Atonement: Jewish and Christian Origins

By Max Botner

A historical survey of atonement theology through ancient Jewish and Christian sources 

What is the historical basis for today’s atonement theology? Where did it come from, and how has it evolved throughout time? In Atonement, a sterling collection of renowned biblical scholars investigates the early manifestations of this core concept in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than imposing a particular view of atonement upon these texts, these specialists let the texts speak for themselves so that the reader can truly understand atonement as it was variously conceived in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, and early Christian literature. The resulting diverse ideas mirror the manifold perspectives on atonement today. 

Contributors to this volume—Christian A. Eberhart, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Martha Himmelfarb, T. J. Lang, Carol A. Newsom, Deborah W. Rooke, Catrin H. Williams, David P. Wright, and N. T. Wright—attend to the linguistic elements at work in these ancient writings without limiting their scope to explicit mentions of atonement. Instead, they explore atonement as a broader phenomenon that negotiates a constellation of features—sin, sacrifice, and salvation—to capture a more accurate and holistic picture. Atonement will serve as an indispensable resource for all future dialogue on these topics within Jewish and Christian circles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467459310

Book preview

ATONEMENT

Jewish and Christian Origins

EDITED BY

Max Botner, Justin Harrison Duff & Simon Dürr

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2020 Max Botner, Justin Harrison Duff, and Simon Dürr

All rights reserved

Published 2020

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7668-3

eISBN 978-1-4674-5931-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART 1

CRITICAL ISSUES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATONEMENT LEGISLATION IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

1.Atonement

Christian A. Eberhart

Introductory Comments

General Remarks on Sacrificial Rituals in the Hebrew Bible

The Hand-Leaning Gesture in the Context of Sacrificial Rituals

The Reception of Isaiah 52:13–53:12

The Death and Resurrection of Jesus (Romans 4:25)

2.Sin, Sacrifice, but No Salvation

Deborah W. Rooke

The Karet Penalty

Cut Off–But from What?

Conclusion

3.Atonement beyond Israel

David P. Wright

P’s ḥaṭṭā’t System

H’s ḥaṭṭā’t in Numbers 15:22–31

Introduction (Numbers 15:22–23)

Specific Cases (vv. 24–26, 27–29)

Intentional Sin (vv. 30–31)

Conclusion

PART 2

ANTHROPOLOGY, COSMOLOGY, AND MEDIATORS IN EARLY JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN ATONEMENT THEOLOGIES

4.When the Problem Is Not What You Have Done but Who You Are

Carol A. Newsom

The Origins of the Shift

Later Second Temple Developments

Conclusion

5.The High Priest in Ben Sira 50

Crispin Fletcher-Louis

Ben Sira 50

Hebrew Ben Sira 49:16–50:21

Priestly and Temple Service Makes All Present to God

Priesthood as a Representative Office Summing Up All Reality

Conclusion

6.Get the Story Right and the Models Will Fit

N. T. Wright

Introduction: The Distorted Story

Contours of the Biblical Narrative

Contours of Jesus’s Saving Death

The Cross in Its Narrative Framework

Conclusion

7.Seeing, Salvation, and the Use of Scripture in the Gospel of John

Catrin H. Williams

Composite Citations

Composite Allusions

Lamb of God (John 1:29, 36) as a Composite Allusion

John’s Lifting Up Sayings—Seeing the Exalted One

Seeing the Pierced One

Conclusion

8.Sealed for Redemption

T. J. Lang

Sealed by the Spirit in Ephesians 1:13

Sealing Terminology in the Realm of Commerce

Promise and Pledge of Inheritance

The Spirit as Ἀρραβών of Our Inheritance

The Redemption of the Acquisition

Conclusion

9.What Goes On in the Heavenly Temple?

Martha Himmelfarb

The Book of the Watchers and the Heavenly Temple

2 Enoch

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

The Book of Revelation

Epistle to the Hebrews and Testament of Levi

Conclusions

Bibliography

Contributors

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Subjects

Index of Scripture and Ancient Sources

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated in the symposium Atonement: Sin, Sacrifice, and Salvation in Jewish and Christian Antiquity, held at the University of Saint Andrews in June 2018. We wish to thank everyone who took the time to make the pilgrimage to our little seaside town on the east coast of Scotland. We are especially grateful to our plenary speakers and presenters for their willingness to contribute to this volume, which we hope will advance the rich tradition of the Saint Andrews Symposium for Biblical and Early Christian Studies.

Our symposium would not have been possible without generous funding from St. Mary’s College (School of Divinity) and from the Centre for Academic, Professional and Organisational Development (CAPOD) at the University of Saint Andrews. I (Max) would also like to thank my LOEWE colleagues at Goethe-Universität, especially Christian Wiese and Nina Fischer, for their support in organizing the conference. It is my pleasure to publish this book within the framework of the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art funded by the LOEWE research hub Religiöse Positionierung: Modalitäten und Konstellationen in jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Kontexten at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main/Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen.

We would also like to thank the faculty and postgraduate community at St. Mary’s College for their support in hosting the conference. A huge thanks to Madhavi Nevader, T. J. Lang, and Elizabeth Shively, who were kind enough to chair our parallel sessions and to ensure that things ran smoothly. A special thanks is also owed to Marian Kelsey, who patiently bounced ideas over the course of planning the symposium, and to the administrative secretaries at St. Mary’s College, especially Deborah Smith, who helped keep all the details in place. Our gratitude is also due to Tavis Bohlinger for covering the symposium on the Logos Academic Blog (https://academic.logos.com).

Finally, we are indebted to Trevor Thompson of Eerdmans Press for his support in helping this book come to fruition. Eerdmans has proven to be a welcoming home for our volume, and we are deeply grateful to Trevor and the entire Eerdmans team for making each stage of the publication process seamless and enjoyable.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Despite a dizzying array of questions and concerns, the concept of atonement remains vital to religious life in the twenty-first century. The holy day Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), for instance, marks the annual moment at which millions of Jewish worshippers around the globe seek to restore intimacy with God. The Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks,

We fast, we pray and we muster the courage to face the worst about ourselves. We are empowered to do so by our unshakeable belief that God loves, forgives, and has more faith in us than we do in ourselves. We can be better than we are, better than we were. And though we may have stumbled and fallen, God is holding out his hand to lift us, giving us the strength to recover, endure and grow to become the person He is calling on us to be: a blessing to others, a vehicle through which His light flows into the world, an agent of hope, His partner in the work of redemption.¹

Atonement is not relegated, however, to religious discourse. For example, Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel Atonement, on which the 2007 film of the same name is based, tells the story of Briony Tallis, an elderly British woman who attempts to atone for a childhood miscalculation through the process of writing. As an author with sole control over her characters’ outcomes, Briony likens herself to God and recasts the history of her loved ones with the happy outcomes she believes they deserve. At one point, she describes her correction of the past and her fresh testimony of their love as a stand against oblivion and despair.² McEwan’s protagonist thus stands as a powerful symbol of humanity’s fraught and complicated desire to rectify guilt, shame, and destructive acts, particularly offenses against persons long dead.

Since popular notions of atonement draw inspiration from ancient Judaism and Christianity, sacrificial rituals often become central to their logic and process. While the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE may have spelled an end to the bloody sacrifices of the Jews and the Christians and thus eventually to paganism itself,³ Jewish and Christian communities continued to preserve and interpret sacrificial rituals through the production of texts, art, and architecture.⁴ Their mental maintenance of sacrificial imaginaires has profoundly affected the theological imaginations of their successors, for better or for worse.

Consider the language used by the congregational minister Horace Bushnell, in his speech Our Obligation to the Dead, which he delivered at the end of the Civil War:

As the mild benignity and peaceful reign of Christ begins at the principle: without the shedding of blood, there is no remission, so, without the shedding of blood, there is almost nothing great in the world, or to be expected for it. For the life is in the blood, – all life; and it is put flowing within, partly for the serving of the nobler use in flowing out on fit occasion, to quicken and consecrate whatever it touches.⁵

Bushnell’s appeal to the lifeforce of blood trades on language in the Pentateuch (cf. Lev 17:11), and his insistence that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission [i.e., ‘forgiveness’] resonates with early Jewish and Christian traditions (cf. Heb 9:22; b. Yoma 5a).⁶ While one might dispute his interpretation of the biblical material,⁷ Bushnell’s conviction that blood spilled in battle has the power to expiate the land of the United States is a remarkable, if not disturbing, indication that talk of the end of bloody sacrifices requires qualification.⁸ The matter wanted here, Bushnell declared at the end of his speech, is blood, not logic, and this now we have on a scale large enough to meet our necessity.⁹ Blood provides the material currency of progress, a red-streaked path of suffering and death oriented toward a better future. Such, at least, thought Bushnell, is the logic of the cross.

While Bushnell’s unsavory vision of national atonement is eccentric, one claim often rings true for students of ancient Judaism and Christianity: the matter wanted here is blood, not logic.¹⁰ Indeed, more than two millennia of Jewish and Christian theorizing on the logic of atonement suggests that its logic is, in fact, highly flexible. Different strata of the Hebrew Bible bear witness to developments in sacrificial rituals¹¹ and their tradents continue to interpret their traditions in light of an ever-changing world: of temples, real and imagined; of mediators, human and angelic; of promises, realized or deferred. Any account of atonement, then, is but one offering in a vast marketplace of atonement theologies.¹²

The chapters in this volume provide points of entry into the marketplace of atonement. Rather than restrict our study to key terms, such as the piel of כפר (cf. the Greek simplex ἱλάσκομαι),¹³ we have asked our contributors to examine atonement as a broader phenomenon that negotiates a constellation of features: sin, sacrifice, and salvation. Recognizing that each feature has its own complicated history,¹⁴ we offer them as heuristic categories in order to interrogate the ways in which ancient Jewish and Christian writers envisaged the concept of atonement, broadly conceived.

Plan of the Book

The essays gathered in Part 1 of the volume outline critical issues in the study of atonement and trace the development of atonement legislation in the Hebrew Bible. Christian Eberhart’s chapter aims to introduce pivotal issues surrounding the concept of atonement in biblical studies. He focuses on four, in particular: 1) sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus, 2) the function of hand-leaning gestures in Levitical sacrifice, 3) early Christian reception of Isaiah’s fourth servant poem (Isa 52:13–53:12), and 4) early Christian reflection on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To this end, Eberhart argues, it is incumbent upon exegetes and theologians today to find avatars—or suitable representatives—to communicate the redemptive framework of the Christ-event.

The next two chapters examine topics related to atonement in the Pentateuch. Deborah Rooke interrogates instances in the Priestly source where atonement becomes impossible, resulting in the offender being cut off from the community. While there has been much debate about the nature of the karet penalty, Rooke argues that its rhetorical function was equally significant to the tradents of P: to inculcate the values of the Priestly legislators into the minds of the community for whom they were writing. Subtle distinctions in the ways the karet penalty is articulated in P may evince a concern to order hierarchically even the most heinous offenses.

David Wright concludes Part 1 by tracing the Holiness school’s expansion of the Priestly source’s regulations on the sin or purification offering (ḥaṭṭā’t). Through careful textual analysis, Wright shows that H amends regulations on the ḥaṭṭā’t to include the immigrant (gēr) living in the land of Israel. In contrast to the ethical concerns of Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code, however, H is strictly concerned with the gēr as a legal category. If the sins of the gēr can pollute the land, as H maintains, then it is vital that the principal source of atonement, the ḥaṭṭā’t sacrifice, is made available to them.

The seven essays gathered in Part 2 explore the intersection of anthropology, cosmology, and mediatorial figures in ancient Jewish and Christian atonement theologies. Carol Newsom leads off by delineating the early Jewish construction of a debased anthropology. According to this framework, human persons lack the requisite moral agency assumed in the classic model of atonement. In fact, humans are so corrupted that the only possibility for atonement and reconciliation is radical divine intervention. Such anthropological pessimism, however, is not an end in itself. Rather, it underscores the religious paradox that it is only by immersing oneself in deep abjection that one is prepared for exaltation.

In contrast to the pessimistic anthropology outlined by Newsom, Crispin Fletcher-Louis traces an exalted view of idealized humanity in Sirach. A close reading of the Hebrew version of Sira 49:16–50:21 suggests that the high priest Simeon, as depicted in his priestly service, is the locus of at-one-ment, the place where the divine glory, the people of Israel, and the cosmos are held together. The sage’s encomium to Simeon, according to Fletcher-Louis, supports the thesis that some Jews conceived of the office of the high priest as the place where the rift between humanity and divinity is overcome.

N. T. Wright takes up and advances Eberhart’s suggestion that early Christian atonement theology holds the various elements of the Christ-event together in a narrative framework. While Wright concedes that atonement models have a necessary place in Christian theology, he suggests that they often become imprecise ways of saying the same thing, particularly when decoupled from the biblical story. The interpretive key to Jesus’s saving death, Wright proposes, is the Passover narrative, understood by early Christians as God’s victory over sin and death (Christus Victor) through the cross of his Messiah (substitution). It is within this narrative that vicarious substitution, participation in Christ, and eschatological joy in the new creation have their raison d’être.

Wright’s thesis about the significance of Passover in early Christian atonement theology is tested in Catrin Williams’s careful analysis of the ways John the evangelist uses composite citations and allusions to recast soteriological images. The designation of Jesus as the Lamb of God, for example, creatively weaves together traditional language from the Exodus Passover narrative with motifs from Isaiah’s fourth servant poem—thus, John’s Lamb does what no other Passover lamb ever did or was intended to do: he bears the sin of the world. Isaiah’s servant poems are so pervasive, in fact, that they provide the evangelist with linguistic resources to articulate both the saving effects of Jesus’s death and the sensory and noetic operations through which these are grasped by his disciples.

T. J. Lang’s chapter on atonement in Ephesians marks a transition from the canonical Gospels to the Pauline corpus. Lang attends, in particular, to the collocation of sealing and redemption language, which he argues Paul (or one of his followers) draws from the realm of commerce. Seals on ancient tablets, testaments, and manumission documents validated their ownership and integrity, while the motif of redemption/ransom entailed the acquisition of persons. Thus, in Ephesians, God’s Spirit is both the seal of God’s possession—i.e., human persons who have been ransomed by the currency of Christ’s blood—and the down payment of their inheritance.

Martha Himmelfarb concludes the book by asking the question, What goes on in the heavenly temple? Developing and conflicting ideas emerge in early Jewish and Christian texts. While a number of early apocalypses, such as the Book of the Watchers, conceive of heaven as the locus of an angelic liturgy of praise, the liturgies do not appear particularly interested in the imagery of the sacrificial cult or the concept of atonement. Conversely, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, Revelation, and the Testament of Levi, each in its own way, imagines a number of cultic gifts mediated in celestial space, with a particular focus on the aroma of the gift. Material blood manipulation in the heavenly realms, however, is absent or suppressed. Hebrews alone, notes Himmelfarb, dares to imagine blood in heaven in a one-time ritual of atonement.

1. Jonathan Sacks, The Most Personal of Festivals, http://rabbisacks.org/the-most-personal-of-festivals/.

2. Ian McEwan, Atonement: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 351.

3. So Elias J. Bickerman, Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139. Bickerman’s statement, of course, is a retrospective judgment. As David Biale notes, The ‘end of sacrifice’ in Western religion was . . . a complex and dialectical process rather than an abrupt caesura (45). Many Jews continued to hope for the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple (see, e.g., Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionsim in the Study of Ancient Judaism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 203–11), and there is ample evidence that some Jews and Christians participated in animal sacrifice well beyond the first century CE. On this see Daniel Stökl Ben-Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity, WUNT 163 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

4. For an overview of Jewish and Christian attempts to preserve the legacy of the Second Temple and its sacrificial system, see Hugh W. Nibley, Christian Envy of the Temple, JQR 50 (1959/60): 97–123, 229–40; Steven Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 11 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); Stökl Ben-Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur; Herbert L. Kessler, "The Codex Barbarus Scaligeri, the Christian Topography, and the Question of Jewish Models of Early Christian Art," in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Nehere, ed. Katrin Kogman-Appel and Mati Meyer, The Medieval Mediterranean 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 139–54; Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Synagogue—Archaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research, HdO 105 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), esp. 46–50, 163–220, 292–338; Rina Talgam, The Representation of the Temple and Jerusalem in Jewish and Christian Houses of Prayer in the Holy Land in Late Antiquity, in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire, ed. Natalie B. Bohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 222–49.

5. Horace Bushnell, Our Obligation to the Dead, in Building Eras in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 325–328, here 325.

6. On blood manipulation in the Hebrew Bible, see William Gilders, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004). On blood manipulation in Tannaitic and Aramaic literature, see Mira Balberg, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). For a discussion of the blood of Jesus and its sacrificial operations in early Christian literature, see Christian A. Eberhart, Kultmetaphorik und Christologie: Opfer-und Sühneterminologie im Neuen Testament, WUNT 306 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 78–129.

7. For instance, Bushnell interprets the hapax legomenon αἱματεκχυσία in Heb 9:22 as an indisputable reference to the shedding of blood or blood-spilling that occurs through an act of slaughter. This interpretation is possible, but concurrences of the noun αἷμα and the verb ἐκχέω in Septuagint ritual contexts suggests the writer has in mind the manipulation or pouring out of blood from a bowl or vessel at the altar for burnt offerings in the process of the Levitical sin offering. See David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of the Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews, NovTSup 141 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 291n157.

8. Unwittingly, Bushnell is reviving ancient discourse about the intersection of war and human sacrifice, on which see Laura Nasrallah, The Embarrassment of Blood: Early Christians and Others on Sacrifice, War, and Rational Worship, in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, ed. Jennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 142–66.

9. Bushnell, Our Obligation, 328.

10. To be sure, blood and the moment of slaughtering sacrificial gifts is not the sine qua non of ancient sacrifice; see, e.g., Jonathan Z. Smith, The Domestication of Sacrifice, in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 191–205; Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Christian Eberhart (Studien zur Bedeutung der Opfer im Alten Testament: Die Signifikanz von Blut- und Verbrennungsriten im kultischen Rahmen, WMANT 94 [Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2002]), argues that ritual burning is the constitutive element of sacrifice in Lev 1–7, a central feature of Greek sacrifice as well (see F. S. Naiden, Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through the Roman Periods [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013]).

11. On the development of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, see Gary A. Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel: Studies in Their Social and Political Importance, HSM 41 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).

12. For example, Robert Jensen points out that there has never been a formal doctrine of atonement to which Christians must adhere: If you deny that Christ is ‘of one being with the Father’ or that the Son and Jesus are but one hypostasis, you are formally a heretic. But you can deny any explanation of how the atonement works, or all of them, or even deny that any explanation is possible, and be a perfectly orthodox believer (On the Doctrine of Atonement, PSB 27 [2006]: 100–8, here 100).

13. For discussion of כפר in the ritual contexts of the Hebrew Bible, cf. David P. Wright, Disposal of Impurity, SBLDS 101 (Atlanta: SBL, 1987), 291–99; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 3 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1079–84; Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: The Priestly Conceptions, Hebrew Bible Monographs 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005). For discussion of the translation ἱλάσκομαι and its cognates in Septuagint traditions, see C. H. Dodd, Ιλάσκεσθαι: Its Cognates, Derivates and Synonyms in the Septuagint, JTS 32 (1930), 352–60; Takamitsu Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 151–52; Dirk Büchner, Ἐξιλάσασθαι: Appeasing God in the Septuagint Pentateuch, JBL 129 (2010): 237–60. The terms כפר and ἐξιλάσκομαι appear in a diverse range of contexts in the biblical tradition (e.g., the burnt offering, cf. Lev 1:4) and invite a diverse range of reflections on the active subjects, objects, and means of atonement. For instance, in both ritual and nonritual contexts, Israel’s deity is rarely the active subject of atonement in the biblical tradition (exceptions in the MT include 2 Chr 30:15–20 and Ezek 16:63). Normally, the active subject is an intermediary figure, such as Moses or a priest. In ritual contexts, Israel’s sanctuary typically features as the direct accusative object of atonement (כפר), though it can, along with other nonhuman objects, function as the indirect object, taking the pattern על + כפר (cf. Lev 16:16). When atonement concerns persons, the Priestly writers consistenly use the verbal pattern בעד / על + כפר (cf. also 11QT 16:14–17:2, 26:9). In LXX traditions, this pattern is paralleled by ἐξιλάσκομαι + direct accusative object or ἐξιλάσκομαι + περί, respectively.

14. On the concept of sin in early Judaism and Christianity, see Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Joseph Lam, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For the situation of Jewish sacrifice in the broader context of ancient Mediterranean religions, see Stanley K. Stowers, On the Comparison of Blood in Greek and Israelite Ritual, in Hesed Ve-emet: Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs, ed. Jodi Magness and Seymour Gitin (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 179–96; Jennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, eds., Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Christopher A. Foraone and F. S. Naiden, eds., Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Naiden, Smoke Signals; Daniel C. Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Daniel C. Ullucci, Sacrifice in the Ancient Mediterranean: Recent and Current Research, CBR 13 (2015): 388–439.

PART ONE

Critical Issues and the Development

of Atonement Legislation

in the Hebrew Bible

CHAPTER ONE

ATONEMENT

Amid Alexandria, Alamo, and Avatar

CHRISTIAN A. EBERHART

At many times and in many ways, religious communities and the academy have employed, defined, developed, explored, and criticized the topics of atonement, sin, sacrifice, and salvation. This essay will try to provide some introductory remarks on the subject matter as well as a recapitulation of previous discussions and results. It will start with reflections on what the term atonement means, proceed to study sacrificial rituals in the Hebrew Bible with specific interest in their interpretation, and conclude by looking at how these rituals and the topic of atonement have been adopted in early Christian literature, with a focus on references to the famous Suffering Servant Song in Isa 52:13–53:12 LXX. Along the way, I will advocate closer readings of biblical texts in order to highlight plausible models of reception within early Jewish and Christian contexts. I will participate in the corporate endeavor of better understanding these texts in their historical framework, and I will point out stumbling blocks as we try to explore an ever-changing and important—but certainly not the only—paradigm for reconciliation and salvation in the socioreligious continuum we call early Judaism and Christianity.

Introductory Comments

What is atonement? It is difficult to define and determine the meaning of this term as it refers to a concept that has been used in a variety of religious traditions over a long period of time. We convened for a symposium at the University of St. Andrews to study this topic, and our investigation led us into the historical depth of Israelite and early Jewish traditions as well as to dogmatic core areas of Christianity. On the one hand, this event dealt with the actual and remembered worship space of the religious, cultural, and sociopolitical epitome of Judaism: the Jerusalem Temple. On the other hand, it also dealt with key referents within the history of Christianity. Not all Christians, however, universally agree on the central place of atonement. To paint the image with broad strokes, Eastern Orthodoxy (and in a similar way, Eastern Catholicism) emphasizes the concepts of incarnation and theosis—i.e., the deification of humanity.¹ In Western Christianity, however, atonement occupies a more central place in the teachings of the church. As a result, a diverse spectrum of atonement theories has been developed throughout history.²

To approach our topic of inquiry, it is helpful to start in the year 1526 CE. At that time, William Tyndale (1494–1536), a leading personality in the English Reformation movement, coined the term atonement. For Tyndale, the term literally meant at-one-ment. It conceptually presupposes that humans and God are separated and that humans cannot directly or immediately communicate or interact with God. Religious ideas and theories that envision methods of overcoming this separation are often said to belong to the category of atonement. Conceptual equivalents are expiation and propitiation. All three terms tend to address the removal or elimination of wrath, sin, guilt, or impurities. They do not, however, cover the same spectrum of meaning. Linguistically, propitiation and atonement evoke interpersonal relations: propitiation conveys the appeasement of a person or