Ps. 50.13 (sacrifice and absurdity)

“Do I eat / the flesh of bulls – or drink / billy-goat’s blood?” It is important that, as a rhetorical question, the answer to this question is so obvious that there is no need to provide it. It is an important insight. Everything has been building, arguably, to this very sarcastic question that devastates any presumption that sacrifices in any way ‘feed’ God. The hypothesis, to God, is, quite literally, absurd. As absurd as it is, however, to God, it was not absurd to surrounding cultures. Sacrifices were often depicted this way—and, indeed, as the purpose of man (man being created in order to serve and feed the gods). It is for this reason that this final question had to come at the end of this long series of ‘teachings’ about the nature of sacrifice and God’s sovereign ownership of the animals of the world. He has steadily been leading his devotees to this conclusion. The fact that it ‘empties’ into this rhetorical question highlights the fact that, at the end, they should have been so initiated into this vision of sacrifice that such a proposition (as God’s eating sacrifices) is now perceived with the same disdain that God has for it. The point is profound though not perhaps surprising: how one understands the nature of God will fundamentally structure the nature of sacrifice itself. For Israel, the blood ran and the fire consumed, but its purpose was radically different than many of her neighbors.