ESSAY
The Meaning of Sacrifice

Two factors keep Nahtali Meshel from discussing the meaning of sacrifice until late in his The “Grammar” of Sacrifice. The first has to do with the texts he draws from: “P says little about the meaning of its rituals” (174). The other has to do with the grammatical theory with which he operates: “we have endeavored to avoid the issue of meaning as much as possible, instead centering primarily on the formal aspects. . . . This avoidance is in line with the Chomskian tradition in linguistics, according to which the formal properties of generative grammars are formulated without reference to semantics” (175).

But he does finally raise the issue of meaning, and elaborates the issue by distinguishing several approaches to ritual meaning that has been proposed by other scholars. In a “task-oriented” approach, the actions of the ritual are a matter of “physically manipulating the nuts and bolts of a mechanism in order to attain a desired effect.” When the ritual is one right, it “means” the result that it has. Daubing blood doesn’t have to signify or symbolize anything; “it simple is a detergent” (179). Such approaches don’t answer the question of the meaning of the rite, but only assert “that there is a mechanism; it does not supply a theory at all in terms of how this mechanism’s effect is attained” (180).

“Functionalist” approaches differ among themselves, but they share some crucial features. They are, first, “etic” rather than “emic,” that is, they are scientist-oriented rather than user-oriented approaches. Girard’s explanation of the purpose of sacrifice is quite explicitly not the view of the participants in sacrifice. They must be ignorant of what they are actually doing for the scapegoat mechanism to work. Second, functionalist approaches are limited to “only the most general contours of sacrifice” (181). Sacrifice “means” social cohesion, or a “transferral of aggression,” an explanation that cannot begin to “enter the fine resolution” of the details and minutiae of ritual action. For these reasons, Meshel does not consider functionalist approaches to ritual meaning helpful in understanding sacrificial grammar.

Meshel discusses two representational approaches, approaches that assume a signfier-signified relationship between the ritual action and something that it means. “Extensionist” approaches claim that the meaning of a proposition is “the set of real-world situations where this proposition is true” (182). Analogously, a ritual would mean that set of situations in which the ritual is performed. This notion of meaning has “limited” usefulness (183). He recognizes that symbolic notions of ritual meaning are ancient, and finds that they can be fruitful. Referring to the purification offering (Leviticus 4), he observes that the sex of the animal was dependent on the status of the offerer: “an animal representing virility was chosen as the offering of powerful political leaders, whereas an ‘effeminate’ zoeme . . . was selected for other Israelites” (185). He cites an ancient Jewish allegory that associates bulls with Abraham (cf. Genesis 18:7), rams with Isaac (the substitution on Moriah), and goats with Jacob (who covered himself with goat skins to deceive Isaac) (185). While he finds that such explanations are “unsystematic” and difficult to verify,” he thinks they have some usefulness, though “we are forced to reject some of the more apparently forced interpretations” (186).

Meshel devotes a section to Frits Staal’s claim that ritual is “meaningless,” both in the sense that it is “useless” and achieves nothing and in the sense that it is “devoid of semantics” (188). Meshel concludes that Staal fails to prove his point, and offers evidence from the Temple Scroll that, he says, casts doubt on Staal’s claim. By Meshel’s lights, the Temple Scroll links a change in the jugations of the calendrical offerings (listed in Numbers 28-29) with a change in understanding of the purpose and aim of the ritual. The issue is: “are purification offerings sweet-smelling to YHWH?” (194). The rabbis thought not, and therefore did not think that the calendrical purification offerings required subordinate grain offerings or libations. The Temple Scroll assumes that purifications do produce sweet-smelling savor, and therefore must be accompanied by subjugated cereal and wine offerings. Meshel claims “we have before us a case in which the interpretation of an offering’s ‘meaning’ relates to a shift in hierarchics” (195), and that suggests that the rituals are not “meaningless” or “purely syntactical,” as Staal claims.

In a final chapter, Meshel assesses the results of his study. He admits that “we have not solved the mysterious issue of meaning in ritual” and argues that before that question is finally addressed there is a need for “a more precise, unified, and verifiable working definition of ‘meaning’ in a ritual context” (203). He argues that his grammatical method would be useful for examining the Levitical system of purity, which shares “some of the distinctions cardinal” to the sacrificial system, including “the distinction between age groups, species and sexes in zoemics; the concatenation of links to animal and vegetable materials in jugation; and the physical ritual activity . . . in praxemics” (203). He questions whether his study has made progress toward a Universal Grammar of Ritual, and concludes soberly: “At present there is very little indication of the existence of a UGR” (206).

In fact, he has found little that would support a “high-resolution analogy between language and ritual” as such. The grammar of P’s sacrificial system is like the grammar of a language only in a quite restricted, Chomskian sense: “both are generative, rigorous, amenable to concise formulation, partially unconsciously internalized, and have some relation to meaning” (207; cf. 209). This may seem a disappointingly thin result, but Meshel argues that it is not nothing: “Few systems that are neither linguistic nor ritual are describable in terms of generative rules.” There may well be a grammar to dance, music, and games, but “very few systems are as rigorously rule-governed” as ritual and language. Thus, despite the need to stretch the term “grammar” to cover ritual, it’s worth the effort because it isolates some features that ritual seems to share with language, perhaps only with language.

After an extensive, up-to-date bibliography, Meshel provides a 26-page grammar of the sacrificial system. Like the rest of the book, it is highly technical, formalized, and rigorous, and valuable primarily because it assembles so much of the data of the Levitical system in one place. Yet there are detailed claims that arrest one’s attention. Like Jugation Rule #4: “A zoeme is never found to be directly or indirectly subordinate to another zoeme,” followed by qualifier (a): “But it may be subordinate to non-animal materials” (5 of the Grammar). This is a surprising finding, but one that Meshel makes good elsewhere in his book. On the interface between jugation and praxemics, he claims that “the link between a zoeme and its subordinate grain offering is stronger than the link between a zoeme and its subordination libation” (8 of the Grammar), raising, as I’ve noted before, some intriguing implications for Eucharistic theology.

Looking at the agential aspects of praxemics, he suggests that while offerers are fixed for each zoeme (i.e., the same offerer must do all the acts that are assigned to the offerer), the same is not true for officiants: “diverse praxemes pertaining to a single zoeme may be assigned to different officiants” (11-12 of the Grammar; e.g., one priest may spread blood, another may carve the animal into pieces).

Meshel’s book is definitely not for the beginner or for the timid. His adherence to generative grammar limits, but sometimes in fruitful ways, as he isolates unexpected patterns of association within the Levitical system. As an explanation of why the system is what it is, the book is somewhat thin. As a careful compilation of the minutiae of the Levitical system, it is very valuable. It will be a constant reference point for those of us devoted to said minutiae.


Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis.

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