Jonathan Grossman is a professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University and a senior faculty member at Herzog College in Alon Shvut. The Sacrificial Service: Gestures of Flesh and Spirit, translated into English by Sara Daniel, is his sustained argument that the sacrificial system of Leviticus is not a concession to Israel’s pagan past, as Rambam famously held, nor an archaeological artifact of ancient Near Eastern religion, as most modern scholarship treats it. It is a language of gesture, nonverbal and precise, through which a human being communicates something specific to God.
The first word of Leviticus’s sacrificial code is not a command. It is an invitation. “When one of you brings an animal offering to the Lord...” The operative word is “when,” not “shall.” Commentators have always noticed the conditional. Grossman notices something else. The word for offering is “korban,” from karov, near. The worshiper is not giving something up. He is approaching.
And every elaborate specification that follows (which animal, whose blood goes where, which portions belong to God and which to the priest – and which the worshiper eats himself) exists to give that approach the best possible chance of being received.
The book grew out of courses Grossman taught at both institutions, later reorganized as an online lecture series, and covers Leviticus’ chapters 1 through 10.
The grammar of this language is most visible in a single verb. Hiktir appears at the conclusion of nearly every sacrificial description in Leviticus, and most translations render it as “burn.”
Grossman, following his teacher Rabbi Ezra Bick, shows the word has nothing to do with fire; it comes from kitor, smoke. To burn something is to destroy it; to hiktir something is to transform it, to take matter and lift it as vapor so that it rises.
The altar is therefore not a furnace but a threshold.
Sacrifice as a language of reproach
That distinction reorganizes every offering it touches. The burnt offering, in which the entire animal is consumed, and nothing is returned to the worshiper, is the gesture the body makes when the spirit wants to say everything, without reservation.
The peace offering divides the animal among altar, priest, and worshiper at the same table, the grammar of covenant, of shared bread with God.
The purification offering does not feed the altar’s transforming fire at all; its blood purifies the altar itself, clearing the contamination that sin deposits there.
Leviticus contains two complete lists of the same sacrificial laws, one in the first section of the book and one in the second. Grossman does not conclude that one is redundant. He asks why they differ in whom they address, in their structure, and in their chronology.
The first section, he argues, was given after the Tabernacle was built, addressed directly to every Israelite wishing to bring an offering, while the second was given earlier, at Sinai, before the Tabernacle existed, and addressed to the priests.
The Torah published them in reverse chronological order, Israel before priests, because that sequencing was itself a theological declaration. Though in the ancient Near East, the sanctuary was the hereditary property of a priestly class; the text sealed, the people excluded. Leviticus publishes everything, addressed to everyone.
When ritual becomes theological grammar
The method is visible in a detail most readers pass over without a second thought: Why must the burnt offering be a male animal while the individual’s purification offering must be female?
Philo argued that the male is the superior animal.
Grossman shows this cannot be right: If maleness meant superiority, every offering would require it. His own reading comes from inside the text. The purification offering changes sex depending on who is bringing it: The anointed priest and the community leader both bring male animals, but the individual Jew brings a female.
The author traces what that difference carries: The individual’s purification offering, uniquely among obligatory offerings in his reading, concludes with the phrase “a pleasing aroma,” an expression he associates with intimacy and renewed closeness rather than obligation. It signals something different in kind from the burnt offering’s grammar of self-effacement and awe before God.
In Grossman’s reading, female offerings carry the grammar of closeness and reconciliation. Male offerings carry the grammar of reverence. The peace offering, a covenant meal and an expression of full partnership, permits either. The law is not arbitrary. It is a vocabulary.
The book's most striking reading is of Nadav and Avihu. Aaron’s two sons, who die on the eighth day of the Tabernacle’s consecration after offering what the Torah calls “unauthorized fire.”
The episode has generated centuries of interpretation: They were drunk, they improvised, they entered forbidden space. Grossman reads backward from Moses’s words to Aaron in the immediate aftermath.
“I will be sanctified through those close to Me, and before all the people I will be honored.”
The two clauses are not synonyms. The priests, those near to God, sanctify Him through their service; the people, all of Israel, witness His honor.
Nadav and Avihu, who had stood at Sinai among the small group granted a direct vision of the divine glory (Moses, Aaron, and 70 elders) recognized the fire descending upon the altar and rushed out with burning firepans of incense to veil it, out of a burning jealousy for God’s glory, out of fierce passion for the priesthood, convinced that only priests ought to witness this level of revelation.
Their unauthorized fire was not recklessness. It was fervent misdirected zeal, and it was wrong because on that day God’s intention was the opposite of concealment.
Why does any of this matter? Grossman’s answer is that every detail says something precise. The specific verb, the specific animal, the specific portion burned and the specific portion eaten: each one a word in a language that ancient Israel understood and that we have largely forgotten how to read.
When the reader has watched that language decode itself word by word, Leviticus stops looking like the part of the Bible you endure and begins to look like the part someone worked very hard to make you understand.■
The Sacrificial Service: Gestures Of Flesh And Spirit
By Jonathan Grossman
Translated by Sara Daniel
Maggid Books/Koren Publishers Jerusalem
630 pages; $40