2019/02/01 by Curtis Hutt
Arts and Humanities · #Ancient Near East History #Biblical Studies and Interpretation #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
paper · doi:10.1086/700578
openalex publication_date 2019/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Previous articleNext article FreeOff the Beaten Track: Animal Sacrifice and Christian TraditionsCurtis HuttCurtis HuttUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this special issue, conceived along the sidelines of the XXI IAHR World Congress in Erfurt in 2015, the authors address animal sacrifice and its connections to diverse, historically Christian, and neighboring religious traditions. Each contribution, in very different ways, explores new and largely untraveled research paths. Whether through the examination of new zooarchaeological evidence, iconographic representations, ethnographic fieldwork, or contemporary political theology, the authors invite us to reconsider how we think about animal sacrifice and Christian traditions. Emergent Christian practices as well as theological approaches to animal sacrifices are not only placed in historical contexts but are seen as evolving—in the ancient world as well as the modern. This is confirmed upon examination of significant pre-Christian Greek and Jewish precedents that form the historical backdrop against which nascent Christian approaches to animal sacrifice arise as well as in the changing views of animal sacrifice in Central Australia and in modern European Protestant political theology in the late nineteenth century. While the topics engaged by these authors are distinct, their inclusion together in this volume is meant to highlight some synergies between their work. In the first two pieces, interpretive priority is accorded to results obtained through the examination of material religion. In the fourth article, the author discusses Protestant theological claims that sacrifice “ended”—something that the second article disputes! Finally, two pieces address in quite distinctive ways the work of distinguished forebears Emile Durkheim and William Robertson Smith.Gunnel Ekroth, in “Why Does Zeus Care about Burnt Thighbones from Sheep? Defining the Divine and Structuring the World through Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greece,” begins this volume by reassessing the historical backdrop against which nascent Christian traditions related to sacrifice emerge. Animal sacrifice was the central ritual action of ancient Greek religion, as well as of most religions of the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. Although modern scholars have studied this religious practice for more than one hundred years, animal sacrifice has always posed something of a problem, as it is so fundamentally alien to western European Christian culture. In order to understand animal sacrifice in the ancient world, one needs to encounter it in its own historical setting. This means exploring its role not only in what moderns more narrowly construe as the religious sphere but also in social and political orderings. Of central importance, to archaeologists of sacrifice like Ekroth, is also the practical execution of the rituals.Ekroth introduces readers to a relatively new wealth of material evidence about animal sacrifice in the pre-Christian, Greek world. Ekroth’s critical contribution is to introduce and assess the results of recent research on the archaeology of sacrifice. Her main concern is with historical animal sacrifice as it was actually performed, primarily in the thysia ritual, which occurred across ancient Greek sanctuaries between the eighth and first centuries BCE. At these events, mainly domesticated animals along with the fruit of agricultural labor and libations, after being dedicated to a deity, were sacrificed and shared—with butchered portions ostensibly going to gods like Zeus who preferred thighbones, while the rest of the animal, in particular the meat, was given to the human participants. Ekroth encounters in the material handling, treatment, and distribution of meat derived from ritualized animal sacrifice an ancient structuring of the world. Analysis of these sacrificial rituals provides us with windows to the cosmologies, hierarchies of social power, and group identities associated with those who participated.Like Ekroth, in “A Threefold Heresy: Reassessing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Animal Sacrifice in Late Antiquity,” I take an indirect approach to the study of Christians and animal sacrifice. Similarly leaning on the examination of material culture as well as surviving texts, I challenge three dogmas related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic animal sacrifice in late antiquity that I believe too often stymie research into obscured pasts. Critically, some overlooked Christian approaches to animal sacrifice are understood in relation to Jewish and Islamic practices rather than “pagan” practices.I lead us down roads less traveled in my account of animal sacrifice in late antiquity. In addition to challenging the rabbinic dogma that Jews gave up all animal sacrifices after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, I reexamine the evidence, material and textual, for the continued role of the Jewish priesthood into late antiquity. Earlier sacrificial rituals associated with former temple activities are transformed in new contexts, across wide-ranging historical and geographical locales. The second dogma that I undermine concerns the rejection and demise of animal sacrifices in late antique Christian traditions. In spite of the official propaganda, in specific cases in the ancient world until today, ritualized animal sacrifice is performed by Christians. These traditions, like those advancing anti-sacrifice agendas, are illuminated against the background of older Greek and Jewish religious practices. Far from the received teachings in many Western traditions that Christians, like post–Second Temple Jews, did not perform sacrifice, I conclude by arguing that animal sacrifice in early Islamic traditions is primarily derived from less well known Jewish and Christian exemplars.Jens Kreinath, in “‘Finding’ the Eucharist in Central Australia: Intichiuma and the Intertextualities of Magic and Religion in the Study of Ritual Sacrifice,” examines at length ethnographic data and its subsequent interpretation related to sacrificial rituals among the Arrente of Central Australia at the end of the nineteenth century. For Kreinath, European Christian understandings of the Eucharist had an effect on the way that the Intichiuma ceremonies were described and interpreted—by missionaries and anthropologists alike. At times, implied understandings of the Eucharist not only guided the gathering of ethnographic data but distorted it. Just as important, these ethnographic accounts in turn had an impact on classic methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of religion and ritual in its foundational stages.Kreinath champions Emile Durkheim—contra James Frazer and Sigmund Freud—in his assessment of the ethnographic work of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, as well as Carl Strehlow. Spencer and Gillen prompted a revolution in the work of James Frazer on totemism, in which he came to propound an evolutionary view of the relationship between magic, religion, and science. Frazer, who argued that the evidence Spencer and Gillen produced confirmed William Roberston Smith’s theory of the totem sacrament, explicitly connected the Intichiuma to biblical sacrifice in Leviticus as well as the Eucharist. In this case, as in many others, biblical understandings found their way to the Central Australian desert. Strehlow’s ethnographic contributions, in addition to his critique of Spencer and Gillen’s work, led him to reject Frazer’s general theory of the relation between magic and religion. Kreinath argues that Freud, like Frazer, disregards fundamental cultural differences in his account of totemic meals. Durkheim manages more clearly, though not completely, to avoid employing theologically loaded Christian sacramental language and categories in his assessments of Intichiuma ceremonies. Throughout this back and forth, the sacrificial rituals examined not only served as ethnographic evidence for the sacramental eating of sacred food but also opened up the possibility to reinterpret the Eucharist in light of this evidence.In the final contribution to this volume, Robert Yelle in “From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Some Transformations in the Politics of Sacrifice from the Reformation to Roberston Smith” reviews a seismic shift in Protestant characterizations of animal sacrifice. What was commonly viewed as ritual acquiescence to the demands of a violent sovereign came to be understood as having originated in a communal meal. This is evident in the late nineteenth-century work of Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith, both of whom viewed animal sacrifice as encountered in ancient biblical Judaism as degraded from its origins. What began as a spontaneous, communal feast had become, as encountered in much of the Hebrew Bible in keeping with their documentary hypothesis, a legalistic ritual dominated by priests and focused on burnt offerings and expiation. Several details related to the Protestant documentary hypothesis of Wellhausen, Smith, and others have been criticized in the past. Protestant bias against Jews—especially the priestly editors of the Hebrew Bible who were too “ritualistic,” in addition to “legalistic”—is clearly evident. Most significantly, for Yelle, the way that Protestants viewed the ritual sacrifice of animals changed.This article takes the next step. Sidestepping the question of whether or not the characterization of animal sacrifice as spontaneous, communal feast is more historically accurate, Yelle shows us how Wellhausen and Smith’s views echoed older theological ideas going back to the Reformation. Yelle highlights connections between this new view of sacrifice and Protestant Christian ideas that the Gospel ended sacrifice; Lutheran and Puritan ideas that the Eucharist was not a sacrifice, but originated as a communal meal—an idea that eventually was applied to sacrifice itself; and rationalizing tendencies in Protestantism, such as Deism, that culminated in the critique of the Mosaic ceremonial laws as based on an irrational and arbitrary divine command. The sum of such discourses effected a shift in the representation of sacrifice as a communal act rather than an expression of sovereign violence. This was at the same time also a shift in political theology. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 58, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700578 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.