Leviticus’ Rhetorical Presentation of the Sin and Guilt Offerings

I am summarizing an argument that appears at greater length in my books, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus: From Sacrifice to Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79–96, and Leviticus 1–10, Historical Commentary on the Old Testament (Leiden: Peeters, 2013), 296–316.

Rationales for these translations of the offering names can be found in Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 4–8, 184–185, 249–250, 276–278, 331–333.

Leviticus 4 uses the same word chatat (חטאת) to describe wrong actions (sins) and the offering required to gain forgiveness for those actions. The traditional translation of the offering name, “sin offering,” was challenged by Jacob Milgrom who preferred “purification offering” because it better describes the function of the offering. Many contemporary scholars and translations have accepted Milgrom’s argument. However, I have defended the traditional translation as better reflecting the word play on חטאת in Lev 4–5, while Yitzhaq Feder has argued that the verb חטא in the piel and hitpael was originally a denominative verb derived from the offering name, חטאת. Both arguments conclude that the offering name and verb should not be equated with either purification (from the root טהר) nor with mitigation/atonement (from the root כפר). See Jacob Milgrom, “Sin-Offering or Purification-Offering,” Vetus Testamentum 21 (1971): 237–239; Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric, 79–96; Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 332–333; Yitzhaq Feder, Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual: Origins Context and Meaning (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2011), 99–108.

How to translate asham is also a matter of controversy. Jacob Milgrom suggested that P regarded guilty feelings as a precondition for gaining forgiveness, so he translated the verb א.שׁ.מ in 4:13, 22, 27, 5:2–4 as “feel guilty.” Elsewhere in these chapters, however, where he thought אשׁם indicates objective guilt (5:19), he translated “bear liability.” Milgrom insisted on translating the offering name as “reparation offering” to reflect its function, producing at least three distinctly different translations of אשׁם in this chapter. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 339–345. Other interpreters have tried and failed to translate all the forms of אשׁם consistently across chaps. 4–5: e.g., Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: the Priestly Conceptions (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005), 24–41; cf. Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 341–42. Recognizing intentional word play in P’s use of אשׁם casts the problem in a different light: The multiple meanings of אשׁם and חטאת are used intentionally for rhetorical effect. It also simplifies translation into English: like asham (אשׁם), the English word “guilt” describes subjective, objective, psychological, and legal guilt. Translating as “guilt, guilty, guilt offering” therefore reproduces the Hebrew word play, and leaves it to English readers to sort out the ambiguities for themselves, just as readers of the Hebrew text must do.

The rabbis call this offering “a sliding–scale offering” (קרבן עולה ויורד).

The concluding formula is missing from the first case, the sin offering for the “anointed” (high) priest, probably because the priest’s action of kipper (כפר) “mitigation/atonement” must always be performed on behalf of someone else. See further in Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 339, 344–46.

Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 300.

אלו הן אשמות:

These are the different guilt offerings:

אשם גזילות

1. Asham of theft (Lev 5:20–26),

אשם מעילות

2. Asham of sacrilege (Lev 5:14–16),

אשם שפחה חרופה

3. Asham for [sex with] a betrothed bondwoman (Lev 19:20–22),

אשם נזיר

4. Asham of a nazirite (Num 6:12),

אשם מצורע

5. Asham for skin disease (Lev 14:12–18),

אשם תלוי

6. Asham of ambiguous violation (Lev 5:17–18)

The English is from C. D. Younge, trans., The Works of Philo (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); online at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book27.html.

כ.פ.ר is usually translated into English with “atone, atonement,” originally meaning “unity” (at-one). Its use in English Bibles has given the term heavy theological overtones from postbiblical Jewish and Christian thought. I suggest translating instead with “mitigate, mitigation” to indicate P’s emphasis on partial rectification through offerings (confession and/or restitution is also required) and on the necessity of mediation by priests.

For this translation and its rationales, see Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 360–61. I use English third plural pronouns where the Hebrew third masculine singular can reasonably be interpreted to include both genders.

As with chatat and asham, I translate the noun korban as “a present” to evoke the meaning of the common verb q.r.b which also appears in these chapters for “bringing” or “presenting” an offering: e.g. 1:2 יקריב … קרבן “present … a present.” The modern tendency to translate the offering names by their (presumed) function has obscured P’s Hebrew word plays on common roots. The need to preserve Hebrew word plays in translation as much as possible was emphasized by Martin Buber and Franz Rozenzweig in German, who translated 1:2 with the neo-logism “Nahrung darnahn,” and followed mostly by Everett Fox in English, “bring near a near-offering.” Robert Alter also shares this ideal; about the chatat, he commented that “something is lost by using a designation for this offering that is not cognate with the verb,” though he often settles for more idiomatic English: he translated 1:2 as “bring forward an offering.” See Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, trans. L. Rosenwald and E. Fox (1936; trans., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Bible 1 (New York: Schocken, 1995), 511; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2004), 547, 557; and Watts, Leviticus 1–10, 4–9, 181.

Yitzhaq Feder argued that P, like other ancient Near Eastern texts, conceived of “divine retribution as a mechanical or automatic process” and its rectification as similarly mechanistic. So forgiveness is the automatic outcome of a correctly-performed sin or guilt offering. See Feder, “The Mechanics of Retribution in Hittite, Mesopotamian and Ancient Israelite Sources,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 10 (2010): 115–156. However, the verb ס.ל.ח takes only God as subject in the Hebrew Bible and frequently appears in the contexts of covenant making and renewal (Exod 34:9; Num 14:19; Jer 31:34) where “forgiveness” preserves the covenant with Israel while many individuals still suffer retribution. So Feder’s depersonalized reconstruction of the effects of sin and guilt offerings is less plausible than that of Jacob Milgrom, who understood “forgiveness” in Leviticus 4–5 as involving repair of the divine-human relationship that depends on the free actions of both parties: Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 245. The rest of this article explores the consequences for P’s rhetoric of the fact that other biblical texts, and so presumably many members of P’s ancient Judean audience, were well aware that ritual offerings could not be depended upon to provide automatic forgiveness.

E.g. Jacob Milgrom, Cult and Conscience: The Asham and the Priestly Doctrine of Repentance (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 2; Milgrom, Numbers במדבר, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 15–16; Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: the Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 106–7; Adrian Schenker, Recht und Kult im Alten Testament: Achtzehn Studien, OBO 172 (Friburg: Universitätsverlag, 2000), 106; among many others.

P’s penchant for word play was noted already by Meir Paran, Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1989), vii.

Milgrom, Cult and Conscience, passim; Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 365–378.

This explanation leaves open the question of why P maintained the principle of no forgiveness for flagrant sins in the first place (see below).

E.g. George Buchanan Gray, Sacrifice in the Old Testament: Its Theory and Practice(1925; repr., New York: Ktav, 1971), 61̄–66; Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 176; contra Feder, Blood Expiation, 43, 83, 113, 250; see the discussion in Watts, Leviticus 1-10, 308–309.

חטאת with the meaning “sin offering” appears otherwise only in Hos 4:8 and 1 Kgs 12:17, where it appears paired with אשׁם as “sin offering.” The latter appears otherwise in Isa 53:10 and in 1 Sam 6:1–18 where it describes a ritual that bears no resemblance to that in Leviticus 5.

Editor’s note: For a discussion of how this offering serves as a meal for the deity, see Naphtali Meshel, “Which Sacrificial Offerings Require Libations?” TheTorah (2018).

That is most obvious for the postexilic period and various features of P suggest that it addresses the post-exilic situation. However, my argument here does not depend on a postexilic dating for P. Judah’s declining fortunes were already evident in the eighth century, as the prophets attest. On the basis of the Hebrew Bible’s historical narratives, the economic and rhetorical situation that I posit for Leviticus 4–5 could have arisen anytime between the end of the eighth and the early fourth centuries B.C.E.