surmise that they were known at least some time prior to the fall of Jerusalem. If the text adopted above be correct, another point of interest emerges; the four sorts of offerings fall into three classes (as they do in Philo): (1) Burnt-offerings; (2) Peace-offerings; (3) Guilt- and Sin-offerings.

This threefold division corresponds to a threefold method (regarded from the priestly standpoint) of disposing of the flesh of the sacrificial victims of the burnt-offering the priests ate nothing, of the peace-offering they ate only certain joints received by them as a due before the remainder of the flesh was returned to the bringer of the offering, of the sin- and guilt-offerings they ate all except certain small portions which were burnt on the altar. The different disposition of the flesh in the case of whole- or burnt-offering and the peace-offering was ancient custom attested no less by early Hebrew literature than by the later-in particular by P and the Mishnah. But the fact that the sin- and guilt-offerings were to be eaten by the priests though they could not be eaten by the laity is first attested by Ezekiel. Was Ezekiel, then, the creator of this distinction? Can the argument from silence be invoked to prove that he was? Once again this seems to me doubtful, and for two reasons: (1) none of the allusions in Ezekiel to this disposition of these offerings suggests novelty; the first occurs in the account of the endowment of the priesthood; Yahweh says to Ezekiel of the priests: 'They shall have no (landed) inheritance, I am their inheritance, ye shall give them no possession in Israel; I am their possession. The cereal-offering and the sin-offering and the guilt-offering, these shall they eat, and every devoted thing in Israel shall be theirs' and so forth (Ezek. 4428 f.). Other allusions to the eating of sin- and guilt-offerings occur in 4620 which defines the place where the sin-offerings are to be boiled; and 4213 which defines the place where the priests are to eat these offerings; (2) there is no earlier priestly treatment of sacrifice than Ezekiel's, and from the standpoint of the laity in reference to the disposal of the sacrificial victim, sacrifices, both first and last, fell into two and not into three classes: sacrifices for the layman after the exile no less than before it consisted either of sacrifices of the flesh of which he partook, or of sacrifices of which he did not partake; or otherwise stated,

either of sacrifices which the giver brought to Yahweh and left entire at the altar to be disposed of as Yahweh might direct whether by being burnt entire on his altar or in the main consumed by his proxies the priests, or the sacrifices were animals which were brought entire to the altar and slain there, but of which after this ritual treatment the greater part was taken away again to be enjoyed by the giver and his friends.

The conclusions to which these various considerations seem to me to point are these: (1) The application of the terms non and be to a particular class of victims from which the offerer parted wholly arose in priestly circles; (2) the terms embody a doctrine of the expiatory character and virtue of certain sacrifices; (3) in priestly circles this terminology already existed before the Exile and had been familiar to Ezekiel before he left Jerusalem in 597 B. C.; (4) certain important elements in the ritual of these sacrifices, such for example as ritual eating of them by the priests, had also become established before the Exile; but (5) we cannot from Hebrew literature more precisely trace the history of the differentiation of sin- and guilt-offerings from the burnt-offering, nor of the ritual by which they came to be distinguished. Nor again can we form any clear idea of the frequency with which such offerings were made before the Exile. If we wish to determine the strength of the association of the idea of expiation with sacrifice in early Israel we must turn, as I hope to do in the next lecture, to other considerations. But in estimating the strength of that association in later Israel and in the Judaism which Ezekiel did so much to create, and which in its turn created the conditions under which Christianity arose, it is important among other things to take account of the frequency with which, under the law, sin-offerings were required of individuals, and the prominence of the sin-offering in certain ceremonies of national import. The last point I shall have some opportunity of considering in the third lecture.

V

SACRIFICE, PROPITIATION, AND EXPIATION

ii

THE nomenclature of sacrifice, as we have seen, expresses the purpose of sacrifice only to a relatively small extent, and consequently in a correspondingly small degree reflects the propitiatory or expiatory character of Jewish sacrifice. Two terms alone out of the many names that occur for classes or subclasses of sacrifices express an expiatory purpose or function; these two, the DN and the non, appear with frequency in the post-exilic literature of the Jews; they do not occur at all in pre-exilic literature, and though we may infer that the names were nevertheless current before the Exile, it is possible that sacrifices so named were first differentiated relatively late in the pre-exilic period, and then primarily in priestly circles; it is also possible, not to say highly probable, that as compared with the place which they occupied after the Exile, the sin-offerings and the guilt-offerings played but a subordinate part in preexilic Jewish life.

But apart from the names there are of course other means of determining whether other, and what other, sacrifices besides the sin-offerings and the guilt-offerings were offered with a propitiatory or expiatory purpose. And first there is the attachment to a law or description of sacrifice that it was made

, or as the E.V. commonly renders, 'to make atonement'. Our chief purpose at present is to observe the extent to which an 'atoning' purpose (I use the term 'atoning' quite provisionally and conventionally) is actually ascribed to sacrifices in the literature, and how far the literature in this respect corresponds to the prominence of 'atoning' virtues in the actual consciousness of the people at various periods. It is of quite secondary

importance to determine the original meaning of the root, and I will refer to the controversy that has arisen on this subject briefly, and merely in order to bring out the degree of clearness with which the ideas of expiation or propitiation were expressed by the term throughout the history of Hebrew literature.

Earlier discussions of the term D start from the assumption that the root meant originally to cover, to cover over; and doubtless a large amount of the actual usage in the O.T. and later Jewish writings could be reasonably derived from such an origin, and in many places the original force of the word might be supposed to survive. For example, when the object of the verb is, as in Gen. 3221 (E.V.20), a person, or more strictly the face of a person, who may be thought to consider he has a ground of anger or ill-feeling against another, it would be in accordance with Hebrew idiom, as we can trace it elsewhere, if the verb should mean to cover: 'to cover the face' of an angry or wronged person was a Hebrew way of saying to get an angry or wronged person to overlook the wrong committed and so to look again with favour upon the person who had committed the wrong. But with a personal object is in literature of all periods rare; it is more commonly construed with the sins or the offences as the direct object, or with the sins or offences indicated in a prepositional phrase as the reason for which what was implied by or atonement was required. Here again it would be quite in accordance with Hebrew modes of thought to speak of covering the sin or offence so as to make it henceforth without effect on the person who had committed the fault or on the wronged person. When the Psalmist1 speaks of the man 'whose sin is covered', he uses not the verb, but the verb no, which beyond question means 'to cover'. To cover a wronged person's face so as to appease him, to cover a sin so as to make it inoperative, are both unquestionably Hebrew ideas whether they were ever expressed by means of and its derivatives or not. One further point before I furn from the possibility that 'to cover' was the original meaning of the root, and the meaning which at times at least continued to be, or, if not original, came to be associated with it. In Jer. 1823 E.V. reads: "Forgive not their iniquity,

1 1 [Ps. 321.]

neither blot out their sin from thy sight'; the Hebrew rendered 'forgive' is by on; this petition is repeated with slight alteration in Neh. 337 (E.V. 4o), which is rendered in E.V.: 'Cover not their iniquity, and let not their sin be blotted out from before thee'; in the later passage D, which unmistakably means, ‘Do not cover over', is substituted for n in the earlier.

'1

The O.T. usage of and its derivatives on the assumption that the fundamental meaning was 'to cover '1 was elaborately discussed by Schmoller in an article in the Studien und Kritiken for 1891 (pp. 205 ff.); and this theory, to which in theological circles Ritschl's great work on Atonement had given powerful support, for long dominated discussion. It was, for example, still put forward, though with some reserve, by Dr. Driver in his article on Propitiation in Hastings's Dictionary in 1902. But the theory did not completely hold the field even then; as early as 1881 W. R. Smith (OTJC1, 380f., 438f.2,) had argued that the original meaning of was to wipe away. And in favour of this it could be urged that in O.T. usage unambiguous words for wiping away sin occur (nn), and that at times these stand as in Jer. 1823, which I have just cited in parallelism with 5. Outside Hebrew usage the supporters of the theory that 'to cover' is the fundamental meaning found confirmation of their theory in Arabic, the supporters of the alternative theory, that it meant to wipe away', in Syriac.

་

This, like so many other questions, was raised by closer comparison of Hebrew with Babylonian terminology. It will be convenient to cite here Zimmern's words in KAT3, p. 601 f.: 'Apart from the actual offerings we find in Babylonian ritual texts numerous rites directed towards securing expiation or general ritual purification. Some of these must be expressly mentioned on account of the technical terms used in connexion with them, because these terms are identical with words occurring in the Old Testament ritual. One of the chief functions undertaken by the âsipu, i. e. the priests who recited incantations and performed rites of atonement, was that of securing kuppuru (Inf. Pi'el, with the corresponding substantive takpirtu), i. e. the washing away (of filth-Schmutz) with a view to lustration. This kuppuru is carried out both on persons and on things 1 So We, Comp. 335 f.