©2007, UrbisMedia
“Take your son, your only son – yes, Isaac, whom you love so much – and go to the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will point out to you.” (Genesis 22:1-18)
There is a lot about sheep in the Bible. Christ is both a shepherd, always finding the lost lamb (us) and returning us to his flock (the Church); but he is also the lamb himself—the agnus dei—who is sacrificed for the sins of the world by his Father in Heaven. There is a lot of sacrificing of lambs that goes on in the Bible, too. [1] I think that there is also a filial dimension to all this lamb sacrificing.
Have you ever noticed the hang-ups about fathers and sons in the Bible? From an anthropological perspective this was a time when social systems were a lot closer to relationships between people and herd animals. Remember that the Hebrews were pastoral people; they saw every year that rams would contest for the right to mate with the most ewes. They say them banging the their horns against one another, and they knew that often the contest was between a senior ram and a junior ram wanting to take over the harem. [2] Human social systems were somewhat the same. Patriarchy was the main type of system in play at the time, and sooner or later the old man was going to get challenged, or going to have to make a deal with one of his sons (primogeniture), giving him the herd and hence the license to get himself a few “ewes’ for himself. So there is always the tension between fathers and sons.
God asks Abraham to take his son to the top of a mountain and plunge a knife in him to show his faith in God. And Abe is quite ready to do it, before God says, “Just kidding. But why don’t you do a lamb as long as I’ve got you in the mood.” But when we get to the New Testament God the Father gets into the act himself with his own Son. This time there is no deus ex agni,Jesus is the lamb of God who will be sacrificed. [3]
The concept and practice of sacrifice, I would posit, is deeply embedded in human behavior. I think it began as a survival technique and then became (sometimes in a Faustian way) a form of metaphysical bribery. It probably began with early humans throwing joints of meet to distract predators from attacking them. [4] That would seem to make sense. So why not try to propitiate your gods in the same manner. (“Here, Great Ooog, Father of creation, have a little lamb, with mint jelly, my mother made it herself.”) Some people still today will spill a little wine before they drink, as s sop to their god or gods. Sacrifices were made before wars, weddings, and other major events, and some peoples, like the Aztecs, went a little overboard with vivisecting hearts for their god with the unpronounceable name.
Sacrificing a son, especially a first-born son, [5] was considered a major offering. One supposed that lambs were substituted because veal is a very tender and flavorful meat (certainly better than goat), and therefore a good animal sacrifice. Somewhere along the line sacrificing females came into practice. Anthropologists might suggest that sacrificing females by female infanticide, or adult (witches?), was a form of population control in tough times, since you got a double value from it. But then their might have been a different rationale for sacrificing virgins, especially after the so-called “intact” female became a valued acquisition for males.
So sacrifice went from a reasonable, and wise, practice of propitiating predators with some food as a means of human self-preservation, to a religiously-sanctioned practice of God playing loyalty games with old fools like Abraham, then all sorts
The notion that you have to give up something to get something sets op a rather commercial and instrumental relationship between people and their deities. As noted above, I think this begins early in human history and that we are almost “programmed” to reason in this manner. I sometimes find myself reflexively engaging in what I call Faust-bargains, saying to myself, “What would I give up to spend a night with Angelina Jolie or Halle Barry? Pasta? Cappuccino? My Left leg? My immortal soul?”
Sometimes religion gets us to turn the sacrifice upon ourselves. I remember the nuns who taught me in grade school going on about some saint—I Think it might have been St, Theresa of Avila, the “Little Flower”—sacrificing herself by wearing a crown of thorns, which she pushed deeper and deeper into her skull. We were supposed to oooh and aaahh at this, and many did, but there was that underlying suspicion that we were hearing the story of a mystical whack job who was being portrayed as a holy person. Later I learned that the Little Flower might have had some regret at sacrificing herself to chastity; she frequently wanted to be penetrated in the heart with a golden spear. [6]
Sacrifice is probably just another aspect of life. We do have to give up things to get other things, whether it’s a joint of beast to some preditor, or cigarettes and strong spirits to live a bit longer. Religion messes that up because we find that what is often given up in a religious exchange is some first-born son, some hapless female, or some cute little lamb or fatted calf. The way religion does it is that somebody else does the sacrificing for you. So much for divine justice.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.18.2007)
[1] I don’t know where or when mint jelly came into all this lamb sacrificing, but it makes all the difference.
[2] There were also some Biblical prohibitions against shepherds getting into the action. Apparently during those long, cold nights up in the high pastures some of those ewes got to be pretty good-looking .
[3] Just between you and me I could never get a good image of the Father and the Son together, you know, like playing catch, or going off fishing, or peeing in the woods together, dad and son stuff like that. Of course there would not be any need for the Father to take the Son aside and tell him about girls, since the Church just couldn’t abide the notion that the Son of God could have a normal sex life.
[4] Leading to the hypothesis that many carnivores went extinct because humans were tossing Kentucky Fried Chicken and super-sized fries to them.
[5] In Exodus 13:2 the Lord said, “Consecrate to me every first-born that opens the womb among Israelites, both man and beast, for it belongs to me.”
[6] Which is how Bernini portrayed her, as St. Theresa in Ecstasy, in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, in Rome, looking very much like she is in an orgasmic state.