Andrew Remington Rillera’s Lamb of the Free has a tell, a tic that indicates the book is being driven as much by polemical animus as by the logic of its own arguments. The tell is the recurrence of absolutisms like “nothing to do with” and “completely” and “only.” The “only purpose” of the ascension offering (‘olah) is to provide a pleasing aroma, not to make atonement (31). Well-being (or peace) offerings have “nothing to do with sin and nothing to do with atonement” (38). Neither does Passover, which has “nothing to do with atonement” (43). An animal’s death “never holds any ritual or theological significance in the Torah” (49). Covenant-renewal ceremonies “feature only . . . non-atoning sacrifices” (54, his emphasis). His enthusiasm gets the better of him on page 66, with a double-negative slip that says the opposite of what he means: “None of this has nothing to do with a ritual or symbolic substitutionary death.”
Polemics are necessary, and often fun. They’re also hazardous, since the polemic can blind the polemicist to contrary evidence. That happens with some regularity to Rillera.
After he claims that the daily ascension offerings (tamid) are non-atoning, he admits in a footnote that ascensions are said to be atoning in Leviticus 1:2-4, the primary text on the ascension. He dismisses the text: It’s “peculiar” since “burnt offerings in general seem to have a non-atoning function” – even though the passage he’s just cited says the ‘olah performs kippur (atonement). He tries to rescue his point by emphasizing that the ascensions that atone are specifically voluntary offerings from an individual Israelite. But that isn’t relevant to the public daily tamid, which “are never said to have an atoning function” (fn. 11, pp. 30-1). If he means the Torah never says “the tamid performs kippur,” he’s right; but the contrary reasoning is just as plausible – the tamid is an offering of ‘olah; the ‘olah atones; therefore, so does the tamid. He doesn’t consider, much less refute, this interpretation, so convinced is he that the tamid has “nothing to do with” atonement.
Another example: there’s an absolute distinction between atoning sacrifices, which cannot be eaten by the offerer, and non-atoning sacrifices, the whole purpose of which is to provide food. Thus, the term “food offering” (his translation of ‘ishsheh) is never used in connection with purification or trespass offerings (34). Except, he admits in a footnote, it is, in Numbers 15:25. Once again, he waves the text away: Numbers 15 “may be the lone exception (that proves the rule)” (fn. 28, p. 34). Again, it’s just as plausible to reason the other way: Numbers 15:25 exposes what has been assumed all along, that the purification offerings are also “food.” (I suspect, in fact, that ‘ishsheh in Numbers 15 refers to the altar portions of the ‘olah [v. 24] rather than to the sin offering. So the text isn’t actually an exception to Rillera’s claim.)
Besides the polemic, Rillera’s argument is distorted by fundamental misunderstandings of the Levitical system. First, common though it is, the distinction of atoning v. non-atoning offerings misses the integral character of the Levitical system. It’s true on narrowly linguistic grounds that some offerings are explicitly linked with kippur and others aren’t. No text says that a well-being or peace offering isolated from other offerings accomplishes atonement. But in actual liturgical practice, well-being offerings are never isolated from other offerings anyway. Every day begins with the tamid (ascension offering), which (I argue) does accomplish kippur, and so every individual peace offering is placed on an altar already kippured. In certain cases, the peace offering is preceded by a sin offering, which, even on Rillera’s reading, atones (Leviticus 9). Peace offerings don’t atone, but they’re always added to offerings that do atone.
Second, and related: Rillera isolates specific moments of the sacrificial rite, rather than viewing them as a mobile pattern of action. He tends to discover a single significance in each ritual action and gesture, rather than recognizing the proliferating character of ritual meaning. Death qua death, he says repeatedly, has no ritual significance, and in fact the death of the animal is “reconceptualized” as a “non-killing” (15-22). The rite requires animal blood and flesh, and the only way to get it is to slaughter the animal. If the animal’s death were important, it would suffice to break the animals neck (21). His conclusion: Sacrifice isn’t about substitutionary death because no death is recognized.
But it’s one thing to say “the death or slaughter of the victim . . . has no particular atoning significance in and of itself” (20-21, quoting David Moffitt), and quite another to say it’s not significant at all as a moment in a ritual sequence. No ritual action has particular atoning significance “in and of itself” because no ritual action exists “in and of itself.” The indisputable fact is that every sacrifice begins with a living animal and ends with a dismembered carcass and mostly burning. Is it even minimally plausible that this obvious feature of sacrifice went unnoticed?? From another angle: It’s also true that Jesus’ death doesn’t have any atoning significance “in and of itself” – that is, isolated from His life of obedience and His subsequent resurrection. Fortunately for us, it isn’t isolated.
Third, Rillera minimizes or misses the links between the sacrificial system and the preceding narratives of Genesis and Exodus. In a long footnote, he denies that the Aqeda (Genesis 22) provides “an interpretive key for Levitical sacrifices” (12). The Passover, he insists “was not a sacrifice!” (42, his italics; weirdly, he interprets various features of the Passover as signals that the process isn’t sacrificial, as if the rite were designed to answer Rillera’s questions).
But the Passover involved killing an animal at a prescribed time, spreading blood, and eating the flesh. It’s hardly a stretch to suggest we’re in “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” territory. At least, we should ask whether Passover sets some of the terms for the Levitical system. (His argument that Passover wasn’t a substitutionary death is very strained, pp. 44-54). He completely ignores the Edenic background to sacrifice – the links between garden and tabernacle, the tree of life and sacrificial food, sacrifice and the flaming cherubic swords, and, importantly, the threat of death.
In this, and in other respects, Rillera’s book exemplifies Richard Barry’s complaint that studies of sacrifice are detached from studies of the sanctuary. Rillera rightly notes that blood is usually applied to the tabernacle and its furnishings, not to human beings. But that misses the underlying assumption of the whole system: The tabernacle is an architectural representation of the people. One might even say the whole Levitical system is founded on a massive act of substitution – tabernacle for people!
A specific example of the misleading treatment of the Levitical system: Like Jacob Milgrom and others, Rillera asserts repeatedly that purge (kipper) never takes a person or persons as its object but always sancta, the holy furnishings or vessels of the tabernacle (p. 115, quoting Milgrom). He quotes Joel Baden in support (p. 115, fn 71; Baden’s article is in Vetus Testamentum 71.1 [2021] 19-26).
What he quotes from Baden is technically accurate; Baden did write the words Rillera cites. But those sentences come a couple of pages into the article, and Baden devotes sustained attention to the end of Leviticus 16, where, he says, kipper is done to the Israelites:
The sanctuary is still being purged in the newly expanded text; but now the Israelites are as well. This is one of the primary emphases of the additional material, as is evident from the final verse, 16:34: 'This shall be to you a law for all time, to purge (כפר) the Israelites from all of their sins once a year.' It is this new purging of the Israelites themselves that accounts also for the requirement that they fast and abstain from working (16:29). Whereas in the original ritual the purging of the sanctuary was done on their behalf, now it is being done to them.
So, Baden’s article refutes Rillera’s use of Baden’s article, as well as the substantive point Rillera cited Baden to support.
This illustrates my larger complaint that Rillera doesn’t grasp the link between tabernacle and people. Yes, blood is applied to sancta; but, if the sancta ritually represent the people, then blood is indirectly to the people too. There's not an either-or, but a means-end: The purgation of the sancta is means by which the people's kipper is completed.
(For the record, I'm doubtful kipper means "purge"; I suspect it's actually closer to Tyndale's old "at-one-ment," of which purgation is one dimension. Uncleanness is finally kippered with a hatt'at and an 'olah, the latter a sign that the excluded person has now been restored to the liturgical community [a point Rillera makes nicely, without grasping the implications]. My suspicion is: kipper = purgation + reunion with Yahweh and His people.)
Baden does a nice job of making this link of people and sanctuary by suggesting that there's a shift after the ordination of the priests, when Aaron and his sons become sancta:
Moses applies the blood to the altar לכפר עליו, 'to purge it' (8:15). Tellingly, later in that chapter the phrase כפר על is used with reference to Aaron and his sons . . . here, uniquely, they are in fact to be understood as the objects of the verb: here on the final day of their ordination process they are being purged, because they are about to become sancta themselves.
Beyond Baden, I'd say the people become sancta insofar as they're represented by the priests: If the priest with his breastplate is a furnishing of the tabernacle, the tribes named on the breastplate are there too. And that's why, I suppose, blood on the sancta effects atonement for the worshiper.
Well, now: That was a pretty polemical review, wasn’t it? Irony alert! Lest I fall under my own critique, let me say, in closing, that Rillera makes a lot of good points and asks a lot of the right questions. He’s right: There isn’t a simple correspondence between what Leviticus calls kippur and what theologians call “atonement.” Traditional treatments of sacrifice and atonement have erred by focusing exclusively on the violence of slaughter, and by ignoring the variety of offerings. He’s right to call attention to the “way the words run” on the pages of Leviticus, and his attempt to rigorously follow the logic of the text instead of importing theological categories is commendable. He asks many of the right questions; he gives fewer right answers.
This is the first critical review of this book I've found. Last year, when this title released, so many treated it like a WMD capable of ending substitutionary atonement, and every review has sung its praises. I read the book earlier this year and found much of it helpful, but various of the positions put forward didn't sit right. Thank you for offering a clear challenge to its theses and its overall triumphalist tone.