ABSTRACT
Jay suggested that blood sacrifice serves to maintain patrilineal descent systems – ones tracing ancestry through the father. acknowledging Robertson Smith’s earlier work (Jay 1992:32), she elaborated the connection between blood sacrifice and patriliny with reference to the old Testament, Christian textual sources, and various ethnographies (Jay 1992). She saw blood sacrifice as a remedy, for men, for having been born from the other sex; put crudely, she suggested that somehow letting blood and giving death evens up the score for men, who cannot menstruate or give birth as they have been given birth.1
