Antiquitopia

After publishing my recent book , I am of course in need of a hiatus from Hebrews and am off to different research projects, particularly my Christian Moses stuff.  But when I return to Hebrews--and I shall return--it will likely be because of Hebrews 9:23, a line that has bothered me every time I've read it.  Quoting from the RSV: "Thus it was necessary for copies of the heavenly things to be purified by these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." Before this in chapter 9, there is a conflation of several sacrificial rites from the Day of Atonement (Lev 16) to the blood used to establish the covenant (Exod. 24:6-8), etc.  These rites established and purified the earthly sanctuary (the copies of heavenly things).  But that is not the part that bothers me; it is the second phrase.  While the better sacrifices refers to Jesus', why, oh why, would the heavenly things / heavenly sanctuary need to be purified at all?  ...

There is news about a mountaintop open-altar dedicated to Zeus that was used for over a millennium! Zeus' altar of ashes News from the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif. By Bruce Bower ANAHEIM, Calif. — Excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus atop Greece’s Mount Lykaion have revealed that ritual activities occurred there for roughly 1,500 years, from the height of classic Greek civilization around 3,400 years ago until just before Roman conquest in 146. “We may have the first documented mountaintop shrine from the ancient Greek world,” says project director David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Ritual ceremonies were conducted in a part of the open-air sanctuary called the ash altar of Zeus. It now consists of a mound of ash, stone and various inscribed dedications to Zeus, the head god of Greek mythology. Romano’s team has found no evidence of a temple or structures of any kind on Mount Lykaion. Work conducted over ...

In his magisterial multi-volume commentary on Leviticus (for Anchor Bible), Jacob Milgrom, interacting with the work of Mary Douglas, suggests that the ancient Israelite system of sacrifice was not merely a bunch of scattered practices, but a unified system--a symbolic system. The unifying factor for Milgrom is death-avoidance. In response, Jonathan Klawans has suggested a two-fold organizing principle: imitatio dei and attracting/maintaing the divine presence (itself sort of a throwback to R.E. Clements, God and Temple ). Klawans presents imitatio dei as the organizing principle and maintaining the divine presence as the function of sacrifice. See my fuller discussion here . I actually like Klawans's thesis, and use a lot of his insights in my dissertation. Interestingly enough, however, the idea that the ancient sacrificial cult was a symbolic system did not begin with Mary Douglas, Jacob Milgrom, and Jonathan Klawans, but St. Augustine (and perhaps earlier), who suggests a...