What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple?
Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to other ancient Near Eastern cults. And it was these similarities that might have drawn the attention of the priestly writers. The word for altar in Greek (bamos) is virtually identical to the Hebrew (bamah).” Here Biale stretches the evidence, since bamah means no “altar” (Heb. mizbeach) but “high place.” But the verbal connection is still there, and still relevant.
Further: “Biblical and Greek sacrifices involved both burning and eating, as opposed to Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Minoan-Mycenaean offerings, which do not appear to have been burned at all. . . . blood played only a minor role in Near Eastern sacrifices, but, like the Israelites, the Greeks required the splashing of blood on the altar and its proper disposal. As Walter Burkert summarizes: ‘The blood fl owing out [of a sacrificial animal] is treated with special care. It may not spill on the ground; rather, it must hit the altar, the hearth, or the sacrifi cial pit. If the animal is small it is raised over the altar; otherwise the blood is caught in a bowl and sprinkled on the altar-stone. This object alone may, and must again and again, drip blood.’”
He cites a vase painting of a Greek sacrifice that “shows a Dionysian rite in which a satyr wields a knife with a maenad assisting as the blood pours down into the sphageion or bowl for catching sacrificial blood, perhaps similar to the bowls (aganot - see Ex. 24:6) used in biblical sacrifice.”
The purpose of blood was similar in both: “As in Israel, blood was used by the Greeks as an agent of purification (apomattein, to wipe clean). Indeed, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus made fun of this practice: ‘They vainly purify themselves of bloodguilt [haimati mianomenoi] by defiling themselves with blood, as though one who had stepped into mud were to wash with mud; he would seem to be mad, if any of men noticed him doing this. Further, they pray to these statues, as if one were to carry on a conversation with houses, not recognizing the true nature of gods or demi-gods.’”
Biale observes that “the first part of his statement could just as well describe the use of blood in Leviticus 17 as the agent that purifies or atones for bloodguilt, the second part, attacking idol worship, sounds as if it comes from a biblical prophet.”
Not all philosophers were so skeptical of Greek blood philosophy: “Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Critias regarded blood as the soul and the principle of life, quite reminiscent of the biblical ‘the blood is the life’ and ‘the blood is in the soul’ . . . . For the Greeks, only mortal beings have blood; the gods, being immortal, do not, possessing instead the mysterious ichor” (27).
