Dr Yitzhaq Feder uncovers the fascinating and unexpected relevance of the sacrificial laws.
Dr. Yitzhaq Feder is a lecturer at the University of Haifa. He is the author of Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual: Origins, Context and Meaning (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). His most recent book, Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines the psychological foundations of impurity in ancient Israel.
Dr Yitzhaq Feder uncovers the fascinating and unexpected relevance of the sacrificial laws.
Dr. Yitzhaq Feder is a lecturer at the University of Haifa. He is the author of Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual: Origins, Context and Meaning (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). His most recent book, Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines the psychological foundations of impurity in ancient Israel.
Welcome everybody to Between the Lines, a podcast produced by the Louis Jacobs Foundation and committed to Rabbi Jacobs' belief that the quest for Torah is indeed itself Torah.
Speaker 1:My name is Simon Eder and each week I'm joined by a special guest who helps us to deconstruct that week's parasha, exploring new paths on the quest for Torah. And it's wonderful today, as we continue our journey through this year's theories, as we arrive at the book of Vayikra, it's wonderful to be joined by Dr Yitzhak Fader, who is lecturer at the University of Haifa. He is the author of Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual Origins, context and Meaning, and, of course, his most recent book, purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible from embodied experience to mole metaphor, and that was published just a couple of years ago by Cambridge University Press, and in that book he examines the psychological foundations of impurity in ancient Israel, which is very timely really, as we enter the book of Vayikra with all its intimacy and its blood and sacrifice and all sorts of other things like that, maybe to begin, I really wonder your take on what you see as the meaning of sacrifices and ritual as we encounter them in the book of Vayikra.
Speaker 2:So first of all, let me just say thanks, simon. It's a real pleasure to be here with you and to talk about things that are so close to my heart and which are so far from most people's at least at first glance, things that aren't that attractive to most people, but actually I think once we get to know them better, they're actually quite relevant to us. The whole world of sacrifice, first of all, is one of those things that kind of puts people off when you get to the book of Abba Yikra. But so where is it all coming from? I think it needs to be put in its ancient Near Eastern context. I mean, the truth is, sacrifice is basically universal phenomenon. We have animal sacrifices all over the world. Now, today less, but at least once upon a time. You know, you go to South America, north America, anywhere you want to go, africa, asia people sacrifice. So the question is, whenever you have a phenomenon like this, which is basically pan-human, like everyone does it, you have to wonder like what's it doing? What need is it fulfilling?
Speaker 2:Now, within its ancient Near Eastern context, the first one was just a way of basically showing homage to the gods. The whole idea of a temple was basically a place for the god to dwell among the society and it had like high stakes because if the god would abandon its temple then bad things would ensue. And the opposite side is, if you bring the god into the temple, you bring him or her, their sacrifices, their offerings. The gods bring blessing on the society and that's why people would spend enormous amounts of material wealth and human labor to create, to build these temples and the sacrifices themselves. The basic idea was actually to feed the. How they really looked at the idea that you're sacrificing an animal and giving it to the god, how they understood whether who's really eating it, it's hard to know.
Speaker 2:But it seems like vayikara is kind of taking a step away from that to some extent because basically there seems to be a number of signs that indicate that they don't want the priestly source or responsible for the vayikara or whoever the author is basically portraying. It doesn't want to portray god in very physical. There are anthropomorphic descriptions of god, but the idea of god eating is too much for most of the Bible and including Leviticus. It prefers just the idea that God smells the aroma of the sacrifices and that's enough to show homage to God. So that's the first step and there are basically two different types of sacrifice. And there's sacrifices that are to show homage I would say like the burnt offering and then there's sacrifices that are meant for expiation or removing guilt for sins that would be like the sin offering and the guilt offering. So I would say there's two different systems of sacrifices.
Speaker 1:Let's maybe go into, I think, the key verb that we want to explore. This verb keep pair, and I wonder really how you see it as being associated with a blood right.
Speaker 2:So what's the connection between kippur and blood? I mean, the truth is that it's a very like that connection, but it does get spelled out in certain places. But in the sacrificial context, the sin offering, for example in Viticus 4, it just comes right out and just says you smear the blood on the horns of the altar and then the kohen, basically the kippur. The kohen makes kippur, whatever that means we can define it. But basically this kohen, the priest makes kippur for the person who brings the offering and he's forgiven, basically for by God. So then you say okay, first of all you have to explain what is this verb mean and what does it have to do with blood? And I guess in its context we see that in the sin offering is very, the hatat is very distinctive in this idea that you smear the blood on the horns of the altar or for collective offering. The priest sprinkles it inside of the tent of meeting, towards the curtains and on the yom kippurim. In the Viticus 16, it talks about going to the holy of holies, but it seems like the blood is very central to this act of kippur. So, first of all, scholars have tried to understand it, looking for cognate terms in Arabic, in Akkadian, babylonian and things like that. In Arabic there's a verb, kafara, which means to cover. So the idea of covering up your sins was very attractive, makes perfect sense as a metaphor. You want to cover up your sins.
Speaker 2:In Akkadian we actually have ritual contexts that are very similar to the types of things we find in Vayikra and we have a verb called kupuru, which means to wipe away, and that's a very attractive direction to go into, basically the idea of wiping away your sins.
Speaker 2:The thing is and some scholars have gone in that direction the thing is that we don't have in the Tanakh any examples of kippur in a very concrete sense of either covering up or like really literally to cover up or to literally wipe away, which in Akkadian rituals, for example, you actually wipe the temple with like dough or an animal or something like that. So it actually literally means to wipe. So we don't have any sense like that in the Tanakh using kippur. So for me it seemed like the most prudent way of trying to understand what it means to kippur is to just use the Tanakh and use all the various usages of the verb in the Tanakh. So then we get a whole set of meanings and then, within all the usages of the Tanakh. One of the things that's really intriguing is that we actually find it associated with blood in one particular context, and that context is spilling blood, the idea of making expiation for basically murder. I'm not sure if I jumped right into that yet. Or talk more about the other.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's a useful segue really to go into. Why were these acts of sprinkling or smearing blood, as you say, believe really to achieve that expiation, that kappa-ra?
Speaker 2:So let me first of all just say my overall approach in trying to understand rituals in general and this kind of this actually is a thread that kind of followed from my first book, blood expiation, to my more recent work on impurity is this idea of the one understand all these kind of seemingly obscure concepts? We have to start with our bodies, embodied experience, or to put it differently, when I was working on this whole idea of blood, the idea is that rituals speak a language, a nonverbal language. It's a language of actions. So the idea is what we often try to understand rituals by trying to make them very intellectual and kind of a verbal sense. But the but I think that when you want to understand a ritual, you first of all want to understand how these actions got received, their meanings as a manipulation of the body, of manipulation of objects, and the premise is that the world is full of meaning. There's an endless examples that you could bring, but once my father said to me, once we went my father's not a particularly religious person, but we went to the hotel, the western wall, and he was stricken by the idea that when people walked away they basically would not turn their backs on the western wall. They would always turn around with their face facing the, the, the hotel, as they moved away. And for him that was a very meaningful thing that you don't need to explain it more than the idea of turning your back to the hotel was something that was meaningful. So that just shows how our behavior is bowing down. Bowing down has a submission, it's built in. It's not something that we need to explain, it's something that's part of the action itself.
Speaker 2:So so, working from that premise, the idea is where would so, where would you get from this idea that blood would somehow remove guilt? That's the idea, and there there's actually a very convenient kind of shortcut to an answer to that. If you look at, like I was starting to say before, if you start looking at all the appearances of Kippur in the Bible and then you start seeing that they're associated with the word dumb or dummim, meaning blood, it seems striking. Wait a minute. There's some kind of connection here, like why is blood and Kippur somehow associated? So where do we find this?
Speaker 2:For example, for example, in numbers 35 it talks about the cities of refuge, that if someone accidentally kills another person, they can run away to these cities of refuge and avoid the, the family member who is going to take revenge, who's actually supposed to take revenge on a murderer? And that's actually there's a lot more to say about it. It's actually quite relevant, but let me just try to leave that aside. So, any case, there it says that you're not allowed, if someone's an actual murderer, you're not allowed to take a bribe to let them, like, stay in this city of refuge. And because the blood. So now I'm reading from a numbers 35, 34, so it says actually 33. It says you shall not pollute the land with you which you live. So if you take a bribe, you're you'll be polluting the land, says for blood, pollute the land. And the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it except by the blood of him who shed it. So in other words, it's saying that if someone's an actual murderer, the land has a stain on it and that stain can't be removed unless you take the blood of the murderer. In other words, you have to take revenge against the murder. So basically, the blood removes this blood guilt. The only way of removing the blood guilt is with the blood of the perpetrator. So you see, in this concept, this idea that, like blood removes guilt.
Speaker 2:I say in a currency for removing guilt, and there's a lot of extensions of this idea, is that you could? There's a lot to be said about it. I don't want to go overboard, but ultimately this whole idea is when someone's guilty, say someone's a murderer and they deserve to be killed. So in the ancient Near East, if someone's a murderer and the family is going to take revenge, at least in Mesopotamia and in Hathi, they would often settle it with money. The people, the murderer, would pay off the family and they would leave them alone. That's what number 35 is saying you can't do.
Speaker 2:But this was like the standard practice, this idea of paying off your blood guilt, and which is, by the way, called the cofare, which is the same root, and this idea was captured in the idea of blood money. This exists among Bedouins and it exists to this day, but it is called blood money and in Acadian, for example, the word damu has one of its meanings, aside from the meaning blood, is this idea of blood money. You give somebody blood, you give them their money. This actually so. The Bible doesn't let you like. The Bible is against this concept. But actually in Hebrew, in Mishnahi Hebrew, we actually get this idea of? We have damei kis. In modern Hebrew we say damei kis. That means big pocket money. It is damei kis dam, it's the blood of your pocket. The idea is that in this term, blood took on this meaning of money. And where did they get this idea of blood could mean money and this concept of paying off blood guilt? So to now go back to where we started. Basically, the idea is this Within the context of blood guilt, there was a whole idea of having to pay off blood, and the way to pay off blood is with blood.
Speaker 2:And that's where this kind of certain like valence or meaning was attached to blood and how it got associated with this idea of kippe'er. And, as it turns out, the kind of very common translation of kippe'er is expiate, which is a weird word. People usually use expiate in their daily lives. But what does that word mean? Comes from Latin, it means expio means to pay off, so it literally refers to this idea of paying off guilt. It's a very correct translation.
Speaker 2:This idea. What does it mean? It's a word that when you bring your sin offering and the priest smears the blood on the thing, and now it doesn't say I don't like putting it this way because it sounds too intellectual at this point, but basically this is how I understand it. It's basically the idea is that when he puts the blood on the altar, it is a gesture of kind of saying I'm paying off my debt to God of my guilt. Whatever it might've been that I did, I'd say it's not for murder, it's for anything. It's actually for non-intentional sins. But the idea here is just how the blood got that kind of meaning. That's what I think you need to do and you don't need to over intellectualize it. At the end of the day, if I haven't done that already, no, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you truly for sharing. I really wonder actually, perhaps, if I may a personal question as to how you got into exploring these themes and where your passion comes from, and really, what is the kind of importance of this scholarship for today.
Speaker 2:The truth is I took a I can't say for sure, but when I was an undergraduate I was trying to searching for myself, looking for myself. I was an undergraduate at Emory University and I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself, and I managed to. As a freshman, I took a graduate course on the tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea, and I found that really fascinating. And then, somewhere soon after that, I was also exploring Judaism and I found it very striking that just the people of Papua New Guinea have these menstrual taboos. So, too, we have these in Leviticus, and I brought this up with a rabbi that I was in contact with at the time, a rabbi, ellen Uter, who's also a doctor, very academic actually, and who was in Springfield, new Jersey. He said you have to read Mary Douglas if you want to understand this.
Speaker 2:So I did, and in any case, I realized that there's certain things in the Bible that are best understood maybe through the lens of anthropology or through psychology, but these are like human phenomena and any explanation that say you'll hear from a I don't know a rabbi or wherever that's just explaining it from a Jewish perspective, that doesn't realize that the people in Papua New Guinea also have some version of this kind of custom, then you're basically missing. I think that you're not really getting the. I don't think it's a true interpretation, because I think what you first need to do is understand the human phenomenon and then you can say, maybe what's the Jewish take on it, and so that's, I think, the main answer. The other answer is that I've always been attracted to weird things and I asked my doctor was also involved the Hittite? If you can always find yourself a little niche, it's always a good thing. I think it's awesome in academics and Leviticus is, I think, weird enough.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing so personally and I never thought we would see the link between Leviticus and Papua New Guinea, so thank you for that connection. Maybe just finally and again just to bring us up to date. But I wonder really how you see the kind of manifestation of expiation metaphors as they're played out in kind of common parlance and how the themes of Leviticus weave their way into daily life.
Speaker 2:This idea of payback. That's like something that's really that's a very deep human need. This idea of it almost seems irrational and some people don't like this. It's basically there's a whole thing about punishing as retribution rather than progressive, but you got to punishment as deterrents, like you punish somebody because you don't want, you want to scare away other people from committing a crime, but then there's punishment so that because the person deserves it, that's paying them back and that's a very basic need that we try to sometimes run away from that.
Speaker 2:But we, if there's something intrinsically satisfying to us that when something, there's something wrong in the world, there's somebody does something wrong, that they deserve to get something bad happened to them and back to them. So that's one thing. So that's a very just basic need and the language we use for that is a language of payment and paying them back and things like that. That's one aspect. The truth is and in the context of the truth, like I said before about blood guilt, we see that especially in context of warfare and things like that we tend to see this idea of paying someone back for the blood they spilled. It's, I don't know, it's the kind of thing that just pops up in idioms all over the place. You just have to keep your eyes open for it.
Speaker 1:Dr Feather, thank you so much for sharing today and for your scholarship, and we look forward to continuing, of course, in the weeks ahead as we journey through the book of Vayikra.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. This has been a great pleasure. And I wish you lots of success with this fantastic project.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for being an important part as we have opened Vayikra. Thank you everybody for listening and if you enjoyed this podcast, please do remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about all of our information on our sites louijacupsorg and also jewishquestorg. Do tune in again next week as we continue our quest together.