Ps. 50.11 (sacrifice and creation)

 “I know / every bird / of the mountains – and the domestic beasts / are mine.” It goes without saying why God is so centrally concerned with the animals of the world. The whole instruction is focused on sacrifice. Notice the litany: steer, billy-goat, creature of the forest, beast of a thousand hills, bird, domestic beasts. The animals are described as consisting of both those ‘owned by man’, to the wild animals, and back to the domestic. Their span is total. And God’s involvement with these animals is, likewise, total. For those that are owned by man (steer, bill-goats and domestic beasts), are also owned by God. Likewise, those that are wild are both owned (creature of the forest, bests of a thousand hills) and ‘known’ by God (every bird of the mountains). Man is given a limited sphere of ‘ownership’ whereas God’s sphere is absolute. This limitation by man to a small sub-set of animals is important, thematically, because it again highlights the fact that man cannot possibly ‘add’ to God’s possessions by way of sacrifice. Even the small sub-set that man ‘owns’ is dwarfed by the wild animals owned by Gods: beasts of a thousand hills, every bird of the mountains. This emphasis is also captured by the fact that while man owns domestic animals, God owns every creature of the forest and every bird of the mountains. This sense of total ownership picks up, also, on a previous theme: the ‘summoning’ of God found in the opening section. There, god ‘summoned the world’ (physically) from the ‘rising of the sun to its setting’ (temporally) (vs.1). Likewise, his summoning was of both ‘heaven above’ and the ‘earth’ (vs. 4). As we saw there, God’s involvement with creation is manifested by and through his lordly ability to call the creation to attention. We saw there, too, that Israel was, although the central character of the drama, but a small portion of the entirety of creation that was being called upon. Israel, therefore, mirrored in some way the paltry ownership of animals that man is given versus the ‘every creature’ possession of God. If God has the ability to summon all of creation we cannot be surprised that, in sacrifice, something other than an ‘adding to’ his possessions is occurring. In this we can come to a further insight into the nature of sacrifice: that within the totality of all animals, only a portion are given over to man and, of these, only a portion are acceptable as sacrifice. Here, we see that, almost by definition, the sacrifice cannot be understood, in any way, as an ‘adding to’ of God. Indeed, the fact that God so narrows down the range of possible animals that could be sacrificed points directly away from this conclusion. The nature of sacrifice, then, must be found in another realm entirely, a category that is far removed from any type of economic transaction. For, if it were at all understood along these lines it would become utterly relativized and, in the end, worthless.