Atonement by blood

Why, Stephen A. Geller asks, does “P” consider blood a necessary agent for achieving forgiveness and the re-creation that is atonement? 

He answers by noting the sequence of Leviticus 16-17, which moves from the bloody cleansing and reestablishment of the sanctuary to the command that butchering be done in the sanctuary to prohibitions on eating blood. In various details, he detects a reference back to the post-flood scenes of Genesis 8-9, where Noah, a new Adam, is told that man (adam) shall shed blood (dam) of those who shed the blood of man, and that he should refrain from blood.

This suggests (p. 114) a circular order to the the entire bloc of text from Genesis 1 to Leviticus 17: Genesis 1 is recapitulated after the flood with Noah; Noah is prohibited from eating blood but offerings sacrifice, and this looks ahead to Leviticus 17; but Leviticus 17 is linked by its concern with blood to Leviticus 16, which looks back to Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10), which  is the climax of the story of tabernacle-construction that begins in Exodus 25 and alludes to the Sabbath. Which brings us back, breathlessly, to Genesis 1.

What’s remarkable about this complex set of allusions is that a substance, blood, whose presence in the world is a sign of sin, becomes in Leviticus a means for atonement from sin. That, Geller thinks, is a clue to the logic of blood in Israel’s sacrificial system. It is not merely life-for-life, but what’s evoked by blood is the “whole complex that blood represents, first as a sign of sin, then as a medium of redemption” (113).

He sums up the theology of blood that emerges from this: “God’s original creation was, he soon realized, flawed by man’s tendency to sin. When the accumulation of crime became unbearable, God returned the world to watery chaos. But Noah, the chosen new Adam, also bore the fatal flaw. So after the Flood, God, moved to pity perhaps by Noah’s sacrifice, temporarily patches his creation. He ‘accepts’ the crack in the human mold and makes provision for limiting its destructiveness. Homicide, the gravest crime of the generation of the Flood, will be punished by man himself. He may kill beasts and eat their flesh, but must refrain from their true ‘life,’ the blood. By Sinai God has devised a more satisfactory method of repairing creation. The very same elements that represented a concession to human evil now are turned to the benefit, not only of man, but also of God. Through blood sacrifice ‘atonement’ in its various meanings is attained, purging the world of sin. Through the rites of the Day of Atonement, the shrine, and through it the cosmos, returns in a kind of jubilee, to the perfection of original creation before man’s flaw became apparent. God is unable or unwilling to correct the flaw by destroying humanity and beginning anew. The whole pattern is therefore a cyclical act of reparation, in which God requires human cooperation” (115). 

Or again, “the role of blood in the Holy of Holies on the day that restores the shrine, and the cosmos, to the original purity of unsullied creation. All the myriad potencies of blood as symbol merge and strengthen the meaning has worked toward through his theology: blood as sign of sinfulness becomes the agent of re-creative purification” (119). He doesn’t think “P” offers any explanation of why blood achieves this, but speculates that “P” may imagine that the blood touches God. At the very least, like Noah’s sacrifice, the blood of Yom Kippur moves God, and so He restores and renews.

This fits fairly neatly with Paul’s brief summary of history in Romans 5, where Moses stands at a crucial moment: Death spread from Adam to Moses. Why stop with Moses, when it seems clear that death continued spreading afterwards? Because with the Sinai covenant God, in Geller’s terms, established a method for “repairing creation,” instituted an annual “jubilee” at the day of atonement.

Geller, “Blood Cult: Toward a Theology of the Priestly Work of the Pentateuch,” Prooftexts 12 (1992) 97-124.