Sanders on Balberg, 'Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature'Past posts on the book are here and here.
Author: S. Mira Balberg
Reviewer: Seth Sanders
S. Mira Balberg. Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. xi + 287 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-29592-6.
Reviewed by Seth Sanders (University of California, Davis) Published on H-Judaic (September, 2019) Commissioned by Barbara Krawcowicz (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Read literally, the Torah looks as much like a cookbook as an origin story: much of Leviticus consists of God's commandments on how to prepare and offer animals to him, and the right and wrong way to sacrifice is a key theme from Cain and Abel through Deuteronomy. Yet Jewish animal sacrifice ended almost two thousand years ago, long before the Talmud was written. How did Judaism, a religion founded on performing God's commandments, abandon these religiously central commandments? Balberg's provocative but well-supported answer is: It didn't.
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