As I was reading the book "Moral Transformation," I noticed that some sins didn't have a specific way to make up for them, and instead, they resulted in the death penalty. I mentioned this to the author, and he wished he had included it in his book. He generously permitted me to share chapter 12.  The following enumerates the sins for which no designated sacrifice existed.

Death Penalty Sins

• Murder - Gen. 9:6; Ex. 21:12-14,20,23; Lev. 24:17,21; Num. 35:16-34; Deut. 19.
• Smiting Parents- Ex. 21:15.
• Kidnapping - Ex. 21:16; Deut. 24:7.
• Cursing Parents - Ex. 21:17; Lev. 20:9.
• Negligence with animals that kill - Ex. 21:28-32.
• Witchcraft - Ex. 22:18.
• Bestiality –( sexual intercourse with an animal ) Ex. 22:19; Lev. 18:23-29; 20:15,16. Lev. 20:15,16
• Idolatry - Ex. 22:20; Deut. 17:2-7.
• Adultery (including sexual intercourse with father's wife, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law)  Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22-30.
• Working on the Sabbath - Ex. 35:2.
• Incest - Lev. 18:6-29; 20:11-22.
• Consecration of children to idols - Lev. 20:1-5.
• Sodomy/Homosexuality - Lev. 20:13.
• Whoredom - Lev. 21:9; Deut. 22:21,22.
• Sorcery   Lev. 20:27
• Blasphemy - Lev. 24:11-16.
• False prophecy - Deut. 13:1-18; 18:20.
• Leading men away from God - Deut. 13:6-18.
• Stubbornness, rebellious, glutton drunken sons - Deut. 21:18-23.
• False dreams and visions - Deut. 13:1-18.
• Rape Duet. 22:25

   As the author has stated below, "In Israel, sacrifices could not cleanse deliberate moral sins; repentance and prayer provided the only solution. Israel had a strong tradition of repentance, prayer and forgiveness."

Moral Transformation
By A.J. Wallace & R.D. Rusk
(Permission Granted by Author to Reproduce Chapter 12)

 Chapter 12

 Sacrifice

   To understand how the New Testament authors used sacrificial language to describe what Jesus had accomplished, we must first find out the way in which their culture understood sacrifices. Let us start with some background. Sacrificial practices predated the formation of ancient Israel. Both biblical narratives and studies of ancient cultures reveal that people made sacrifices long before the Jews received the sacrificial laws of the Torah. The covenant between God and Israel at Sinai did not introduce sacrificial practices, but rather provided formal guidelines and strict limits in order to control an already existing system. Generally, early Christian writers believed that God had never approved of ritual sacrifices and desired to phase them out. In their view, he regulated their practice first at Sinai and then critiqued them over time through the Prophets. Finally, he abolished them entirely following the life of Jesus and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.[1] As one scholar explains: “Early Christian writers collected together the anti-sacrificial passages in the prophets in order to show that God did not need or want the sacrifices of the Jews, but rather demanded obedience, learning to do good, desisting from evil, seeking justice, correcting oppression, and supporting the widow and orphan.”[2]

   In the last few centuries, many Christians have believed that Jesus died a substitutionary death on behalf of others to atone for their sin. This idea has become connected with the New Testament sacrificial language used to speak of Jesus’ death. Without understanding how ancient Israelite sacrifices actually worked, Christians often assume they worked through substitutionary atonement. One scholar explains it like this: “ideas that form the basis for certain interpretations of Jesus’ death are read back into the biblical texts regarding sacrifice so as to argue that the same ideas are behind ancient Jewish beliefs concerning sacrifice… it is argued that in ancient Israel, sacrifices were understood as involving the death of an animal as a substitute for the person who had sinned and thus deserved death: sinners themselves were spared this penalty when the animal victim endured it in their place.”[3] We could imagine that people offered sacrifices because they felt guilty of sin and worthy of death. The animals died in their place as substitutes, and took the punishment they deserved. Such an account has appeared widely in recent Christian literature, and it probably sounds familiar to many Christians today.

   As plausible as such a view might sound, recent scholarship shows that the Israelites understood their sacrifices very differently. “A deepening scholarly appreciation of ancient animal sacrifice has revealed that later Christian conceptions of sacrificial atoning death have been systematically projected back onto Judaism.”[4] We know this because scholars have studied the ancient texts carefully. They have examined how the people practising those sacrifices described what they did and why they did it. Largely, these scholars have reached agreement. Even anthropologists who study modern cultures that perform sacrifices report the same findings. It does not seem to matter what culture we study – Israelite or Greek, Indian or Hawaiian, ancient or modern – the same basic sacrificial principles and motivations appear around the world and throughout history. Modern scholars have studied ancient Jewish texts carefully (including the scriptures and other texts). They have found that the principles and motivations held by the Israelites have striking parallels in many other cultures – yet modern Westerners would find their ideas completely foreign!

   One scholar investigated the way in which the early Christians understood sacrifices as part of her doctoral research. She has also published several books on early Christianity. She noted this problem of misunderstanding the meaning of sacrifice, and explained it in this way:

[Christians today] live in a culture in which the practice of sacrifice is totally foreign – no doubt largely because of the influence of Christianity down the centuries. But the result is that we no longer seem to be in a position to know instinctively what the sacrifice language of our traditions really means. In fact, we get certain preconceptions about the meaning of sacrifice and so misinterpret the real point of the language we are using. Many books on the subject expound theories of sacrifice which are in fact modern reconstructions with little evidential basis in the ancient texts. The most common misconception when sacrificial language is applied to the death of Christ runs something like this: ‘God was angry with sinners. The Jews had tried to placate his anger by symbolically offering the lives of animals to him in place of their guilty selves. But this was inadequate and so Jesus offered a perfect sacrifice. He died as our substitute to appease God’s anger.’ With certain degrees of sophistication, this is the general picture one gets from listening to sermons or reading the majority of easily available books. Yet it is far from doing justice to the real religious outlook of the Jews, or the early Christians who used sacrificial terminology to sense the depth of meaning in the death of Christ. Clearly, if we are going to be able to appreciate the language of the liturgy and the New Testament, of our hymns and prayers, we need to go back and try to understand what sacrifice meant in the ancient world and what the new use of sacrifice language in Christianity meant to the worshippers of that time.”[5]

   We will present here the conclusion of numerous scholars after their extensive research into the ancient Israelites’ sacrificial system. Remember, the Israelites did not hold a 21^st-century Western view of life. They held a world view totally different from our modern one, which has been strongly shaped by science. We cannot understand their ideas about sacrifices through the filter of our modern world view. Their sacrificial ideas corresponded with the way in which they understood the world, so we can only understand their sacrifices properly within their cultural context.

 Israel’s sacrifices

   Cultures that sacrifice tend to perform a number of different rituals at different times for different purposes. Israel’s sacrificial system fitted this general rule. It used three major concepts that many other cultures also used: gifts, meals, and purification.[6]

 Gifts

   People in the ancient world often sacrificed to give “gifts to the gods,” as one ancient Greek writer noted.[7] We noted earlier that ancient cultures valued the giving and receiving of gifts highly. People could have many different motivations for giving gifts: to gain a person’s favour; to appease an angry person; to thank someone; or to repay a debt. It was believed widely that the gods abided by the normal rules of social interactions, and so people thought it appropriate to give them gifts for any of these reasons. The notion that gods accepted sacrifices as gifts thus had tremendous flexibility, and seems to have appeared in all sacrificial cultures.[8]

   Israelites gave the ‘first fruits’ offering to the priests of God as thanks for the harvest. In presenting this offering at the Temple, the offerer thanked God publicly for bringing his ancestors to the fertile land of Israel.[9] In a ‘burnt offering’ sacrifice, a whole animal would be burned as a gift to God. People would sometimes sacrifice a burnt offering in the hope that God would respond favourably to their prayers. We might call it ‘bribery’, but many ancient societies used this standard practice on a daily basis. They also gave gifts as a common customary way in which to appease those they had offended. So, if people believed they had angered God for some reason, they often attempted to appease him by giving him a gift.

   Initially, ancient Israel had no prisons. No crimes resulted in imprisonment and punishments took instead the form of either death or a fine. The ancient Israelites had very little coinage – since the wealth of their agricultural society consisted in livestock and grain – and therefore had to pay fines in food products. In some cases, the monetary value of the sacrifice was downgraded for poorer people according to what they could afford – birds instead of livestock, or just flour.[10] They paid these fines to God, and burned the offerings whole as compulsory ‘gifts.’ Hence, the Israelite ’burnt offering’ served several purposes: the motivation varied, but in all cases the giver sacrificed an animal or grain to God as a gift.

 Meals

   Meat was far rarer and more expensive in ancient societies than it is in modern times. The ancient world had no refrigeration and very poor quality salt, so they also needed to eat killed animals quickly. Naturally, many people were required in order to consume an entire animal in a short time, and the killing of an animal for meat was generally reserved for special celebrations involving many people. The group dynamics at such meals mattered greatly. Who sat where, who got which cuts of the meat, and even the preparation of the meal itself had great significance.[11] Many cultures gave a portion of the meal to the gods, who they believed shared the meal in fellowship with the community.

   Israel called such group banquets ’well-being’, ‘thanksgiving’, and ‘free-will’ offerings. They performed sacrifices of this type most commonly. A modern reader may feel that these do not truly count as ‘sacrifices’ at all, but, as in many ancient cultures, the Hebrew word for ‘sacrifice’ also meant ‘slaughter.’[12] They considered life sacred, and taking the life of an animal, even for eating, required an appropriate ritual. The Israelites held these community meal sacrifices in the presence of God and followed the relevant customs carefully.

 Purification

   Many pre-scientific cultures believed in the existence of magical forces of purity and impurity. As a useful analogy for these ideas, imagine this impurity as invisible dirt or bacteria. If people did not take care to keep things clean, they could become contaminated. If things became too dirty, and stayed dirty for a long time, then disease and suffering could result. People believed that demons thrived in an impure environment. An impure person or house could therefore become inhabited by demonic forces and powers. Purity had special importance around temples, in order to keep demons out of the homes of the gods. Hence, people performed rituals carefully in order to clean up any impurity quickly and keep things clean. Today, if parents saw that their children had failed to take off muddy shoes and trekked mud through the house, they would probably use some cleaning product to remove the dirt. In the same way, cultures that believed in magical purity and impurity used cleansing agents to remove impurity. Such cultures had various sets of cleansing agents, rituals, and incantations that they used to purify people or places, and used various substances and rituals to purify items magically.

   The Israelites used purification agents that included blood, ashes, coals, oil, water, cedarwood (a strongly scented red wood), red cows, red wool,[13] and hyssop (an aromatic herb). They believed that these substances acted in the way detergents do today. The detergent analogy even appears in the Bible.[14] As an example, one Israelite purification ritual after contact with dead bodies involved the following:

Take some ashes of the burnt purification offering, and running water shall be added in a vessel; a clean person shall take hyssop, dip it in the water, and sprinkle it on the tent, on all the furnishings, on the persons who were there, and on whoever touched the bone, the slain, the corpse, or the grave.[15]

   Obviously, cultures like that of the West would not perform such a ritual, as typically people do not believe in this kind of magical impurity today. The Israelites, however, believed that such rituals removed the magical contamination that resulted from contact with the dead. The Israelites believed that these magical impurities came from several sources, including corpses, some skin diseases, genital discharges, and moral wrongs.[16] Impurity could also arise if people made mistakes in rituals and did not follow proper procedure.

   The Israelites cared especially about maintaining the purity of the Temple, God’s dwelling. They believed that impurities elsewhere in Israel could spread into the Temple and contaminate it. The more impurity in Israel, the farther into the Temple the impurity would reach. They feared that God would abandon both the Temple and Israel if impurities contaminated the Holy of Holies.[17] Hence, they purified the Temple regularly. For serious contamination, they purified the inner sanctums of the Temple. Israel’s neighbours had similar practices to keep their temples ritually pure because they thought that purity warded off demons. They maintained the purity of their temples to prevent demons from entering, for if they did the gods would leave.[18]

   As we have already noted, one of the substances used in these purification rituals was blood. People thought that blood contained the life-force of the animal, and that they could use this pure life-force to wash away impurity. Israelites used blood regularly to purify the contaminated parts of their Temple, pouring or sprinkling the blood of animals on the outer altars to purify them. Once a year, on Yom Kippur (the Day of Purgation), the High Priest would use blood to purify the Holy of Holies. Consider this typical passage about a purification ritual being performed in God’s dwelling:

   The anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting. The priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle some of the blood seven times before the Lord in front of the curtain of the sanctuary. The priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense that is in the tent of meeting before the Lord; and the rest of the blood of the bull he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering, which is at the entrance of the tent of meeting.[19]

   All the important parts of the altar and Temple needed ritual purification using blood to prevent magical impurities from accumulating within the Temple.[20] Blood served as a magical detergent, not as a means of personal forgiveness. Personal forgiveness in Judaism came through repentance (as we saw in an earlier chapter). One scholar explains the function of blood in this way:

Failure to keep the temple pure meant to risk God’s anger and the loss of his presence. …the blood of the animal was the purging agent that was applied to various parts of the temple and removed the consequences of sins and impurities (that is, the pollution of the temple). The person did not receive forgiveness for a sinful act itself but dealt only with the consequences of such acts on the temple.[21]

   Another scholar has reached the same conclusion:

Who or what is being purified? Surprisingly, it is not the person with the moral or physical impurity. According to Leviticus, if his or her impurity is physical, only bathing is required to purify the body; if the impurity is moral (the unintended breach of a prohibition), a remorseful conscience clears the impurity. In neither case does the offering purify the person bringing the offering. … Blood is the ritual cleanser that purges the altar of the impurities inflicted on it by the offender.[22]

   A third scholar agrees that the Israelites viewed the animal’s blood “as a kind of spiritual disinfectant purifying the sanctuary of the pollution associated with sin and uncleanness.”[23] Traditionally, translators have called the rituals to purify the Temple with blood ‘sin‑offerings’, but these rituals are translated more accurately as ‘purification offerings.’[24]

   The Israelite Passover also functioned as a purification ritual.[25] In the original Passover, the Israelites had dabbed two purification agents (hyssop and blood) on their doors. The instructions were to “take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood in the basin.”[26] Other references to the Passover in the Bible confirm that the Israelites considered it a time of ritual purity in which they performed a purification ritual on their doors. The ancient Babylonians performed a similar practice. Their ritual involved “smearing a door with a mixture including bats’ blood and crushed spider.”[27] The Babylonians did this to create a barrier of purity around the door to protect against evil spirits. People in the ancient Near East performed similar rituals, daubing vulnerable parts of structures with blood to purify them and thereby ward off demonic forces.[28] In the original Passover, the Israelites purified the doorways of their dwellings to ward off the Angel of Death.

   Ancient Israelites, like people of many other ancient cultures, also believed in the power of curses – magical forces invoked by rituals to bring harm. Curses differed from impurity in that people could not simply wash them away. Instead, people could transfer them ritually. The ancient Greeks performed a ceremony in which they transferred the curses from a city to a slave. They then drove that person out of the city to bear away the curses. The Israelites had a similar annual ritual in which the High Priest placed two hands on a goat and prayed over it all the curses, sins and wrongs of the nation. They then drove that animal off into the wilderness to carry the curses away.[29] Note that they saw the goat simply as a means of transport, and that it did not die as an offering or a sacrifice. It did not die nor suffer on behalf of others but simply carried the curses away, out into the wilderness.[30]

   These purification rituals were not, strictly speaking, sacrifices to God. In rituals involving blood, the actual death of the animal had no relevance. In many purification rituals they did not use blood at all and instead used other substances as purification agents. These rituals may strike us as magical, ritualistic and primitive, yet the ancient Israelites took them very seriously. Professionals performed them in a formal and public setting, and people believed these rituals had great power.

 Clarifying modern misunderstandings

   The three concepts of gift, meal, and purification correspond to ancient Israel’s three types of sacrifice – the three reasons they killed animals. In Israel’s sacrificial system, as in most other cultures, the actual death of the animal itself had no relevance. As one scholar notes: “In ancient Jewish and ancient Mediterranean animal sacrifices and in the rites of numerous other cultures the death of the animal was an incidental prelude to the ritual. Strange as it may seem to people steeped in the legacy of Christianity; these sacrificing cultures attach no special significance to the death of the animal itself.”[31] Rather, they attached importance to what they did with the animal’s blood and flesh, which they would eat, burn, or use in rituals. Israel’s sacrificial texts discuss these aspects at length, and hardly discuss the death of the animal itself at all. They mention the actual death of the animals only briefly, often to outline simply the most humane way in which to kill the animals.

   In Israel, sacrifices could not cleanse deliberate moral sins; repentance and prayer provided the only solution.[32] Israel had a strong tradition of repentance, prayer and forgiveness.[33] In their view, a burnt offering gift might appease God and encourage him to accept a person’s repentance and prayers for forgiveness. Their standing before God, though, depended on his kindness and their own prayer and repentance, not on any sacrifices they might perform.

   If a transgression deserved the death penalty, no sacrifice could be given. Israel’s legal code either fined people in the form of compulsory burnt offerings or applied the death penalty (or in some cases, exile). People could offer sacrificial fines if, and only if, their transgressions did not deserve the death penalty. Hence, if we remain consistent with the way their law worked, we see that the animal never died as a substitution for the offerer. This concept would have been totally foreign to the Ancient Israelites.

   Many different cultures followed the custom that the person bringing the sacrifice identified the animal publicly as theirs by placing a hand on it.[34] Some Christians have thought mistakenly that the Israelites did this to transfer the sins of the sinner to the animal. Many scholars, therefore, take pains to reject this view explicitly and note that the evidence contradicts it.[35] The Israelites followed the hand-laying practice for all their sacrifices – gifts, meals, and purification rituals.[36] In all three of these types of sacrifice, transferring sin to the animal would not have made sense. It would have polluted the gift that the worshipper gave to God, contaminated the meat they ate, or spoiled the blood that they used to purify the Temple. For meal sacrifices, the holy offerer did not even have any sin to transfer. The Israelite practice of hand-laying more closely parallels the customs we see in other cultures, in which it publicly identified the person bringing the sacrifice. It had little to do with atonement. The only time in the Israelite rituals where such a transfer of sin took place was on Yom Kippur. On that day, the high priest laid both hands on the goat, rather than only one. After praying over it the curses and sins of the nation he did not sacrifice it, but instead sent it away into the wilderness.

 Development of sacrificial ideas

   Studies have found that it is common for the sacrificial ideas within different cultures to change over time, moving typically toward moral ideas and away from ritual and magical ones.[37] One scholar has observed: “In cultures from Asia to Europe to Africa there is a progressive and observable development away from violent sacrificial practices toward a concentration on ethics.”[38] Sacrificial systems tend to focus initially only on ritual and magic. People see morality as unrelated and irrelevant. Yet, over time, morality becomes as important as ritual. Eventually, people reject ritual and magic and stop making sacrifices. They then start to use sacrificial language metaphorically to talk about morality. A similar progression of ideas occurred among the Israelites and early Christians.

   The writings of the Psalms and Prophets in the Old Testament seem to have moved the Israelites some distance toward emphasising morality at the expense of ritual. Some of their comments include:

I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats… cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.[39]

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon…But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.[40]

   They also used the word ‘sacrifice’ metaphorically to refer to morality rather than to an animal on an altar. One Psalm reads, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.”[41]

   The New Testament authors rejected sacrifices and replaced them completely with morality.[42] Within the Gospels we see some clear statements about the importance of morality compared to that of sacrifices:

Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”[43]

“To love [God] with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,” and “to love one's neighbor as oneself,” – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.[44]

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