‘The Spiritual’ Sacrifices
In a number of texts [from Qumran] the
community is represented as the new temple with two rooms, the ‘Holy place’ and
the ‘Holy of holies’; but this is not all: the life of the community in perfect
obedience to the Law is represented as the true sacrifice offered in the new
temple (the community) has come about in order to make atonement for the land ‘
. . . and a bringing forth of the sweet smell of sacrifice and a house of
justice and truth in Israel . . . ‘. These are not merely mages and symbols;
they express a reality. Since the community has taken over the holiness and the
functions of the temple it is now in point of fact the only means of maintain the
holiness of Israel and making atonement for sin. It is necessary that atonement
should be made for the sins of the people; the desecration of the official
temple has rendered it useless for these ends; there must be a substitute, and
that substitute is the life of the community, lived in perfect obedience to all
the precepts of the Law, all its commandments, purifications and prayers. It is
this that is implied by the words of 1QS ix. 3ff., ‘When these (things) has
come to pass in Israel according to all these laws, it is for (or in order to establish) the foundation
of the holy spirit, for eternal truth, for the atonement of the guilt of sin
and misdeeds, and for the wellbeing of the land by means of the flesh of burnt
offerings and the fat of sacrifices that is) the right offerings of the lips as
a righteous sweet savour and a perfect way of life as a free-will offering,
pleasing (to God) . . . ‘. We encounter the same ‘spiritualization’ (when we
speak of the ‘sacrifices’ offered through the works of the Law this is not
merely a metaphor; both actual and ‘spiritual’ sacrifices were regarded as
being equally ‘real’ in the eyes of God. The problem recurs in the N.T. A
useful criticism of those who regard the Pauline sacrifice terminology as no more than an extended metaphor is found in K. Weiss, ‘Paulus—Priester der
christlichen Kultgemeinde’, T.L.Z.
LXXIX [1954], 356) of the idea of sacrifice in 4QFlor. i.6f., ‘And he purposed
to build him a sanctuary of (among) men, in which should be offered sacrifices
before him, the works of the Law’. The blood sacrifices offered in the
Jerusalem temple were often linked with some individual’s confession of sin;
sacrifice and man’s turning to God were closely related. This was the ‘atmosphere’
in which the Qumran community made its severe demands, requiring that the
sacrifices offered by its members should consist in a life lived in perfect obedience
to the Law. The works of the Law were useless without an inward turning to God.
But it is in the Rabbinic Judaism of the
period following the fall of the temple in A.D. 70 that we finally see realized
the trend toward the Law as the most vital element of the Jewish religion, a
trend which began much earlier. Service in the temple, abodā, becomes replaced by the study of the Law and the life of
obedience to the Law. Other substitutes included a rigid scheme of prayers,
formerly (that is, before A.D. 70) connected with temple worship. A similar
process of reorientation is to be observed, even before the fall of the temple.
We have already discussed some of the causes, but there is one further detail
which we must mention here. It is striking how many of the Qumran texts hark
back to passages in the Old Testament which criticize sharply any form of
temple service which fails to take account of justice and righteousness
according to the demands of the Law. This is important for the understanding of
the Qumran background, with its frequent stress laid upon truth and righteousness
according to the Law as the only sacrifices of value in the eyes of God. There
is a link with a well-established tradition of criticism of the cultus, a
tradition of which the prophets were the principal exponents. Thus we see how
the account in 1QS ix. 3 ff. of the ‘new’ temple and its ‘sacrifices’ links up
with Hosea’s criticism of the cultus. The other text in 1QS which is important
in this connexion, viii. 2 ff., is easily associated with Mic. vi. 6-8 and Ps.
li. 19, ‘The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, רוח נשברה’. C.D. xi.
20f., which prohibits members of the community from sending sacrifices to the
Jerusalem temple, the altar of which has been defiled, refers to Prov. xv. 8, ‘The
sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to Yahweh, but the prayer of the
upright is his delight’ (C.D. amends the Masoretic text to read ‘the prayer of
the upright is like a pleasing sacrifice’!). Examples might be multiplied (1QS
x. 22, 26f., and Hos. xiv. 3, Ps. li. 19; 1QS v.3 and Isa. lvi. 1; 1QS i. 24
and Mic. vi. 6-8), but these should serve to show how the community turned to
those passages in the Old Testament which they regarded as fitting their own situation
and their own critical attitude to the temple and its sacrifices. The former
service is the temple they replaced by a general עבודה, a life according to the Law, a righteousness demanded of each
and every member of the community. (Bertil Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament: A
Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism of the Qumran Texts and the New
Testament [Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 1; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965], 44-46)
