Ancient Israelite Worship: Sacrifice and Tabernacle in the Hebrew Bible
Sacrifices, the primary expression of worship in ancient Israel, were performed at sanctuaries, like the Tabernacle built by the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt.
What is the purpose of sacrifice?
The basic form of religious worship in the Torah is sacrifice. It goes back as far as Cain and Abel, who, as a farmer and a shepherd, respectively, brought offerings to God from the products of their labors (Genesis 4:1–5), and Noah, who made sacrifices to God after the end of the flood. In both cases, the sacrifices follow good fortune and seem to express gratitude. Sacrifices, common in ancient religions, were generally understood as providing sustenance for the gods. The Bible, however, gives no indication that God consumed the sacrifices.1 It is telling that the “Bread of Display,” the loaves of bread placed “before” God in the Tabernacle, was placed in the antechamber and separated from the Holy of Holies by a curtain (Exodus 25:23–40; 26:31–35). This contrasts with food offerings in Mesopotamian rituals in which curtains were drawn around the image of the deity and the table when sacrificial food was brought in for the deity to eat. The biblical partition makes clear that the bread of display is not actually eaten by God but is only a token gift.
The laws delineate two main types of sacrifice: gift offerings and expiatory offerings. Gift offerings express devotion, reverence, and gratitude to God. They include the burnt offering, in which an animal is burned in its entirety as a gift to God;2 the grain offering, an act of tribute, which is mostly burned as a gift to God but part of which is eaten by priests; and the sacrifice of well-being (the exact meaning is uncertain; some translations render this as “peace offering”), which is mostly eaten by the worshiper who is celebrating by feasting in God’s presence. Expiatory offerings are brought for various types of offenses: the purification offering (older translations rendered the term, incorrectly, as “sin offering”), to purge the sanctuary of impurity caused by bodily impurities and by certain types of wrongdoing, which defile it, and the penalty or guilt offering, to make reparations for deliberate or unintentional trespass against sacred objects and the sacred domain, and for false oaths in property offenses.
Where and how were sacrifices performed?
The laws about the Tabernacle—God’s sanctuary in the Israelite camp (also known as the Tent of Meeting and the Sanctuary)3—include detailed instructions about its design and construction (see Sanctuaries) and about the types of sacrifice that will be offered in it, as well as rules about ritual purity and impurity to protect the sanctuary from becoming ritually impure.4 Many instructions about sacrifices and ritual impurity deal with procedures performed exclusively by the priests. In Mesopotamia the priests were forbidden to reveal such instructions to laypersons. Their inclusion in the Torah reflects the principle that God’s instructions on every subject, even those expressly addressed to the priests, are made known to the public as a whole. There are no esoteric teachings reserved for a spiritual, intellectual, or clerical elite.
The Tabernacle is to consist of three carefully delimited sections, listed in descending order of holiness and restricted access: (a) the inner sanctum or “Holy of Holies,” where the Ark and Tablets of the Covenant are kept; (b) its antechamber, “the Holy Place”—both of these are inside the Tent of Meeting, the Tabernacle proper; and (c) the surrounding courtyard, with the sacrificial altar. The law describes the daily activities of the Tabernacle—the kindling of its lamps, the daily sacrifices and incense burning—and it describes the priestly vestments and the ceremony for ordaining the priests. Finally, God identifies the artisans he has endowed with the skills to carry out the construction.
These laws were given at Mount Sinai. While Moses is on the mountain with God he receives the instructions about the Tabernacle’s design and construction. After it has been constructed, God transfers his Presence to the Tabernacle and, from within the Tabernacle, God gives Moses detailed laws about sacrifices and laws to protect it from ritual impurity so that it will remain fit for God’s Presence (Leviticus 1–16). The Tabernacle serves as God’s portable earthly abode; he will continue to dwell among the people as their divine lord after they leave Sinai. The people will worship God at the Tabernacle, and he will issue future commandments there (Exodus 25:22). Thus Israel will always experience God’s guiding Presence, thereby fulfilling the purpose of the exodus.
Various allusions in these chapters relate the Tabernacle to the creation of the world. The instructions appear as seven separate divine commands, culminating in the Sabbath (see Exodus 25:1; 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1, 12), like the creation of the world in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. The dietary laws, which require the separation (“setting apart”) of pure species of animals from impure ones (Leviticus 11; 20:24–26), emulate God’s acts of separation whereby he created an orderly world out of chaos, separating light from darkness, the upper waters from the lower waters, the oceans from the dry land, and day from night. This lends a cosmic significance to the construction of the Tabernacle and the laws of food purity.
Notes
A few references, apparently vestigial, call sacrifices “food of God” (Leviticus 21:6 and Numbers 28:2), because, as B. A. Levine explains, they are offered to God in the same way as food is served to humans. Most ancient societies believed that gods required food and relied on sacrifices for energy and strength. (These societies had rituals for feeding the statues of gods.) The Torah, however, preserved the common ancient idiom but understood the process differently. God did not need sacrifices for his sustenance but because he desired the devotion and the fellowship of his worshipers. B. A. Levine, “Leviticus,” in The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 17.
Some old translations translate the term for burnt offering as “holocaust,” a term derived from Greek, meaning “wholly burnt.” The term was aptly adopted to refer to the Nazi extermination of Jews in World War II.
The Tabernacle is referred to by three terms, each expressing different aspects of it: mikdash (“sanctuary”), lit., “holy place,” “sanctum,” referring to its sacred dimension; mishkan (“Tabernacle”), lit., “abode,” that is, God’s dwelling; and ohel mo’ed (“Tent of Meeting”), an oracle site, the place where God would communicate with Moses. Sanctuary refers to the entire sacred compound, the covered structure and the courtyard surrounding it. Tabernacle and Tent of Meeting sometimes refer to the entire compound and at other times only the covered structure.
The terms impure and unclean refer not to dirtiness but to a ritual state caused by bodily discharges, a skin condition translated (misleadingly) as “leprosy,” and contact with human corpses and certain animal carcasses. Impurity was thought to have a physical quality that spreads and contaminates whatever it touches. If allowed to accumulate in the sanctuary, God would abandon the sanctuary.