1 Peter 1:18–20).
Have you been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb? If not, by simple faith believe in Jesus Christ as your Saviour today.
But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. Romans 5:8, 9)
BSP 2:4 (Autumn 1973) p. 115