ABSTRACT
Closely connected with the ideology of covenant and holy war in the Hebrew Bible was the ritual of sacrifice. If holy war was intended to keep Israel pure from contamination by outsiders and their gods, sacrifice was to keep her pure from within, cleansed of sin and indicative of obedience to her god. The practice of sacrifice is of course not unique to Israelites: it has been part of a great many societies and cultures. Nevertheless, it is the ideology and practice of sacrifice as represented in the Bible that has had the greatest impact on the West, especially through Christendom’s appropriation of its themes and application of them to Jesus, the ‘Lamb of God’ whose violent sacrificial death is held to take away the sins of the world. But why is sacrifice necessary? Who can perform the sacrifice? Who can be
sacrificed? What are the assumptions of gender and power implicit in biblical representations of sacrifice? How is the internally directed violence and purification of sacrifice related to the externally directed violence and purification of holy war? Above all, what sort of god is it who requires all this violence and delights in blood? In this chapter I shall address these questions, and show the significance of
sacrifice in the genealogy of violence in the West. I shall begin by tracing some of the central instances of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. While these instances cannot be presented without reference to the questions raised above, I shall reserve fuller discussion of them to later in the chapter, when I shall consider anthropological and theological theories of sacrifice. It will be my contention that the ideas of covenant, holy war and sacrifice form a constellation of gendered violence which has structured Western civilization, to its own detriment and to the detriment of all with whom it interacts. But where shall we find a counter-narrative from which to draw resources for change?
Blood and the Father God
