The arch of Constantine in Rome depicts a bear and boar hunt that ends with a sacrifice to Hercules. Architectural historians suggest that the hunt represents Constantine’s taming of the forces of civil disorder and chaos. One (Mark Wilson Jones) suggests that the sacrifice represents pre-Constantinian pagan religion, while Constantine’s participation in the hunt represents his conquest of bestial social and religious forces.
My interest is elsewhere: Biblical sacrifices were confined to clean animals, and, more specifically, to domesticated clean animals. No wild animal ever ascended to Yahweh’s altar?
What does it say about Israel that it offered only domesticated animals? What does it say that Israel detached the cult from the hunt?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Deliver Us from Evil
In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…
Natural Law Needs Revelation
Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…
Letters
Glenn C. Loury makes several points with which I can’t possibly disagree (“Tucker and the Right,” January…
