Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 367 Reviews PURITY, SACRIFICE, AND THE TEMPLE: SYMBOLISM AND SUPERSESSIONISM IN THE STUDY OF ANCIENT JUDAISM. By Jonathan Klawans. Pp. xi + 372. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cloth, $74.00. According to Jonathan Klawans, there are two serious problems that have thoroughly saturated modern scholarship on Israelite sacrifice. The first is the tendency to analyze sacrifice in supersessionist terms and the second is the obsessive search for the origins of sacrifice and its subsequent evolution. Christian scholars tended to examine sacrifice armed with the supersessionist ideology that the Eucharist was destined to spiritualize sacrifice and thereby replace it. Modern Jewish scholars did not fare much better. Heavily influenced by Maimonides’s theory that God intended animal sacrifices to wean humans off of human sacrifice and the popular Reformist notion that the rabbis created prayer to replace sacrifice, Jewish scholars joined their Christian counterparts in viewing sacrifice as destined to lead to something better, something more spiritual. Against all this, Klawans demonstrates that sacrifice actually meant something to the ancient Jews who practiced it. This really should not have been surprising. Should we have imagined that Jews, or any other sacrificepracticing people, devoted so much of their resources to a practice that was only a vestige of the past or groundwork for a more meaningful future? As Klawans points out, recent scholars have succeeded in understanding purity laws as a meaningful symbolic system. This makes their failure to come to terms with sacrifice all the more revealing of prevailing biases. Klawans even offers a tantalizing suggestion for this failure. Perhaps, he suggests, our society’s squeamishness in coming to terms with the daily mass slaughter of animals occurring in industrialized feed lots, has trickled over into a tacit scholarly condemnation of the practice of animal sacrifice. Whereas Victorian society had trouble coming to terms with the body, and hence felt distaste for purity laws, many of which are related to various bodily issues, today’s society’s problem is our relationship to animals and hence we feel distaste for sacrifice. The first two chapters set scholarship on a more productive track in understanding sacrifice. The first chapter highlights the regnant biases in scholarship, and points out some recent and not so recent work more successful in understanding sacrifice. Klawans has a remarkable talent for digesting broad swaths of scholarship, reducing them to their essences, and presenting them to the reader in a coherent fashion. He warns of two consistent problems in scholarship. The first is the separate treatment of systems of purity and sacrifice. The second is the obsessive search for origins. While this search may be justified, it is not helpful in understanding Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 368 Reviews the meaning of sacrifice to its practitioners. Furthermore, the search for a single “origin” to sacrifice is itself a mistaken undertaking as it is likely that there are many convergent origins to sacrifice. Finally, the search for origins too often ends up with the scholar positing the disparaging claim that all sacrifice is a result of the violent instincts of human beings. In the second chapter, Klawans outlines what he considers the two main symbolic meanings of sacrifice. The first is imitatio dei—the sacrificial process, which begins with purification, imitates God. “The offerer and the priest play the part of God, and the domesticated animals—from the herd and the flock—play the part of the people (and particularly Israel)” (p. 67). The second is that sacrifice maintains God’s presence in the Temple. Sacrifice is the opposite of moral sin, but not in the way in which we usually conceive of the process. “It is not that daily sacrifice undoes the damage done by grave transgression. Quite the contrary: grave transgression undoes what the daily sacrifice produces” (p. 71). Klawans emphasizes that these two meanings of sacrifice are not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive of other interpretations. They are merely types of interpretations that scholars should be suggesting. They do not divorce purity laws from sacrifice, and they do not present an evolutionary scheme; they do respect sacrifice as a meaningful metaphor. The final chapter in the first section deals with the prophetic critique...