The prophets indicated clearly that God did not care for blood sacrifices. In fact, they practically repudiated the entire sacrificial system, teaching that repentance and prayer were sufficient. The Talmudic rabbis simply affirmed this biblical truth

Some later rabbis may have taught this, but the prophets certainly did not. Everything the prophets did, they did out of allegiance to the Torah and to reinforce what it said. There is no possible way that they would have repudiated the God-given, God-ordained, God-sanctioned system of atonement as laid out in the Torah—especially with the Temple standing.

The prophets would not have contradicted Moses. What the prophets repudiated was hypocritical religion. In other words, they rejected the performance of sacred rites and the keeping of special days when those practicing them had polluted hearts. They were perfectly clear on this. It’s also interesting to note that every traditional Jew around the world prays daily for the restoration of the Temple and the sacrificial system. If sacrifices were really unnecessary and unimportant, and if the prophets utterly repudiated them, why pray daily for their restoration?

The prophetic books contain many strong statements that say the Lord rejects the sacrifices and offerings brought by his people. There are also sentiments expressed in Psalms and Proverbs indicating that the Lord would rather have inward devotion than outward sacrifices. But there are also equally strong statements and sentiments in those books denouncing every form of hypocritical religious observance, including passages in which God is said to utterly reject his people’s prayers and Sabbath observance. Does this mean the Lord is against prayer? Of course not. And would a traditional Jew think for a moment that God was anti-Sabbath? Never.

What the prophets and psalmists were saying was that God did not want empty and meaningless observance of his laws—whether those laws pertained to sacrifices, feasts, Sabbaths, holy days, or prayer. All the outward observance in the world is meaningless if the heart is far from God, and all the sacrifices in the world cannot take the place of godly conduct. Thus, the prophets taught that sacrifices without mercy and justice were vain and that bringing an offering without a repentant and contrite heart was unacceptable. On this point all of us—the prophets, traditional Jews, and Messianic Jews—agree. In fact, this was a theme emphasized by Yeshua as well, and one of his favorite texts was Hosea 6:6: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (see Matt. 9:13; 12:7).

The prophets and psalmists also taught that prayer and worship could be accepted by God in the same way as (not instead of) sacrifices and incense, a theme also repeated in the New Testament (see Heb. 13:15–16). But it would be entirely wrong to suggest that the prophets or psalmists denigrated or rejected the sacrificial system itself. In fact, it was because sacrifices were so powerful and meaningful in Israelite religious practice that the prophets had to remind the people that the sacrifices had no atoning or blessing power unless they were coupled with repentant and devoted hearts. That is the meaning of Hosea 5:6: “When they go with their flocks and herds to seek the Lord, they will not find him; he has withdrawn himself from them.”¹⁰⁶ In other words, even when the disobedient Israelites brought all their sacrifices to the Lord, he still would not listen to them. (From a parallel New Testament perspective, we could emphasize that even the ultimate sacrifice—the Messiah laying down his very life for us—has no life-changing value at all unless it is joined with repentance and faith; see vol. 1, 1.11.)

Let’s consider just how central the sacrificial system was to the people of Israel before we discuss the words of the prophets and psalmists. According to the Tanakh, here are some undeniable facts:

• Over and over in the Torah, sacrifices and offerings are described as a pleasing aroma to God (see Gen. 8:21; Exod. 29:18, 25, 41; and twenty-eight more occurrences of this phrase in Leviticus and Numbers). Leviticus 1:9 gives a good example of the typical language used to describe these sacrifices: “It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord.”¹⁰⁷ The Lord obviously welcomed and enjoyed sacrificial offerings when his people brought them with holy hearts. He took pleasure in them, according to the clear testimony of Scripture.
• Sacrifices were so important to Israelite religion that when the Lord sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh, he sent them with this message: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Now let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God, or he may strike us with plagues or with the sword” (Exod. 5:3). The very reason God gave for calling his people out of Egypt was to offer sacrifices to him.
• A careful study of the Five Books of Moses indicates that more chapters are devoted to the subject of sacrifices and offerings than to the subjects of Sabbath observance, high holy days, idolatry, adultery, murder, and theft combined.
• The sacrifices, more frequently than anything else in the Torah, are described as “lasting ordinances” or being established “for the generations to come.” (Similar language is used to describe other priestly rituals, along with circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath and holy days.) If anything was not to be replaced, it was the sacrificial system. Consider the weight of verses such as these: “Once a year Aaron shall make atonement on [the altar’s] horns. This annual atonement must be made with the blood of the atoning sin offering for the generations to come. It is most holy to the Lord” (Exod. 30:10; cf. similar language with regard to circumcision [Gen. 17:7–14] and Passover observance [Exod. 12:14–17, 42]). That’s why Messianic Jews so strongly emphasize the fact that Jesus the Messiah fulfilled the requirements of the sacrificial system by laying down his life on our behalf (see below, 3.10, 3.14).¹⁰⁸ It is unthinkable to us—based on the Torah—that the sacrificial system was simply discarded and replaced with prayer.
• After Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah had delivered their prophecies—prophecies that are quoted by anti-missionaries to prove that the prophets repudiated sacrifices—the prophets Haggai and Zechariah strongly encouraged the exiles who returned to Jerusalem to get on with the rebuilding of the Temple: “Now Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the prophet, a descendant of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel, who was over them. Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Jeshua son of Jozadak set to work to rebuild the house of God in Jerusalem. And the prophets of God were with them, helping them” (Ezra 5:1–2; see also Haggai 1). They too were eager for the Temple to be rebuilt and for sacrificial worship to be restored.
• Malachi, who was the last of the prophets of the Tanakh and who lived in the days of the Second Temple, emphasized the importance of Temple sacrifices, soundly rebuking the priests for bringing defective offerings to the Lord (see Mal. 1:6–14). And Zechariah, prophesying in the very days in which the Second Temple was being built, declared that at the end of this age, “Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the Lord Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them” (Zech. 14:21; see below, 3.17). This, in fact, parallels the promise in Malachi, namely, that after the Lord purifies and refines the Levites, then he will “have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years” (Mal. 3:3–4). The prophets hardly repudiated the sacrificial system!

What then were the prophets saying? What exactly was their problem with the sacrifices? In order to give a sound, biblical answer to these questions, we’ll look at every relevant verse in the Hebrew Scriptures, at the same time testing the accuracy of the anti-missionary claim that “the prophets loudly declared to the Jewish people that the contrite prayer of the penitent sinner replaces the sacrificial system.”¹⁰⁹

Let’s begin our survey with the prophet Micah.

With what shall I come before the Lord

and bow down before the exalted God?

Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,

with ten thousand rivers of oil?

Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has showed you, O man, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:6–8

Now, Micah was a Judean prophet living in the eighth century B.C.E., which means that he lived in proximity to the Temple in Jerusalem. In his day, the Temple was fully operative and the Jewish people were not in exile. Thus, no one can argue that Micah was addressing the question of how his people could come into right relationship with God when the Temple was destroyed or inaccessible. That was not the issue here. Rather, Micah was writing to people who had full access to the Temple, and this means that at the very time he was preaching and prophesying, daily sacrifices were being offered at the Temple in Jerusalem and special sacrifices were being offered on the holy days and feast days. And these sacrifices, as we have just noted, were being offered by divine directive, as laid out explicitly in the Torah.

Does anyone think that Micah was repudiating these divinely ordained sacrifices?¹¹⁰ Does anyone think that Micah was saying to his fellow Jews, “The entire sacrificial system as outlined in the Torah is utterly meaningless to the Lord! The Five Books of Moses don’t count. Their words have no meaning. Forget about them, ignore them, don’t even think about following them.” Can you imagine Micah saying such things?

Ironically, anti-missionaries often argue that Jesus was not a true prophet because, they claim, he ignored or violated the Torah and led others to ignore or violate the Torah (see vol. 3, 5.28). Yet if this passage from Micah means what some anti-missionaries claim it means, then Micah was a false prophet too. In fact, he would have to be considered a false prophet of the worst kind, since, it is alleged, he aggressively spoke against sacrifices and offerings. Obviously, this cannot be the case.

What then was Micah saying? He was reproving his sinful people and telling them (with some obvious hyperbole) not to think that they could please God merely by bringing thousands of sacrifices and offerings or to imagine that the Lord would want them to sacrifice their own sons to pay for their sins. Rather, what God was looking for was justice, mercy, and humility, something that some of them apparently overlooked in their zeal to bring sacrifices and special offerings. They put their emphasis on the wrong thing, emphasizing the outward ceremonies and ignoring the inward corruption. Such is human nature.

Yeshua rebuked hypocritical religious leaders for similar practices in his day, saying to them, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matt. 23:23). Our Messiah was saying, “You are scrupulously careful to tithe on every last crop, but you completely overlook matters that are of far more importance to the Lord: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You’ve got your priorities all wrong.”

Similarly, Paul had to straighten out some zealous Christians who were excited about spiritual gifts (such as prophecy) but neglected love. He explained to them, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1–2). In other words, I may be a great miracle worker, but if I don’t have love, it’s all a big, empty display. He even went as far as saying, “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3).

All these voices—Micah, Yeshua, and Paul—express the identical sentiment: What good are our tithes, our offerings, our exercising of spiritual gifts, or even our personal sacrifice if we don’t practice justice, mercy, love, and humility? Those are the qualities that God really requires.

Of course, it’s easy to see how Micah’s strong prophetic language could be misunderstood by people living centuries after the biblical era, just as the language of Yeshua and Paul has been misunderstood by some. But for Jews living in Micah’s day, there was no possible way they would think he was saying, “Forget about Moses! Throw out the Torah! No longer observe the Day of Atonement! Disregard the Passover lamb! Forget about the daily, prescribed offerings! Get rid of the priests and their sacrifices!” Instead, his meaning was clear: “Sinner, God wants you to live right, not bring him endless—and pointless—sacrifices and offerings.” And to underscore his point, Micah used exaggerated, sarcastic language, speaking of offering up “thousands of rams … ten thousand rivers of oil” and even the sinner’s “firstborn” son. His argument is clear.

It’s also important to note that the prophets often used either-or language to drill home their point. That’s why Hosea could say on behalf of the Lord, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6), when in reality the Lord wanted both mercy and sacrifice, acknowledgment of him and burnt offerings.¹¹¹ Remember, the Torah described the burnt offering as “an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord” (e.g., Lev. 1:9, quoted in full above), and it represented the complete dedication of the worshiper to the Lord. This was something of worth when done with a right heart. And remember also that it was after Noah offered up sacrifices that the Torah records, “The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done’ ” (Gen. 8:21; many other similar examples could be given from the Tanakh). There is nothing negative here.

You see, the Lord did desire sacrifices and offerings from his people—as long as they were brought with obedient or repentant hearts. But if his people continued to live in sin, then it was the height of self-deception for them to think that their sacrifices would make a difference to God. Absolutely not. Instead, those offerings were utterly repulsive to him, looking more like a bribe than an act of worship and devotion.

In contemporary terms we might say, “What’s the use of your going to the synagogue (or church) and fasting and praying and giving large gifts to the building program if you’re watching pornography at home and you cheat on your job? God hates your attendance at synagogue (or church) and he despises your acts of sacrifice. They are unacceptable to him! What he wants from you is obedience.” (See further, 3.8, above.)

We see a similar emphasis in the writings of Isaiah, a contemporary of Micah and a man who also lived in proximity to the Temple. Speaking by divine inspiration, he said:

Hear the word of the Lord,

you rulers of Sodom;

listen to the law of our God,

you people of Gomorrah!

“The multitude of your sacrifices—

what are they to me?” says the Lord.

“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,

of rams and the fat of fattened animals;

I have no pleasure.

in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.

When you come to appear before me,

who has asked this of you,

this trampling of my courts?

Stop bringing meaningless offerings!

Your incense is detestable to me.

New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—

I cannot bear your evil assemblies.

Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts

my soul hates.

They have become a burden to me;

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands in prayer,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even if you offer many prayers,

I will not listen.

Your hands are full of blood;

wash and make yourselves clean.

Take your evil deeds

out of my sight!

Stop doing wrong,

learn to do right!

Seek justice,

encourage the oppressed.

Defend the cause of the fatherless,

plead the case of the widow.”

Isaiah 1:10–17

The meaning of Isaiah’s words is obvious: God is sick of his people’s hypocrisy. He is saying, “Enough! I don’t want any more of your sacrifices, your prayers, your Sabbaths, or your holy days. What I want from you is that you repent and live right.”

Would anyone, Messianic Jew or traditional Jew, argue with this? And would anyone take this passage to be a blanket statement indicating that God completely rejected the sacrificial system, along with prayer, worship, and Sabbath and Holy Day observance? Certainly not.¹¹² Rather, when sacrifices are brought with a sinful heart, they are meaningless offerings, a stench in God’s nostrils. When sinful hands are lifted in prayer, the Lord hides his eyes and shuts his ears. Even when his people come to the Temple to worship, if their hearts are not right, God sees their presence as an intrusion—literally, a trampling of his courts—and he regards all their religious observance as an unbearable burden.

But when his people’s hearts are right, then their sacrifices are a sweet smelling aroma to him, as emphasized above. And when his people have clean hands, then their prayers are his delight (see Prov. 15:8; and contrast Prov. 28:9, “If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable.”). Jeremiah 14:12 is also in harmony with this, where the Lord tells his prophet, “Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague.” Yes, God will even reject our fasting—along with our prayers and offerings—if our hearts are far from him.

In this regard, Psalm 51 is especially enlightening. This psalm of repentance is attributed to King David after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah, killed. After fully acknowledging his guilt and pleading for mercy, David exclaimed, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Ps. 51:16–17)[18–19].

But does the psalm end there? Not at all. Instead, the very next verses contain a prayer, possibly added later by another author, closing with these words: “In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar” (Ps. 51:18–19[20–21]).¹¹³ This is quite a statement!

When sacrifices are brought in righteousness, they are a delight to the Lord; when they are brought in sin—or as a replacement for repentance—they are an abomination. It is also in this light that we should understand the words of Psalm 40, where the psalmist wrote, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced [or opened];¹¹⁴ burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart’ ” (vv. 6–7).

It seems that the psalmist received a revelation, apparently while meditating on the words of the Torah. When he considered what was written there concerning the sacrificial system, he realized that what God really wanted was his own life, his own devotion, the surrender of himself to the Lord—as opposed to the mere offering up of a sacrifice. That’s what he meant when he said, “it is written about me in the scroll.”¹¹⁵ In other words, “When you command me to bring an offering to you, that offering symbolizes my own life being given over to you, my own soul being poured out to you. That’s what you really want!”¹¹⁶

In the New Testament, Paul used similar language: “I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Rom. 12:1).¹¹⁷ That’s what the psalmist was saying for himself: “Here I am, Lord, offered up wholly to you!” What the psalmist was not saying was, “The Day of Atonement, with its special sacrifices and offerings as given to Moses by the Lord himself, is not wanted by God. The special offerings for the Feast of Tabernacles—given in great detail by the Lord—are irrelevant to him. He doesn’t want the offerings for purification, thanksgiving, dedication, and atonement as outlined in the Torah. No. He wants devotion.” Clearly, this was not his point.

Jeremiah 6:19–20 underscores this well: “Hear, O earth: I am bringing disaster on this people, the fruit of their schemes, because they have not listened to my words and have rejected my law. What do I care about incense from Sheba or sweet calamus from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable; your sacrifices do not please me.” As the Christian Old Testament scholar David Talley noted:

In Mal 3:4; Jer 6:20; Hos 9:4 the acceptability or unacceptability of the sacrifices is not based on the sacrifices themselves, but rather on the obedient lifestyle of the ones who offer them. It does not matter how much the sacrifices might cost (i.e., imported incense and sweet cane or the amount of the sacrifice that is for the Lord), when sin is not forsaken, the sacrifices are worthless.¹¹⁸

From all this we are reminded of an important spiritual truth, one that recurs often throughout the Word of God: Even things as precious as prayer, sacrifices, worship, fasting, and observance of the Sabbaths and holy days are utterly distasteful to the Lord when performed with a sinful, hypocritical heart. In fact, the Torah addressed this as well, specifically with reference to sacrifices and offerings.

As we noted earlier, God repeatedly referred to the sacrifices and offerings as a pleasing aroma to him, describing voluntary offerings, offerings for holy days, and daily, fixed offerings in these very terms. To give just one example, we read in Numbers that the Lord gave his people these instructions: “Prepare one lamb in the morning and the other at twilight, together with a grain offering of a tenth of an ephah of fine flour mixed with a quarter of a hin of oil from pressed olives. This is the regular burnt offering instituted at Mount Sinai as a pleasing aroma, an offering made to the Lord by fire” (28:4–6).

This is a sacred rite. The sacrifices and offerings were to be a vital, holy, and glorious part of Israel’s worship and devotion. That is what the Torah taught, and we read here that these words came from Mount Sinai itself. But the Lord also said in the Torah that if we sinned against him and fell into idolatry, “I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings” (Lev. 26:31). It’s all laid out in advance! The very problem the prophets were addressing was already addressed in the Torah. Sacrifices and offerings were not the problem. Sin was the problem. It spoiled everything, including Israel’s sacrifices and offerings, making them unacceptable to the Lord. So it is written in the law of God. The words of the prophets were actually a fulfillment of the words of the Torah.

This, quite obviously, is a far cry from saying that God (and/or his prophets) repudiated the sacrificial system. Rather, as we have been emphasizing, God no more repudiated sacrifices than he repudiated prayer, worship, or the Sabbath. But he accepted nothing from those whose hearts were far from him, a truth that Yeshua affirmed as well. “You hypocrites!” he said to sinful leaders in his day. “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men’ ” (Matt. 15:7–9, quoting Isa. 29:13). The Messiah hated hypocrisy too.¹¹⁹

So as we have clearly seen, even though the Torah commanded that the Israelites keep the feasts, observe the new moons and Sabbaths, and offer various kinds of sacrifices—corporately, and under certain circumstances, individually—God would have none of it from sinners and hypocrites.

We find an almost identical message from the northern Israelite prophet Amos. Through him the Lord said:

I hate, I despise your religious feasts [Hebrew, hag];

I cannot stand your assemblies [Hebrew, ʿassevetʾ].

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Amos 5:21–24

Now, if you have had any doubt whatsoever about my line of reasoning so far, this should settle things completely for you, since here the Lord rejects his people’s religious feasts and assemblies (the Hebrew words here included Sabbaths, new moons, Passover, Tabernacles, and the other holy days and festivals), sacrifices and offerings, and music and songs. And why did he reject all these forms of worship and devotion? It was because the Israelites were steeped in sin—including idolatry, immorality, and injustice—and therefore all their acts of worship were abhorrent to the Lord. He wanted justice and purity, not songs, services, Sabbaths, and sacrifices. Add to this the fact that even the worship of Yahweh in northern Israel was mixed with the worship of other gods,¹²⁰ and you can see why he wanted nothing to do with their zealous religious activity—even when the choicest of offerings were brought to him or the most beautiful songs were sung to him.

The Israeli biblical scholar Shalom M. Paul summarized the message of Amos, noting that

this total disavowal of the cult is expressed anthropomorphically [i.e., speaking of God in human terms] by the Lord’s shutting off, so to speak, several of his own senses: smell (v 21 …), sight (v 22 …), and hearing (v 23 …) … representing a complete and comprehensive repudiation.…

Ritual per se, with all its paraphernalia and panoply, simply cannot substitute for the basic moral and ethical actions of humans. When these are lacking, religious life, with all its ritual accoutrements, becomes a sham. What is required above all else is justice and righteousness.¹²¹

That is what Amos was saying, and it was in harmony with the message of the rest of the prophets. As Charles Lee Feinberg, a Jewish Christian biblical scholar, noted:

sacrifices were always meant to be of secondary importance to obedience and godliness. Neither Jeremiah nor any other prophet decried sacrifices as such. They meant that moral law is always paramount to the ritual law. It is significant that when Leviticus 6–8 is read in the synagogue, this passage in Jeremiah is read as the concluding portion, called the Haphtorah.¹²²

“But wait one second,” you say. “You didn’t quote the entire passage from the Book of Amos. If you continue reading, you will see that he claimed that the Israelites never even brought the Lord sacrifices during their forty years of wandering in the wilderness. And yet God took care of them that entire time, proving that sacrifices were simply not a big deal. In fact, Jeremiah went one step further, telling us that God never really wanted our sacrifices in the first place, even in the beginning when he gave us the law.”

Let’s look at those passages right now:

“Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings forty years in the desert, O house of Israel? You have lifted up the shrine of your king, the pedestal of your idols, the star of your god—which you made for yourselves. Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,” says the Lord, whose name is God Almighty.

Amos 5:25–27

“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go ahead, add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! For when I brought your forefathers out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not … give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in all the ways I command you, that it may go well with you.”

Jeremiah 7:21–23¹²³

What are these verses saying? Writing in the Encyclopedia Judaica, Anson F. Rainey, a professor at Tel Aviv University and a foremost biblical and Semitic scholar, provided these important insights:

The prophets of the First Temple period often spoke out against sacrificial ritual (Amos 5:21–27; Hos. 6:6; Micah 6:6–8; Isa. 1:11–17; Jer. 6:20; 7:21–22). Righteous and just behavior along with obedience to the Lord are contrasted with the conduct of rituals unaccompanied by proper ethical and moral attitudes (Amos 5:24; Micah 6:8; Isa. 1:16–17; Jer. 7:23). It has thus been assumed by many scholars that the prophets condemned all sacrificial rituals. [The Catholic biblical scholar Roland] De Vaux has shown the absurdity of such a conclusion since Isaiah 1:15 also condemns prayer. No one holds that the prophets rejected prayer; it was prayer offered without the proper moral commitment that was being denounced; the same holds true for the oracles against formal rituals. Similar allusions in the Psalms which might be taken as a complete rejection of sacrifice (e.g., 40:7–8; 50:8–15) actually express the same concern for inner attitude as the prophets. The wisdom literature sometimes reflects the same concern for moral and ethical values over empty sacerdotal acts (Prov. 15:8; 21:3, 15:27).

Certain other statements by Amos (5:25) and Jeremiah (7:22) have been taken to mean that the prophets knew nothing of a ritual practice followed in the wilderness experience of Israel. De Vaux has noted that Jeremiah clearly knew Deuteronomy 12:6–14 and regarded it as the Law of Moses. The prophetic oracles against sacrifice in the desert are really saying that the original Israelite sacrificial system was not meant to be the empty, hypocritical formalism practiced by their contemporaries. The demand by Hosea for “mercy and not sacrifice … knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hos. 6:6; cf. Matt. 9:13; 12:7) is surely to be taken as relative, a statement of priorities (cf. also 1 Sam. 15:22). The inner attitude was prerequisite to any valid ritual expression (Isa. 29:13). Foreign elements that had penetrated the Israelite sacrificial system were, of course, roundly condemned by the prophets. Such was especially the case with Israel (Amos 4:5; Hos. 2:13–15;4:11–13; 13:2) but also in Judah (Jer. 7:17–18; Ezek. 8; et al.).¹²⁴

Rainey correctly rejects two impossible views: First, that the prophets completely repudiated the sacrificial system; and second, that the prophets knew nothing about a sacrificial system in conjunction with Israel’s wilderness wanderings.¹²⁵ We should also point out that the Book of Jeremiah does not take a negative view of sacrifices and offerings. Just look at Jeremiah 17:24–26.

But if you are careful to obey me, declares the Lord, and bring no load through the gates of this city on the Sabbath, but keep the Sabbath day holy by not doing any work on it, then kings who sit on David’s throne will come through the gates of this city with their officials. They and their officials will come riding in chariots and on horses, accompanied by the men of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, and this city will be inhabited forever. People will come from the towns of Judah and the villages around Jerusalem, from the territory of Benjamin and the western foothills, from the hill country and the Negev, bringing burnt offerings and sacrifices, grain offerings, incense and thank offerings to the house of the Lord.

What a promise! And what a reminder that the prophets did not denigrate or reject sacrifices per se. In fact, here is another promise from Jeremiah that is even more dramatic:

This is what the Lord says: “You say about this place, ‘It is a desolate waste, without men or animals.’ Yet in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are deserted, inhabited by neither men nor animals, there will be heard once more the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom, and the voices of those who bring thank offerings to the house of the Lord, saying, ‘Give thanks to the Lord Almighty, for the Lord is good; his love endures forever.’ For I will restore the fortunes of the land as they were before,” says the Lord.

Jeremiah 33:10–11

For Jeremiah, a restored Jerusalem meant a restored sacrificial system too.

And here is yet another promise of restored sacrifices from Jeremiah, also presupposing that the sacrifices were divinely ordained and positive: “For this is what the Lord says: ‘David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests, who are Levites, ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices’ ” (Jer. 33:17–18).

In light of these verses, there can be no question that Jeremiah did not reject the importance of sacrifices and offerings earlier in his book.

“Then why don’t the rabbis agree with your position?”

Many of them do! According to Dr. J. H. Hertz, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire and the author of the English commentary on the Torah and prophetic readings used in Conservative synagogues worldwide, “Jeremiah by no means opposed sacrifice brought in the right spirit. In his picture of the Restoration (Jer. 33:18), due place is given to the Temple worship and priestly sacrifices.”¹²⁶ With regard to the “widespread misunderstanding [that] exists in regard to the attitude of the Prophets to the sacrificial cult,” Hertz notes:

The Prophets do not seek to alter or abolish the externals of religion as such. They are not so unreasonable as to demand that men should worship without aid of any outward symbolism. What they protested against was the fatal tendency to make these outward symbols the whole of religion; the superstitious over-estimate of sacrifice as compared with justice, pity and purity; and especially the monstrous wickedness with which the offering of sacrifices was accompanied.¹²⁷

In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most respected Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century:

Sacrifice, the strength and the measure of piety, acts wherein God and man meet—all this should be called obnoxious?

Of course, the prophets did not condemn the practice of sacrifice in itself; otherwise, we should have to conclude that Isaiah intended to discourage the practice of prayer (Isa. 1:14–15). They did, however, claim that deeds of injustice vitiate both sacrifice and prayer. Men may not drown out the cries of the oppressed with the noise of hymns, nor buy off the Lord with increased offerings. The prophets disparaged the cult when it became a substitute for righteousness. It is precisely the implied recognition of the value of the cult that lends force to their insistence that there is something far more precious than sacrifice.…

What they [i.e., the prophets] attacked was, I repeat, extremely venerable: a sphere unmistakably holy; a spirituality that had both form and substance, that was concrete and inspiring, an atmosphere overwhelming the believer—pageantry, scenery, mystery, spectacle, fragrance, song, and exaltation. In the experience of such captivating sanctity, who could question the presence of God in the shape of a temple?¹²⁸

In support of this last statement, Heschel cites Psalm 132:

“Let us go to his dwelling place;

let us worship at his footstool—

arise, O Lord, and come to your resting place,

you and the ark of your might.

May your priests be clothed with righteousness;

may your saints sing for joy.” …

For the Lord has chosen Zion,

he has desired it for his dwelling:

“This is my resting place for ever and ever;

here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it.”

Psalm 132:7–9, 13–14

God himself welcomed his people to his holy Temple, and the psalmist reveled in the wonder and awe of this joyful, sacred celebration. The prophets did not repudiate this. Rather, as we have clearly seen, it was because sacrifices were so significant in the biblical world that the prophets’ attacks on their misuse sounded utterly shocking. Listen again to Heschel:

In the sacrifice of homage, God was a participant; in the sacrifice of expiation, God was a recipient. The sacrificial act was a form of personal association with God, a way of entering into communion with him. In offering an animal, a person was offering himself vicariously. It had the power of atonement.…

It is hard for us to imagine what entering a sanctuary or offering a sacrifice meant to ancient man. The sanctuary was holiness in perpetuity, a miracle in continuity; the divine was mirrored in the air, sowing blessing, closing gaps between the here and beyond. In offering a sacrifice, man mingled with mystery, reached the summit of significance: sin was consumed, self was abandoned, satisfaction was bestowed upon divinity. Is it possible for us today to conceive of the solemn joy of those whose offering was placed on the altar?

Then will I go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy. I will praise Thee with the lyre, O God, my God (Ps. 43:4; cf. Deut. 12:18–19; 31:11; Exod. 34:23–24; Isa. 1:12).¹²⁹

What a delight it was to go to the Temple and sacrifice at God’s altar! What a joy, what a privilege, what a sacred transaction. These are biblical truths we must keep before us as we analyze and interpret the words of the prophets regarding the misuse and abuse of the sacrificial system.

Turning to the specific interpretation of Jeremiah 7:21–23, verses that have raised questions for both Jewish and Christian scholars, there are several possible views: (1) In the Ten Commandments themselves, there is no mention of sacrifices and offerings, since morality came before sacrificial rites, and it is the Ten Commandments (or Exod. 19:5, one chapter before the Ten Commandments) to which Jeremiah is referring.¹³⁰ (2) When the Lord brought our people out of Egypt, he did not speak only about sacrifices and offerings—which is the impression given by the overemphasis put on these rites by Jeremiah’s contemporaries—but he also spoke about morality and obedience.¹³¹ (3) It is a typical, prophetic overstatement that should be taken to mean “that the original Israelite sacrificial system was not meant to be the empty, hypocritical formalism practiced by their contemporaries” (A. F. Rainey, as quoted above).¹³² (4) It is a strong rebuke to individual Israelites who were not commanded to bring burnt offerings in the Torah but rather were given the privilege of doing so. The stinging rebuke is found in God’s words, “eat the meat for yourselves,” since the burnt offering was to be consumed totally by the flames on the altar, whereas God is saying here that their offerings are not acceptable to him because of their sin, so they might as well eat the sacrificial meat themselves.¹³³

Which view is correct? That can be debated, but in reality, not one of these views helps the anti-missionary argument, since none of the positions just presented claims that God or his prophets ultimately rejected or denigrated sacrifices and offerings. We have room, therefore, to differ on the exact interpretation of these verses. In fact, in his commentary on Jeremiah, Charles Feinberg, writing from a Christian perspective, affirmed the first view cited above, even though that view has been championed by leading rabbis through the ages.¹³⁴ However, I believe it is important to offer some qualification to that same view, since the casual reader might actually think that God gave no specific commandments about sacrifices and offerings when he brought our people out of Egypt. That is simply not what the Torah says.

It was in Exodus 12, while the Israelites were still in Egypt—and that means before the Ten Commandments were given—that the Lord commanded them to sacrifice a lamb for each house, inaugurating the annual Passover ritual. And this sacrificial ritual was to be established as a lasting ordinance for all generations (see especially Exod. 12:14). In Exodus 20:24, immediately after the giving of the Ten Commandments, the Lord said to his people, “Make an altar of earth for me and sacrifice on it your burnt-offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause my name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you.” Right from the start the Lord was speaking about sacrifices and offerings. In fact, in Exodus 20–24, called by scholars the Book of the Covenant (see Exod. 24:7), there are three more commandments regarding sacrifices and offerings (see Exod. 22:20, 29; 23:18; see also Exod. 24:1–8 and immediately below, 3.10). So we see that sacrifices and offerings were, in fact, part of God’s laws to Israel immediately before and after the exodus from Egypt.

In this light, the comments of Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman, summarizing the major traditional Jewish commentaries to Jeremiah, are applicable. I quote here the relevant portions of his commentary to Jeremiah 7:21–23:

21. add your burnt offerings, etc. Burnt offerings were wholly consumed on the altar, whilst of other sacrifices parts were eaten by the priests and offerers. The meaning is: There is no sanctity in offerings brought by guilty men; they are merely flesh so you might as well eat your burnt offerings too! (Rashi; Metusdath David).
22. for I spoke not, etc. Sacrifices were only of secondary importance and subordinate to moral conduct. But neither Jeremiah nor the prophets opposed sacrifices as a religious institution. This is made clear from the whole passage.… Some non-Jewish commentators have likewise recognized that Judaism has always given precedence to the moral over the ritual law [citing 1 Sam. 15:22 here; see above, 3.8]. Indeed, this selection of the Prophets has been chosen to read [in the weekly synagogue reading of Scripture] along with Lev. 6–8 as the Haphtarah [i.e., the supplemental reading from the Prophets that relates to the weekly Torah portion], to indicate that it is better to obey God rather than to sin and bring a sacrifice [with reference here to the commentary of Levush; note also the similar observation of Feinberg, cited above].
23. in the day … Egypt.… the context makes it evident that a contrast is drawn between offerings on the altar and the moral laws enjoined in the Decalogue (verse 9); and it is true that there is no mention of sacrifices in the Ten Commandments. Daath Mikra [a classic Rabbinic commentary] suggests a different rendering of the text: ‘I spake not unto your fathers … for the sake of burnt offerings,’ i.e. I did not bring you out of Egypt because I wanted your sacrifices, although these are certainly part of the system of Divine worship.¹³⁵

These comments speak for themselves, reinforcing that there is nothing in these verses—even according to the standard traditional commentaries—to support the anti-missionary argument that the prophets denigrated and rejected the sacrificial system.

As for Amos 5:25, I have no problem with your interpretation, namely, that the children of Israel did not bring sacrifices to the Lord during their wilderness wanderings, yet he still guided and kept them by his grace and mercy. It is clear that the contemporaries of Amos put some kind of mystical emphasis on sacrifices, offerings, worship, and the observance of Sabbaths and festivals, imagining that these rites could counteract their persistent sins and transgressions and somehow secure the favor of God. Amos is telling them in no uncertain terms that such an emphasis is nonsense, plain and simple. This is in complete harmony with everything we have read so far in the prophetic books.¹³⁶

As we have seen, the prophets sought to counteract the misunderstanding and misuse of the sacrificial system, not its rightful use. Similar to this is the language of Psalm 50, in which the Lord says:

“Hear, O my people, and I will speak,

O Israel, and I will testify against you:

I am God, your God.

I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices

or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.

I have no need of a bull from your stall

or of goats from your pens,

for every animal of the forest is mine,

and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains,

and the creatures of the field are mine.

If I were hungry I would not tell you,

for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats?

Sacrifice thank offerings to God,

fulfill your vows to the Most High,

and call upon me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”

Psalm 50:7–15

Here the Lord is acknowledging that his people are wonderfully zealous when it comes to bringing sacrifices and offerings (just as Jesus acknowledged a similar zeal from the Jewish leaders of his day with regard to tithes and ceremonial purity). That was not the problem. The problem was their sin (see vv. 16–21 in this psalm) and their notion that somehow the Lord actually needed their sacrifices (as if they would satisfy his “hunger”). But this psalm cannot possibly be construed as an attack on the sacrificial system in general. Just look at verses 14, 15, and 23. “Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.… He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.”

Here, bringing thanksgiving offerings is commanded and commended, not condemned and cast aside. The meaning of these verses is clear, and it is also clear that so far we have found no support for the anti-missionary claim that “the prophets loudly declared to the Jewish people that the contrite prayer of the penitent sinner replaces the sacrificial system.” On the contrary, as we have seen, the prophets indicated that the Lord rejected both prayer and sacrifice—along with Sabbath observance and all forms of worship—from unrepentant sinners. As Chief Rabbi Hertz summarized, “The Prophet’s call is not, Give up your sacrifices, but, Give up your evil doing.”¹³⁷

“But,” you say, “there are other passages that state clearly that prayer does replace sacrifice.”

Let’s finish our discussion, then, by turning to those verses that have sometimes been interpreted to mean that penitent prayer replaces sacrifice. We’ll consider evidence from the Book of Psalms, the Book of Hosea, and the prayer of Solomon in 2 Chronicles 7 and 1 Kings 8.

In Psalm 141:2, David prayed, “May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.” The meaning of this petition is clear: “Lord, receive my prayers just as you receive the incense burned before you by the priests; receive my uplifted hands just as you receive the evening sacrifice.”

How then can this verse be interpreted to mean that “prayer replaces sacrifice”? According to the psalm’s superscription, it was David who uttered these words, the very man who wanted to build a Temple for the Lord, the man who wrote out the plans for that Temple and left a huge fortune for it to be erected by his son Solomon (see 1 Chronicles 29). It was the same David who brought the ark of the Lord back to Jerusalem, who invested so much time and effort to enhance the Tabernacle rituals (see 1 Chronicles 15; 28), who offered sacrifices to God to stop a plague of judgment (see 2 Sam. 24:25; 1 Chron. 21:26–28).

In fact, it was the Lord himself who instructed David to offer those sacrifices before he would stop the plague of judgment:

When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the Lord was grieved because of the calamity and said to the angel who was afflicting the people, “Enough! Withdraw your hand.” The angel of the Lord was then at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. When David saw the angel who was striking down the people, he said to the Lord, “I am the one who has sinned and done wrong. These are but sheep. What have they done? Let your hand fall upon me and my family.” On that day Gad went to David and said to him, “Go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” So David went up, as the Lord had commanded through Gad.… David built an altar to the Lord there and sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. Then the Lord answered prayer in behalf of the land, and the plague on Israel was stopped.

2 Samuel 24:16–19, 25

How important sacrifices and offerings were! Surely no one among David’s descendants—for hundreds of years following—would have thought he was suggesting that prayer replaced sacrifice. It was those very descendants who were so faithfully involved in Temple worship and Temple offerings. And it was the beauty and glory of sacrifices and incense that provided the backdrop for David’s prayer.

This verse does not teach that prayer replaces sacrifice (or just the evening sacrifice, since that’s all the verse mentions), nor can it be interpreted as a secret biblical reference whose real meaning was only discovered centuries later when the Temple was destroyed. If that were the case, then it would be only fair to ask why the Jews who returned to Jerusalem one generation after the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple were so eager to rebuild that very Temple and begin to offer sacrifices to the Lord. If prayer replaced sacrifice, or if prayer was superior to sacrifice, then why were our forefathers so eager to reinstitute the sacrificial system? In fact, we must ask why Ezra and Nehemiah and their fellow workers risked life and limb to rebuild the Temple and restore the altar of the Lord. Why do this if God had prepared a better (or at the least, alternate) way? (For more on this, see below, 3.17.)¹³⁸

Perhaps the anti-missionaries have a stronger case in the Book of Hosea? Rabbi Tovia Singer, representing the anti-missionary position, would answer with an emphatic yes. He writes:

In fact, in Hosea 3:4–5, the prophet foretold with divine exactness that the nation of Israel would not have a sacrificial system during the last segment of Jewish history until the messianic age. [Rabbi Singer then quotes Hosea 3:4–5, following the King James Version almost verbatim: “For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king, and shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days.”]

In the words of the Bible, this period of time would last for many days. Yet, despite the repeated proclamations of the church that the crucifixion of Jesus serves as a sin sacrifice today, the words of Hosea were meticulously fulfilled, and we are without an animal sacrificial system today.

Given the spiritual magnitude of this remarkable prophecy, Hosea was compelled to reveal how the ecclesiastical temple functions were to be replaced. In essence, if the prophet is testifying that the nation of Israel will indeed be without a sacrificial system during their long exile until the messianic age, what are we to use instead? How are the Jewish people to atone for unintentional sin without a blood sacrifice during their bitter exile? What about all the animal sacrifices prescribed in the Book of Leviticus? Can the Jewish people get along without animal offerings? Missionaries claim they cannot. The Bible disagrees.

For this reason, the statement in Hosea 14:2–3 is crucial. In these two verses, Hosea reveals to his beloved nation how they are to replace the sacrificial system during their protracted exile. The prophet declares that the Almighty wants us to “render for bulls the offering of our lips.” Prayer is to replace the sacrificial system. Hosea 14:2–3 states, “Take words with you, and return to the Lord. Say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity; receive us graciously, For we will render for bulls the offering of our lips.’ ”¹³⁹

Are Rabbi Singer’s claims true? Certainly not. Let’s review his interpretation, working backward from Hosea 14 to Hosea 3.

First, it is quite natural to take Hosea 14:1–2[2–3] figuratively, just as Psalm 141:2, in which David, as we saw, asks that his prayer be set before God as incense and that the lifting up of his hands be as the evening sacrifice. So even following the traditional Jewish translation, God’s people could be saying, “We will fulfill the vows of our lips as if they were bulls being offered up in sacrifice.” The New Testament letter to the Messianic Jews (known as Hebrews) draws on the imagery of this verse in a similar fashion: “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name” (Heb. 13:15).

Second, and more importantly, there are difficulties in the translation of Hosea 14:2[3], since the Hebrew literally reads, “Forgive all iniquity, and take good, and we will pay [Hebrew, shillem] bulls our lips.” For that reason, there are leading Jewish scholars (such as Robert Gordis)¹⁴⁰ who suggest that the oldest Jewish translation of this verse, namely, the Septuagint, should be followed here, reading the word “fruit” (peri) instead of “bulls” (parim)—thereby undercutting the entire anti-missionary argument.¹⁴¹ Not only so, but a careful reading of the Hebrew text—even leaving the word bulls intact—indicates that the verse has nothing to do with offering sacrifices, since the Hebrew verb shillem is never used in the entire Bible with reference to making an animal sacrifice. Rather, it is most frequently used in the context of paying a vow, and its actual meaning—which is not disputed in any Hebrew dictionary I have found—is “to fulfill, complete, pay, repay, compensate,” as in Ecclesiastes 5:4[3]: “When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it [shillem]. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill [shillem] your vow.” Therefore the meaning of the phrase is, “We will pay the vows of our lips to God,” as opposed to, “We will replace animal sacrifices with the offerings of our lips.”¹⁴²

All this should give us pause for thought, since it would be highly unlikely—to put it mildly—that the Lord would hang a major, life-critical, Torah revising revelation on just one verse, especially when that verse in the original Hebrew is somewhat obscure grammatically and clearly does not mean what the anti-missionaries claim it means.¹⁴³

Third, there is a fatal flaw in Rabbi Singer’s use of Hosea 3, and it is seen in the key verse from Hosea that he failed to quote. You will remember that he argued that according to Hosea 3:4–5, “the nation of Israel would not have a sacrificial system during the last segment of Jewish history until the messianic age.” According to this interpretation, Hosea 3:5 describes the end of this period when Israel will again have sacrifice and king: “Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days” (Hosea 3:5). Rabbi Singer then explains that during this period “the prophet declares that the Almighty wants us to ‘render for bulls the offering of our lips.’ Prayer is to replace the sacrificial system,” referring to Hosea 14:1–2[2–3]. But he never actually quotes verse 1[2], which reads, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall!” And this is the verse that leads into the exhortation to “take words with you.…”

So Hosea 14 is speaking of the end of the period described in Hosea 3:4–5, the time when Israel returns to the Lord, the time when sacrifices and offerings are restored. Look again at Hosea 3:5: “Afterward the Israelites will return [Hebrew, shuv] and seek the Lord their God and David their king.” Then compare this with Hosea 14:1–2[2–3]: “Return [shuv], O Israel, to the Lord your God.… Take words with you and return [shuv] to the Lord.” Then keep reading in Hosea 14. God says:

“I will heal their waywardness

and love them freely,

for my anger has turned away from them.

I will be like the dew to Israel;

he will blossom like a lily.

Like a cedar of Lebanon

he will send down his roots;

his young shoots will grow.

His splendor will be like an olive tree,

his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.

Men will dwell again in his shade.

He will flourish like the grain.

He will blossom like a vine,

and his fame will be like the wine from Lebanon.”

Hosea 14:4–7[5–8]

What a wonderful passage! It is hardly a picture of Israel in exile, separated from the Temple and unable to offer sacrifices and offerings. Rather, it is a picture of Israel restored, gloriously blessed by the Lord, a picture that many traditional Jews would equate with the Messianic age, meaning the age of the building of the Third Temple, with its sacrifices and offerings (see below, 3.17). So Hosea is actually saying the opposite of what Rabbi Singer claims he says. Contrary to the assertion, then, that “the prophets loudly declared to the Jewish people that the contrite prayer of the penitent sinner replaces the sacrificial system,” we have seen that not only did the prophets not declare this “loudly,” they didn’t declare it at all.¹⁴⁴

Yet there is a final passage marshaled by Rabbi Singer and other anti-missionaries, taken this time from the prayer of Solomon as recorded in 2 Chronicles 6 and 1 Kings 8. Interestingly, it was the Lord’s reply to this very prayer that was pointed to by the Talmudic rabbis for scriptural justification of their position that prayer had replaced sacrifice. As noted in the Encyclopedia Judaica, “After the destruction of the Temple and the consequent cessation of sacrifices, the rabbis declared, ‘Prayer, repentance, and charity avert the evil decree,’ ”¹⁴⁵ and they based their position on one scriptural text, namely, 2 Chronicles 7:14, in which the Lord said to Solomon, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

With reference to this Talmudic concept, Rabbi Singer writes:

The prophets never instruct the Jews to worship any crucified messiah or demigod. Nor does scripture ever tell us that an innocent man can die as an atonement for the sins of the wicked. Such a message is utterly antithetical to the teachings of the Jewish scriptures. [Actually, this very message is found both in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. See below, 3.15.] Rather, it is the lips of the sinner that would become as bulls of the sin offerings.

King Solomon echoes this sentiment as well. In 1 Kings 8:46–50 [which is an exact parallel to 2 Chron. 6:36–40], King Solomon delivers a startling prophetic message as he inaugurates the first temple that had just been completed. In his inauguration sermon, King Solomon forewarns that one day the Jewish people would be driven out of the land of Israel, and be banished to the land of their enemies, far or near. During their exile they will fervently desire to repent of their sins. King Solomon then declares that they will face Jerusalem from their exile, confess their sins, “and God will hear their prayers in Heaven, and forgive them for all their transgressions.”

There was no mention of a cross or a dead messiah in King Solomon’s prophetic message.¹⁴⁶Only the contrite and repentant prayer of the remorseful sinner can bring about a complete atonement. Although King Solomon’s timeless message stands out as a theological impossibility in Christian terms, it remains the centerpiece of the Jew’s system of atonement throughout his long and bitter exile.¹⁴⁷

“Well,” you say, “it seems that at last there is support for my argument, since these verses explicitly state that when the children of Israel are in exile—and that means without Temple or sacrifice—that their prayers directed to the Temple are sufficient. God will forgive them when they repent and ask for mercy, without sacrifices of any kind.”

Are you sure? Have you read these verses in context? You see, rather than speaking of a time when there are no Temple sacrifices being offered, these verses are predicated on the fact that the Temple would be standing and that sacrifices would be offered. That’s why prayer toward the Temple was so important. And the ancient rabbis, knowing full well that a destroyed Temple indicated that something was amiss, instituted prayers for the restoration of the Temple, and these prayers are prayed daily around the world by traditional Jews. In fact, one petition is so important that it forms the last of the Eighteen Benedictions, called the Amidah or Shemoneh Esreh: “Be favorable, O Lord our God, toward Your people Israel and toward their prayer, and restore the service to the Holy of Holies of Your Temple. The fire-offerings of Israel and their prayer accept with love and favor, and may the service of Your people Israel always be favorable to You.”¹⁴⁸

This petition is also recited every day:

May it be Your will, O Lord our God, and the God of our forefathers, that You have mercy on us and pardon us for all our errors, atone for us all our iniquities, forgive all our willful sins; and that You rebuild the Holy Temple speedily, in our days, so that we may offer to You the continual offering that it may atone for us, as You have prescribed for !us in Your Torah through Moses, Your servant, from Your glorious mouth, as it is said: [Num. 28:1–8 then follows].¹⁴⁹

So rather than simply teaching that prayer replaces sacrifice, the rabbis longed for the day when they could offer sacrifices again. As the note in the ArtScroll Siddur explains: “We are about to begin ‘offering’ our communal sacrifices, as it were. Before doing so, we recite a brief prayer that God end the exile and make it possible for us to offer the true offerings, not just the recitations that take their place.” ¹⁵⁰ Even the Prayerbook recognizes how important the Temple sacrifices were.

Let’s look carefully at 2 Chronicles 7, God’s response to Solomon’s prayer (the prayer strangely referred to by Rabbi Singer as Solomon’s prophetic message and inauguration sermon). To bring out some key points, I have highlighted them in the text:

When Solomon had finished the temple of the Lord and the royal palace, and had succeeded in carrying out all he had in mind to do in the temple of the Lord and in his own palace, the Lord appeared to him at night and said: “I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices. When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there. As for you, if you walk before me as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a man to rule over Israel.’ But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from my land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for my Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. And though this temple is now so imposing, all who pass by will be appalled and say, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’ People will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—that is why he brought all this disaster on them.’ ”

2 Chronicles 7:11–22

Let’s take this one step at a time. We must first remember that the prayer of Solomon was the prayer of the dedication of the Temple. In response to this prayer, the Lord appeared to Solomon and said, “I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a Temple for sacrifices.” And it is this fact, namely, that the Lord chose this Temple as a house for sacrifices, that leads into the famous promise of verse 14: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” Yet this is the very verse quoted in the Talmud to prove that when the Temple was not standing, prayer, repentance, and charity replaced sacrifice. Isn’t this amazing? A verse based on God’s acceptance of the centrality of the Temple sacrifices is used to prove that those very sacrifices were replaced.¹⁵¹

But there’s more. The verses we just read state clearly that Solomon’s prayer would be answered only as long as the Temple was standing. Otherwise, if the people of Israel went too far in their sin, then the Lord would uproot them from their land and destroy the very Temple he had consecrated for his name.¹⁵² And so, rather than being an object of veneration and respect, the destroyed Temple would be an object of ridicule and reproach, a sign to the nations that God’s people “have forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—that is why he brought all this disaster on them.” A destroyed Temple would be a sign of severe divine Judgment. It would mean that Israel, as a nation, was temporarily rejected by God.¹⁵³ At such times the words of the psalmist must have been on the lips of many: “Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” (Ps. 44:23–24). Yes, the pain and grief and shame were almost unbearable.

Just consider the biblical response, found in the Book of Lamentations, to the destruction of the First Temple:

Jerusalem has sinned greatly and so has become unclean. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns away.… Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. The Lord has decreed for Jacob that his neighbors become his foes; Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them.…

The Lord is like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all her palaces and destroyed her strongholds. He has multiplied mourning and lamentation for the Daughter of Judah. He has laid waste his dwelling like a garden; he has destroyed his place of meeting. The Lord has made Zion forget her appointed feasts and her Sabbaths; in his fierce anger he has spurned both king and priest. The Lord has rejected his altar and abandoned his sanctuary. He has handed over to the enemy the walls of her palaces; they have raised a shout in the house of the Lord as on the day of an appointed feast.… The Lord has done what he planned; he has fulfilled his word, which he decreed long ago. He has overthrown you without pity, he has let the enemy gloat over you, he has exalted the horn of your foes.

Lamentations 1:8, 17; 2:5–7, 17¹⁵⁴

In light of descriptions such as this, the Talmudic use of 2 Chronicles 7:14 must be seen as misguided at best and presumptuous at worst, since the Rabbinic sages claimed that prayer had replaced sacrifice immediately after the Temple was destroyed. It is reminiscent of the words of the people of Israel who failed to feel the weight of God’s judgments centuries before. They said, “The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars” (Isa. 9:10). Or in the present context, “The Temple has been destroyed, but we will replace it with something else!”¹⁵⁵ On the contrary, with the Temple in ruins, there is no national system of atonement, and either the Messiah has come and fulfilled the purpose of the sacrifices and offerings, or else as a people we have no atonement.¹⁵⁶

In this connection, there is an interesting tradition found in Rashi’s commentary to Genesis 15:6 (“Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness”). Rashi explains:

6 And he believed in the Lord He did not request of Him a sign regarding this, but regarding the inheritance of the land, he did request of Him a sign, and he said to Him, “How will I know? [from b. Nedarim 32a] and He accounted it to him as righteousness The Holy One, blessed be He, accounted it to Abram as a merit and as righteousness for the faith that he believed in Him (Targum Jonathan). Another explanation for: “How will I know?” He did not ask Him for a sign but he said before Him, “Let me know with what merit will they [my descendants] remain therein [in the Land]?” The Holy One, blessed be He, replied, “With the merit of the sacrifices.”¹⁵⁷

What a concept! Abraham’s descendants would be able to stay in the Promised Land through the merit of the sacrifices. How important, then, were the sacrifices, even in traditional Jewish thinking?

Not surprisingly, some of the Talmudic rabbis, fully aware of the magnitude of the destruction of the Temple and of the disastrous consequences that followed, stated that since the day the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer were closed and there was an iron wall between God and his people (see b. Berakhoth 32b, with reference to Ezek. 4:3). In fact, it was even taught that since the day Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, there was not a day that went by that had no curse in it (see Midrash Psalms 9:7; Tanhuma [Buber] Tezaveh 10) and there was no joy in God’s presence until such time that Jerusalem would be restored with Israel in her midst (see Midrash Zuta, Eicha, 1:7). Despite all this, however, the Rabbinic view that became normative was that with the Temple’s destruction, prayer replaced sacrifice.

The sad, painful fact is that there have been times in our history when God refused to forgive us as a nation. Just consider these verses from Jeremiah, shortly before the Temple was destroyed: “So do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them; do not plead with me, for I will not listen to you” (Jer. 7:16). “Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them, because I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their distress” (Jer. 11:14). “Then the Lord said to me, ‘Do not pray for the well-being of this people. Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague’ ” (Jer. 14:11–12).

Just consider how hopeless the anti-missionary argument is that with the Temple destroyed, God ordained that prayer would replace sacrifice. The Temple was destroyed because of our sins as a people, sins that were so grievous to God that he said, “Enough! No amount of prayer, sacrifice, or fasting will stop me. I will reject my city and my sanctuary, and I will judge my people, banishing them from my presence.” How ludicrous to say then, “Now that the Temple has been sacked and we can no longer offer sacrifices, God will accept our prayers instead.” On the contrary, during the last years the First Temple was standing, with sacrifices still being offered in accordance with the Torah, the Lord refused to hear our prayers for mercy. How much worse, then, would it be once the Temple was destroyed by the anger of the Lord?

As Jews, we must come to grips with the fact that there have been periods of time in which we had no assurance of national atonement because of our sins. Even the Talmud records that for the last forty years before the Second Temple was destroyed, the Lord did not accept the sacrifices offered on the Day of Atonement (see b. Yoma 39b; and see vol. 1, 2.1). How would this make a religious Jewish person feel? And how would a God-fearing Jew feel when the Temple was actually destroyed? While the Temple was standing, there was at least some hope for national atonement, no matter how sinful the people were. But once the Temple was destroyed, it was as if God were closing the door on national grace and mercy. How frightful and traumatic the destruction of the Temple must have been for our people,¹⁵⁸ and how easy it is to see how our leaders would have tried to pick up the pieces somehow, someway, even by grasping at spiritual straws and claiming that prayer would now replace sacrifice. But this couldn’t really remove the sense of despair and divine rejection that our people experienced.

Just consider this petition from the traditional morning prayer service, as found in the Siddur. It acknowledges that the Temple was destroyed “through our sins” but then asks God to accept prayer in the place of sacrifices, calling on Hosea 14:2, a verse that, rightly translated and interpreted (see above), does not provide even the slightest support for the view that prayer replaces sacrifice. This is the petition, lifted to God in prayer every morning for more than fifteen hundred years by traditional Jews worldwide:

Master of the Worlds, You commanded us to bring the continual offering at its set time, and that the Kohanim [priests] be at their assigned service, the Levites on their platform, and the Israelites at their station. But now, through our sins, the Holy Temple is destroyed, the continual offering is discontinued, and we have neither Kohen [priest] at his service, nor Levite on his platform, nor Israelite at his station. But You said, “Let our lips compensate for the bulls” [Hosea 14:2]—therefore may it be Your will, O Lord, our God and the God of our forefathers, that the prayer of our lips be worthy, acceptable and favorable before You, as if we had brought the continual offering at its set time and we had stood at its station.¹⁵⁹

Can you feel a dimension of futility in this prayer, especially when you realize that it is followed by the recitation of the fifth chapter of the Mishnaic tractate Zevahim, outlining in painstaking detail the specific rulings for the offering of animal sacrifices at the altar? Once again, there is the clear recognition that the Temple’s destruction means that something is very wrong, and therefore, there is an uncertain hope in God’s willingness to receive his people’s prayers in place of sacrifices. Can you sense that there is no assurance of being heard in this prayer?¹⁶⁰ To be honest, many of the prayers found in the Prayerbook send a similar message—sometimes clear, sometimes veiled—that something is amiss in Israel’s relationship with God, despite all of his covenantal promises, which also form an integral part of the Prayerbook. Heartfelt pleas for mercy are found on almost every page. Just consider the second to last prayer of the Shemoneh Esreh, praying that our prayers will be heard:

Hear our voice, O Lord our God, pity and be compassionate to us, and accept—with compassion and favor—our prayer, for God who hears prayers and supplications are You. From before Yourself, our King, turn us not away empty-handed, for You hear the prayer of Your people Israel with compassion. Blessed are You, O Lord, Who hears prayer.¹⁶¹

Perhaps if you have prayed these prayers, asking God not to turn you away empty-handed, you too have felt a barrier, a breach, a break-down of some kind between you as a Jew and the God of our forefathers. Perhaps you too have sensed that something was spiritually disjointed, but you have not known what the problem was. Could it be you are sensing that you have no acceptable form of atonement for your sins and that all the prayers in the world cannot take the place of blood atonement? Could it be you recognize that you pray these prayers daily as part of the Jewish people, a people who is still scattered around the world, a people who even with a homeland still has no Temple, a people who still awaits some hint that the Messiah will come—though he was expected so many centuries ago?

I would suggest that you give this topic of sacrifice and atonement some careful consideration. In the objections that follow, we will deal with the issue of the centrality of blood atonement according to the Hebrew Scriptures, the question of how Yeshua’s death meets the requirements of an atoning sacrifice, and the question of why, if Yeshua’s death paid the price for our sins, some of the prophets seem to anticipate sacrifices in a restored, future Temple. We’ll also look at some other relevant issues, including the question of how Gentiles received forgiveness before the days of Jesus.

For now, one thing is clear: Not a single verse in the Hebrew Bible states that the prophets repudiated the sacrificial system or that prayer replaced sacrifice.

¹⁰⁶ For the importance of sacrifices and offerings in the worship of God, note Ezra 4:1–2: “When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the exiles were building a temple for the Lord, the God of Israel, they came to Zerubbabel and to the heads of the families and said, ‘Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here.’ ” That was simply the way of the ancient world. Note also Judg. 6:17–24; 13:1–21. Michael E. Stone, a professor at Hebrew University, believes that even after the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar, “Some sacrificial cult was probably maintained in Jerusalem” (cf. Jer. 41:5–6). He also makes reference to the well-known fact that some of the Jews in exile erected Temples and offered sacrifices in the locations where they took up residence (the best attested case being that of the Jews in Elephantine in Upper Egypt). See his article “Reactions to Destruction of the Second Temple: Theology, Perception and Conversion,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 12 (1981): 194–204 (here, 194–95). I express my appreciation to my friend Dr. Phil Miller, head librarian at Hebrew Union College and Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, for xeroxing and faxing this article to me on two days’ notice. His staff also helped me track down a key reference in volume 1.

¹⁰⁷ As a point of comparison, note that there are a total of forty-seven references to the Sabbath in the entire Torah, whereas there are thirty-two references alone to sacrifices as a sweet-smelling aroma, and the overall number of references to sacrifices in the first five books dwarfs the total number of references to the Sabbath.

¹⁰⁸ Yeshua also did this in his role as our great High Priest; see again below, 3.15, and note further vol. 3, 4.1 .

¹⁰⁹ Rabbi Tovia Singer, from his web site, www.outreachjudaism.org/sin.html.

¹¹⁰ I should note that liberal biblical scholars (both Jewish and Christian) have sometimes argued that the prophets did, in fact, reject the sacrificial cult, even arguing that the prophetic literature preceded the Torah, which is seen to be a later, priestly retrojection. This was the classic and influential view of Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), adapted by many in the following decades, although largely abandoned in recent years. Cf. Robert P. Gordon, ed., The Place Is Too Small for Us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 9–12.

¹¹¹ For the Rabbinic usage of Hosea 6:6 to prove that charitable deeds replaced sacrifice, see below, 3.10. Of course, if this was Hosea’s intent or meaning, it is strange to think that he would have written these categorical words on behalf of the Lord while the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing and completely accessible to his fellow Israelites living in the North. And what place, then, would this verse have once it was received as Scripture and read by Jews living in the land of Israel while the Second Temple was standing?

¹¹² William L. Holladay, Jeremiah I, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 261 , notes that “Roland de Vaux [the Catholic biblical scholar] has wisely pointed out that the passages in question no more condemn the cult than Isa 1:15 suggests a condemnation of prayer; the problem is the formalism of exterior worship without any corresponding interior disposition (compare Isa 29:13),” with reference to de Vaux’s Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1961), 454–55.

¹¹³ For a discussion of the authorship and editing of Psalm 51, see Willem Van-Gemeren, “Psalms,” EBC, 5:384.

¹¹⁴ For a discussion of the Hebrew here, especially as quoted in Hebrews 10:5, see vol. 3, 5.5.

¹¹⁵ There are, of course, several ways to interpret the Hebrew text here, and some have argued that the prepositional phrase “about me” (ʿalay) can also mean “to my debit.” For an older but still insightful discussion, see Franz Delitzsch, in Commentary on the Old Testament, Psalms, C. F. Keil and idem, trans. Francis Bolton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), 2:39–40.

¹¹⁶ We will discuss the Rabbinic interpretation of this passage below, in relation to Jeremiah 7:21–23 and Amos 5:21–27; see also Midrash Ha-Chafetz to Leviticus 1:2, cited below, 3.10.

¹¹⁷ The Greek latreia is the equivalent of the Hebrew ʿavodah, “rite, act of divine service,” found, e.g., in Exodus 12:25–26; 13:5.

¹¹⁸  “ʿrbg III,” NIDOTTE, 3:522.

¹¹⁹ Anyone familiar with the New Testament will know that similar rebukes are found throughout the teachings of Jesus, Paul, and the apostles: All the praying, confessing, and sacrificing in the world is of no value whatsoever when it proceeds from a hypocritical heart.

¹²⁰ This is even attested by the names containing divine elements discovered in inscriptions from Northern Israel. As noted by John Bright, History of Israel, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 260 , “It is significant that the Samaria Ostraca yield almost as many names compounded with ‘Baal’ as with ‘Yahweh.’ ”

¹²¹ Shalom M. Paul, Amos, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1991), 192.

¹²² See Charles Lee Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” EBC, 6:431, with reference to Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman, whose comments are cited in our text, below.

¹²³ I have revised the NIV translation to bring out the force of the traditional Jewish argument; the NIV had added the word just to bring out its understanding of the passage, hence, “For when I brought your forefathers out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them this command” (my emphasis). This interpretation, however, is not widely followed.

¹²⁴ Aaron Rothkoff, “Sacrifices,” EJ (CD ROM), 14:599–615.

¹²⁵ If you read Anson F. Rainey’s remarks carefully, you would have realized that some liberal scholars believe that prophets such as Jeremiah and Amos were unaware of the teaching in the Torah that connected sacrifices and offerings with the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings. This is because these scholars believe that those portions of the Torah that record such events were written later, after the days of these prophets. Of course, Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians completely reject this view based on their belief in the inspiration of the Torah, along with the internal evidence of the biblical writings themselves.

¹²⁶ Dr. J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 2d ed. (London: Soncino, 1975), 439.

¹²⁷ Ibid., his emphasis.

¹²⁸ Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 1:196–97. Heschel also states tellingly, “How supremely certain ancient man was that sacrifice was what the gods most desired may be deduced from the fact that fathers did not hesitate to slaughter their own children on the altar. When Mesha, the king of the Moabites, was hard-pressed in war, he sacrificed his own son, who would have reigned as his successor, for a burnt-offering upon the wall (II Kings 3:27)” (ibid., 196).

¹²⁹ Ibid., 196–97.

¹³⁰ This is basically the view of Rashi, Radak, Ibn Ezra, and Metsudat David. See also their comments to Amos 5:25.

¹³¹ This is the view reflected in the NIV. See above, n. 120.

¹³² Cf. also Hertz, Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 439. See further ibid., 561: “The Prophets were orators, and made occasional use of hyperbole, in order to drive home upon the conscience of their hearers a vital aspect of truth which those hearers were ignoring. And when they were confronted by the pernicious belief that God desired nothing but sacrifice, and saw sacrifice being held to excuse iniquity, heartlessness, and impurity—they gave expression to their burning indignation in the impassioned language of vehement emotion” (with specific reference to Jer. 7:22).

¹³³ This is basically the view of Jacob Milgrom, a leading Jewish authority on sacrifice and atonement, in his article, “Concerning Jeremiah’s Repudiation of Sacrifice,” ZAW 89 (1977): 273–75. He has been followed by several recent Jeremiah commentators, including William Holladay (Hermeneia) and Peter C. Craigie (with Page H. Kelley and Joel F. Drinkard Jr., Word Biblical Commentary).

¹³⁴ Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” 431–32 (commenting on Jer. 7:23–26): “Actually, God had not spoken at Sinai of sacrifices but only of obedience (:23)—and this even before the law was given (Exod. V.3–6). Jeremiah’s words show that he had in mind in V.23 the giving of the Ten Commandments. Among these were no directions for sacrifices; they dealt solely with spiritual and moral matters. The OT order was first obedience and worship of God and then institution of sacrifices (cf. Ps 51:16–19). In Judah, as Jeremiah shows, the whole sacrificial system was invalidated on the ground that it was not carried out in true faith (V.24). Obedience always was and would be the dominant consideration.”

¹³⁵ Holladay, Jeremiah, 56, his emphasis.

¹³⁶ Cf. the pointed comments of Hertz, Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 561: “God would not be the God of Holiness if He did not ‘hate’ and ‘despise’ sacrifices, hymns, and songs of praise on the part of unholy and dishonourable worshippers. But there is no intimation that sacrifice, prayer and praise will continue to be ‘hated’, if the worshippers cast away their vile and oppressive deeds.” In this connection, Hertz cites the Scottish biblical scholar W. L. Baxter, who observed that “there was use, a seemly and beneficial use, of sacrifice, but there was also abuse, a vile and God-dishonouring abuse. The Prophets made war upon the latter, but it does not follow that they objected to the former.” Note also that some translations, such as the NIV, join Amos 5:25 with the following verses, changing the meaning of the entire passage. So, e.g., the New Living Translation renders Amos 5:25–27 as, “ ‘Was it to me you were bringing sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, Israel? No, your real interest was in your pagan gods—Sakkuth your king god and Kaiwan your star god—the images you yourselves made. So I will send you into exile, to a land east of Damascus,’ says the Lord, whose name is God Almighty.” The meaning, then, changes completely. This interpretation of the text can be dated back to John Calvin in the sixteenth century and was championed last century by C. F. Keil, a leading Lutheran Old Testament scholar.

¹³⁷ Hertz, Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 561, here, commenting on Isaiah 1:4, 11–17. Note again the harmony of Hertz’s interpretation with what we have been emphasizing throughout our answer to this objection: “If this is to be taken as an absolute condemnation by Isaiah of all sacrifice, then that absolute condemnation must also include Sabbaths and Festivals; solemn Assemblies, i.e., public gatherings for worship, and the appearing before the Lord in the Temple: for all these are classed by him with ‘blood of bullocks’ and ‘fat of fed beasts’. But, of course, to Isaiah, prayers and Sabbaths and solemn assemblies and Temple were noble and sacred institutions, indispensable to religious life, and it was only their intolerable abuse which he condemned. The same things applies to his view of sacrifices.”

¹³⁸ There is another problem with this view, namely, it is really not true to the biblical text. In other words, if the prophets and psalmists really meant to say that prayer could or should replace sacrifice, then their true ideas would have been contrary to Torah. If they really didn’t mean to say that prayer could or should replace sacrifice, then how can their texts be called on to support that very position? What right do we have to use someone’s figurative speech (or hyperbole) to prove our literal point? For a realistic statement of how the Rabbinic view developed, see these brief remarks in the article on “Atonement” in the ODJR, 78: “With the destruction of the Temple and the automatic abolition of the sacrificial system, these and similar verses [i.e., from the prophetic books] formed the basis of the doctrine of the existence of alternatives to the sacrificial system.”

¹³⁹ See Rabbi Tovia Singer’s web site: www.outreachjudaism.org/sin.html.

¹⁴⁰ See Robert Gordis, “The Text and Meaning of Hosea xiv. 3,” Vetus Testamentum 5 (1955): 88–90, reprinted in Robert Gordis, The Word and the Book (New York: Ktav, 1976), 347–49; see also Menahem Mansoor, Revue de Qumran 3 (1961): 391–92. (Mansoor authored a widely used biblical Hebrew grammar; Gordis was a highly respected biblical scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary.)

¹⁴¹ The careful reader will notice that that is the identical reading of Hebrews 13:15, “the fruit of our lips.” In fact, this reading is so natural that Hebrew scholar Douglas Stuart, in his commentary on Hosea, simply translates with “we will fully repay the fruit of our lips,” without even providing a textual comment! See his Hosea-Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 1987), 210–13. This would be an example of what Semitic scholars refer to as “the enclitic mem,” referring to the well-attested phenomenon in which the Hebrew letter m at the end of a word is grammatically superfluous; on this cf. the seminal study of Horace D. Hummel, “Enclitic Mem in Early Northwest Semitic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 76 (1957): 85–107; and note the more recent works cited in Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 159, n. 45. Thus, Gordis, among many others, would read the Hebrew consonants prym as peri-m (“fruit” followed by the letter mem; Mansoor simply moves the mem to the beginning of the next word—a reading that is entirely possible—producing peri misepatenu, also meaning, “fruit from our lips”). According to Francis Anderson and David Noel Freedman, both renowned Hebrew and biblical scholars, the mem of the Hebrew text here “is an unassailable example of the enclitic particle” (Hosea, Anchor Bible [New York: Doubleday, 1980], 645).

¹⁴² See Gordis (ibid., 347), who states, “The difficulties of the traditional interpretation of MT [i.e., the Masoretic Text] are patent,” also making the important grammatical observation that the accusative of the verb rendered “to pay” (shillem) “generally represents the debt or obligation being discharged [with reference to Exod. 21:36; 20:12; 22:5; 2 Kings 4:7; 1 Sam. 12:6; Joel 2:25; Prov. 19:17], not the object of payment [with reference only to “the legal phraseology of the Covenant Code,” citing Exod. 21:37[36]; 22:3ff.]. Most frequently by far the verb governs neder ‘vow’ in the accusative [with reference to Deut. 23:22; 2 Sam. 15:7; Isa. 19:21; Nahum 1:15; Pss. 22:26; 50:14; 61:9; 65:2; 116:14, 18; Prov. 7:14; Job 22:26; Eccles. 5:3, among others].” He thus interprets the phrase in question to mean, “We shall pay the fruit of our lips, i.e., we shall fulfill our vows to God,” understanding the final mem of parim to be enclitic (see immediately above, n. 141, for enclitic mem). A. B. Ehrlich, Mikra, 3:393, after explaining the grammatical usage (with reference to the unusual phrase goyyim tsarayw in Num. 24:8), states that “paying bulls” refers to “the words of our lips, as if to say, We will act in accordance with everything we confess to you.” So, rather than understanding the text to mean that prayer replaces sacrifice, Ehrlich is saying that the image of sacrifice explains Hosea’s idiom.

¹⁴³ According to the footnote in the New Jewish Publication Society Version, the meaning of the Hebrew for this verse is uncertain, despite the fact that virtually all of the major, medieval Jewish commentators (including Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Radak) interpret it in keeping with the tentative translation offered by the NJPSV, reading, “Instead of bulls we will pay [the offering of] our lips.” The fact that the bracketed words—which are not found in the original—have to be supplied underscores the difficulty of the Hebrew text. The Stone edition of the Tanakh renders Hosea 14:3[2] as, “Take words with you and return to HASHEM; say to Him, ‘May You forgive all iniquity and accept good [intentions], and let our lips substitute for bulls.’ ” But where does shillem ever mean “substitute”?

¹⁴⁴ It should also be pointed out that even Rabbi Singer’s interpretation of Hosea 3:4–5 is defective, since he emphatically states that the prophecy described a state in Israel’s history in which there would be no animal sacrificial system, and hence no possibility of blood atonement, whereas the prophecy says far more than that—and really, says something different than that. As Douglas Stuart noted, Hosea spoke of the removal of objects of worship accepted by God (e.g., sacrifice) as well as objects of worship outlawed by God (e.g., pillar; see Deut. 16:22, in which some translations refer to a sacred stone; and teraphim, also known as household gods). Thus, Stuart states, “The sacrificial system and the ephod were orthodox. The pillar and the teraphim were abominably pagan. Israel, in its syncretism, had mixed the holy with the forbidden—had adulterated its religion. So, orthodox and heterodox features alike would now be taken away. Neither leadership, nor worship, nor divination would any longer be available to Israel’s citizens” (Hosea-Jonah, 67). In light of this observation, it is clear that Hosea 3 does not show the people of Israel “how they are to replace the sacrificial system during their protracted exile” (as claimed by Rabbi Singer).

¹⁴⁵ “Atonement,” EJ (CD ROM), 3:830–31, citing y. Ta’anit 2:1, 65b; see further Pesikta deRav Kahana 191a, cited in part in Montefiore and Loewe, Rabbinic Anthology, #868.

¹⁴⁶ For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the texts quoted by Rabbi Singer, I should point out some of the more glaring errors: He makes reference to Solomon’s “startling prophetic message,” calling it his “inauguration sermon,” whereas it was simply a prayer to God. (This makes quite a difference!) Worse still, he states, “There was no mention of a cross or a dead messiah in King Solomon’s prophetic message” whereas there was no mention of any Messiah, living or dead, in Solomon’s prayer. As for the lack of reference to a cross, why should there have been a reference to the cross in Solomon’s prayer?

¹⁴⁷ Interestingly, there was another Rabbinic view concerning means of atonement during times such as those described by Hosea, times when there was neither Temple nor sacrifice. It was the leaching that the death of the righteous made atonement! According to the midrash, “Moses said to God, ‘Will not the time come when Israel shall have neither Tabernacle nor Temple? What will happen with them then?’ The divine reply was, ‘I will then take one of their righteous men and keep him as a pledge on their behalf so I may pardon all their sins’ ” (Exodus Rabbah, Terumah 35:4, discussed below, 3.15). As stated in the medieval chronicle Yeven Metsulah, “… since the day the Holy Temple was destroyed, the righteous are seized by death for the iniquities of the generation” (cited in full below, 3.15).

¹⁴⁸ I have basically followed the rendering of ArtScroll Siddur, 111, substituting Lord for Hashem here and elsewhere. For further discussion of this petition, see below, 3.13.

¹⁴⁹ Scherman, ArtScroll Siddur, 33. A closely related petition is, “May it be Your will, O Lord, our God and the God of our forefathers, that this recital be worthy and acceptable, and favorable before You as if we had offered the continual offering in its set time, in its place, and according to its requirement” (ibid., 35).

¹⁵⁰ Ibid. , 32, my emphasis.

¹⁵¹ Notice how Temple prayer and sacrifice are joined together in Isaiah 56:6–7: “And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to serve him, to love the name of the Lord, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

¹⁵² If you read carefully the verses to which Rabbi Singer referred, namely, 1 Kings 8:46–50 (2 Chron. 6:36–40), you will see that there is not a hint of the Temple being destroyed. Rather, those exiled (apparently not the entire population) will repent and pray towards that very Temple, and as they do, God will forgive them. Again, the reason is obvious: They mix their prayers of repentance with the sacrifices being offered on their behalf (prayers, which, according to the later Talmudic rabbis, were efficacious in their atoning power), and God hears and forgives.

¹⁵³ According to Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Jewish Messiah (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 43, with reference to the destruction of the Second Temple, “Once the Temple had been destroyed and the Jewish people driven out of their homeland, the nation was bereft. In their despair the ancient Israelites longed for a kingly figure who would deliver them from exile and rebuild their holy city.” Thus, in Rabbi Cohn-Sherbok’s eyes, the destruction of the Second Temple helped pave the way for a deeper Messianic hope among the Jewish people.

¹⁵⁴ For expressions of mercy after God’s temporary rejection of his people, see verses such as Isaiah 54:7–10: “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,’ says the Lord your Redeemer. ‘To me this is like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth. So now I have sworn not to be angry with you, never to rebuke you again. Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed, ‘says the Lord, who has compassion on you.’ ” For a strong, Messianic Jewish affirmation of God’s eternal, immutable covenant with his people Israel, see Michael L. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the “Church” and the Jewish People (Shippensburg, Pa.: Destiny Image, 1992), 117–53.

¹⁵⁵ This would have been similar to the people of Judah saying to Isaiah, “God has said he will not accept our prayers because our hands are covered with blood. So we’ll give tithes instead, and God will accept that.” On the contrary, God would not accept tithes any more than prayers or sacrifices or praises or fasts—unless they were accompanied by repentance. In the same way, since the destruction of the Temple was an act of judgment by God, it would be ludicrous to say, “We cannot offer sacrifices because the Temple is in ruins as judgment on our sins. So we’ll offer prayers instead!”

¹⁵⁶ For the question of how Jews received atonement during the Babylonian exile, see below, 3.13, and n. 247.

¹⁵⁷ As rendered by Rabbi Rosenberg. The commentary of Gur Aryeh to Rashi here is illuminating.

¹⁵⁸ According to Jacob Neusner, First Century Judaism in Crisis, augmented edition (New York: Ktav, 1982), 24–25, speaking with reference to the destruction of the Second Temple, “No generation in the history of Jewry has been so roundly, universally condemned by posterity as that of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Christianity remembered, in the tradition of the Church, that Jesus wept over the city and said a bitter, sorrowing sentence [making reference to Matt. 23:37–39].… So for twenty centuries, Jerusalem was seen through the eye of Christian faith as a faithless city, killing prophets, and therefore desolated by the righteous act of a wrathful God. But Jews said no less. From the time of the destruction they prayed, ‘On account of our sins we have been exiled from our land.…’ It is not a great step from ‘our sins,’ to ‘the sins of the generation in which, the Temple was destroyed.’ It is not a difficult conclusion, and not a few have reached it. The Temple was destroyed mainly because of the sins of the Jews of that time, particularly ‘causeless hatred.’ Whether the sins were those specified by Christians or by Talmudic rabbis hardly matters. This was supposed to be a sinning generation.” Neusner, for his part, states, “It was not a sinning generation, but one deeply faithful to the covenant and to the Scripture that set forth its terms, perhaps more so than many who have since condemned it.” See also Stone, “Reactions to Destructions of the Second Temple,” 196: “If the documents of the Second Temple age that deal with these destructions and desecrations are examined, it becomes apparent that theodicy became the central issue. Israel’s suffering was thought to be the result of sin; a punishment inflicted by God who covenanted with the nation. Israel’s fate was seen as bound to Israel’s action and God’s justice.” He states further, “The profound impact of such destructions is appreciable only in light of the central role of Jerusalem, the Temple and the High Priesthood in the whole of Jewish life in the Second Temple period” (198). See also the relevant chapters in Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

¹⁵⁹ Scherman, ArtScroll Siddur, 41, 43.

¹⁶⁰ Contrast this with the assurance that followers of Yeshua have through his atoning sacrifice: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:19–23).

¹⁶¹ ArtScroll Siddur, 109.111.

Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 2: Theological objections (71). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.

The prophets indicated clearly that God did not care for blood sacrifices. In fact, they practically repudiated the entire sacrificial system, teaching that repentance and prayer were sufficient. The Talmudic rabbis simply affirmed this biblical truth