Burning Offerings in Israel and Elsewhere

Erhard Gerstenberger (Leviticus, 34) claims that “The completely burned sacrifice is probably an Israelite peculiarity.”

James Watts (Ritual and Rhetoric) disagrees. He argues (75) that “The practice of burning offerings gained popularity during the first millennium and spread from its original home in northwest Syria. Burnt offerings clearly played a central role in Phoenician rituals of the early first millennium b.c.e., and theywere exported by the Phoenicians to their colonies across theMediterranean, and perhaps to Greece as well. References to burnt offerings and depictions of burning altars began to appear in Assyrian records and artwork in the eighth or seventh centuries b.c.e., presumably due to Syrian religious influence. Farther east, fire altars had become an identifying feature of Zoroastrian practice as well, though no animals were burnt on them. This may have been an independent cultural development. By the fourth or third centuries, however, burnt offerings on horned altars in the Syrian/Palestinian style had become a feature of many Egyptian temples, along with priests bearing titles such as ‘superintendent of the burnt offerings of Amon and the slaughterhouse of meat.’”

This suggests to Watts that the priority of the whole-burnt offering (olah) in Israel was “part and parcel of a wider discourse of ritual practice and rhetoric that transcended Israel’s boundaries and was reshaping the religious world of antiquity.”

Watts admits that the no text from Ugarit or nor any of Hittite/Hurrian provenance “describes the precise manner in which they were offered (the Ugaritic offerings were placed on altars, but no text specifies that a burnt offering was entirely burnt” (74). He argues that the terminology of these ritual texts, which use the verb “burn,” “suggests that they may have functioned similarly to Israel’s ‘olah” (74). Of Gerstenberger’s claim, he writes, “Though theHittite andUgaritic evidence does not contain proof that he is wrong, the similarities in ritual practices and terminology between the texts of these cultures argue less for discontinuity than for continuity in their treatment of the burnt offering” (75).

It’s worth recalling that burnt offerings are one thing, whole burnt offerings another. And it’s intriguing that the evidence comes largely from fairly close neighbors to Israel. Egyptians sometimes immolated animals, but that represented destruction of threatening deities. In many ancient cults, “sacrifices” were not burned at all, much less burned entirely. Watts shows that it goes beyond the evidence to say Israel’s whole burnt offerings were unique; but even the evidence Watts cautiously offers suggests that Israel’s offerings were unusual.