In a contribution to Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, David Frankfurter analyzes several contexts of Egyptian religion on the way to a critique of the whole category of “sacrifice.”

In some of these contexts, no animals were slaughtered; no violence done. In some contexts, though, animals were killed. He elaborates on “the ritual incineration of certain animals” which “were meant in one capacity to please the gods with the aroma of barbecue, but also, more importantly, to ward off chaos through the ritual destruction of cosmic enemies. The animal carcasses are presented as images or incarnations (ihryt) of divine enemies, and the grilling process is declared to be the vanquishing of those enemies. Across the various temple inscriptions that record these rites through the Roman period, it is entirely ambiguous whether the gods actually are meant to gain food through this incineration and whether some meat grilled for such apotropaic purposes might have fed priests or festival participants. But the animals in the case of these ritual incinerations are quite specific: antelopes, certain fowl, reddish bovines, and crocodiles. These representatives of the chaos god Seth-Typhon have a predominantly wild character” (78-9).

The point is not to feed the gods “with physically transformed meat” but to “vanquish their cosmic enemies through their animal representatives.” Against common views of sacrifice, moreover, “the ritual destruction takes place on the fire, not by the knife” and this implies that “the killing itself is peripheral to the rite, which revolves around burning and aroma, not killing or blood” (79-80).

Later in the essay, he suggests that the appearance of the god, his emergence from his house and procession among the people, is the high point of Egyptian religion, not killing (81-3).

A few responses to this from the perspective of Levitical “sacrifice.” First, Israel’s offerings included rituals of “incineration,” the olah offering (Leviticus 1), but in Leviticus there is no hint that these animals represent Yahweh’s cosmic enemies. Many commentators - rightly, I think - see the olah as a rite of complete devotion to Yahweh by the worshiper. But this ritual immolation is described in Leviticus as Yahweh’s bread (lehem; Leviticus 21-22 especially). So, even though the focus is on burning, the fire is understood as Yahweh’s fire, which “eats” the sacrificial flesh and is satisfied. I don’t know if there are any such hints in Egyptian sources, but the fact that the animal is burned doesn’t necessarily imply a marginalization of the meal. Burning might be a divine feast. Perhaps the imagery in Egypt is that the gods “devour” their enemies - bringing the incineration of the enemy together with a meal.

Second, for similar reasons, I’m suspicious of Frankfurter’s suggestion that bloodshed is “marginal” and that burning takes the central role. Why, one wonders, are we looking for a single center of the rite of offerings? Isn’t that the problem with the view of sacrifice that Frankfurter contests - the view of Burkert and Girard that singles out the moment of slaughter. Why exchange one reductive theory for another? After all, even in Egypt (presumably), animals were killed before being burned. It’s the whole sequence that needs to be interpreted, without assuming that one or the other moment in the event is the master moment of sacrifice.

This has important implications for Christian understandings of sacrifice, insofar as Christian views of sacrifice build on the entire ritual of the Levitical offerings, and not merely on the moment of bloodshed.