Payback

By looking for the sources of biblical notions of kipper in texts dealing with bloodguilt for murder, Feder concludes that blood serves as a compensation for the damage done by sin. Sin is conceived as a debt, and the blood of sacrifice is payment for the debt.

To explain the logic of the lex talionis for murder, he uses Marx’s notion of “exchange value,” he suggests that “blood retaliation results in an abstraction of the value of the murdered party’s life. By turning the victim’s blood into an exchange value, it becomes a debt that can be ‘repaid’ by the death of the murderer, which, needless to say, would otherwise have no value to the inujured party.”

The same abstraction of blood, and its symbolization as a “currency” is at work in the sacrificial system: “the sin offering blood rite has adapted the symbolism and terminology of murder compensation and transformed them into a cultic means of expiating sin. Just as in the context of homicide expiation, kipper is used in reference to the repayment of a blood debt, the sin offering rituals employing this verb in reference to the use of blood as a means of making restitution for guilt, conceptualized as a debt vis-a-vis the Deity.”