ABSTRACT
In Freud's depiction, sacrifice is rooted in family conflict, specifically intergenerational conflict. Paul matches up a number of details of the Torah story with Freud's depiction of the primal horde, locating the model for the primal horde sacrifice specifically in the Passover sacrifice. The Passover sacrifice is a compromise formation, "for having killed a senior male, the Israelites, through the sacrifice of a junior male/son/animal, must pay the retributive price for the guilt they have incurred by turning the tables on their oppressor". Freud read about raw sacrifices, and even raw ancient sacrifices that involved drinking blood, in William Robertson Smith's The Religion of the Semites. Like sacrifice, blood has no literal meaning, despite various attempts to show it as bridging the gap between the world of nature and that of culture. As a flexible representational system, sacrifice is useful for carrying out what Obeyesekere calls the "work of culture".
