Did God Ever Want Sacrifice? w/ Dr. Nathan MacDonald

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today my guest is Dr. Nathan MacDonald. Dr. MacDonald, thank you so much for your time today. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Johnny, lovely to be with you. I hope we have a great conversation too.

Johnny Ova: It's going to be great. Even though you're stuffed in a hot room, I believe we're going to deal with it.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: It's a warm, sultry afternoon in Cambridge at the moment. I shall not start shedding clothes. That would not go very well.

Johnny Ova: Man, this may be the most popular episode yet if it starts out like that. Did you see the professor taking his clothes off during a conversation about sacrifice?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: I'm afraid not this 50-year-old.

Johnny Ova: All right. Let's start with the question right in our title. When people picture the God of the Old Testament, they picture a God demanding blood on an altar. Did God ever really want sacrifice in the first place?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: You're right, Johnny, that sacrifice is a central idea in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Certainly if I talk to my students, they find it very alien, very odd. I think part of that is due to the fact that for about 2,000 years now, both Judaism and Christianity have found ways of thinking about sacrifice much more as a metaphor, thinking of prayer and singing hymns as sacrificial worship, or at least as good as or equivalent to sacrificial worship. That's one reason. The second reason is that we as a culture, particularly these days, are quite far removed from the realities of farming. If I want chicken for lunch, I go into the supermarket and it's beautifully packaged for me. There is nothing of the mess of killing an animal. We're removed from the reality that if you eat meat, you are going to have to slaughter something. In the ancient world, sacrifice is that means of consuming meat.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: One of the things that's so important to realize when we're thinking about ancient sacrifice is that the question is not, why were these ancient people so concerned with getting their hands deep in blood? We might think of it much more as a real respect for life. The chicken thighs don't just arrive neatly packaged in a supermarket. The steak does not come ready to cook. A life has to be taken, and sacrifice is one of the ways of recognizing that to take a life is always a very significant act. That's particularly true if it's a human being, but no less true if it's an animal. So when we think about sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, one of the things that has to be done is that you can't eat the blood. The blood has to be drained down into the earth. It returns to the earth from which the animal's life has come. It returns, we might say, to its maker. So there is a recognition in sacrifice of the sacred nature of all life, and that you can't eat domesticated animals unless you have offered the animal to God, and then you can partake of it. There's something really important there that we lose by not having sacrifice.

Johnny Ova: To use my 2026 term, it's such a weird thing to think about as a whole when it relates to God, and especially how as a Christian and a pastor we worship God and sacrifice to God today. It obviously evolved over time, but before Israel ever built a tabernacle, we know that in the ancient Near East sacrifice existed all throughout the land. What did Israel's neighbors believe sacrifice accomplished, and how was Israel's understanding different? Where did this even come from? God's upset, kill an animal. You can almost see their thinking: let the blood go back into the earth, life comes from the earth, so put it back to the earth. They're coming up with all these rules to make it as holy as possible, the right thing that would make sense to them. So if you could explain what Israel's neighbors believed sacrifice accomplished and how Israel's understanding differed.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: You're absolutely right that across the ancient Near East we have very similar understandings. One of the things I'm often trying to explain to my students is that when we think of worship in the Hebrew Bible, we mean sacrificial worship. It's easy to project our own understandings, where worship is feeling close to God, a meditative spirit. In the ancient world, worship first and foremost means sacrifice, and that's true not only in Israel. It's true across the ancient Near East. Human beings in the ancient world, as now, use human language when they talk about the divine. We speak in terms of analogy, in terms of what we know. Theologians have thought about this for a very long time, but we speak in our own language, and we have to think about God in terms that make some sense to us.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: In the ancient world, sacrificing an animal to God is giving God something valuable and important. This is a world in which people do not eat meat often. It's not a regular part of the diet. It's eaten on celebratory occasions, at festivals. So it's a big thing to offer some part of it to God. The relationship to God is also one where the metaphor often used in the Hebrew Bible is a king and his subjects. You give to God, who is the supreme being, your Lord and your King, something that is a worthy gift for him. You do that because it's a suitable way of honoring him. There's a very interesting account at the beginning of Malachi where God complains to the people through the prophet that he's not getting proper sacrifices. He's not getting the best lamb. He's getting a lamb that's lame or has a gammy leg or has lost an eye, and he's not impressed. The prophet, speaking on behalf of God, basically says: you wouldn't do that to your governor, and he wouldn't accept it if you did.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: So there is this basic analogy: the people's relationship to God is similar to a people's relationship to a ruler. A ruler is going to demand certain things because he's your ruler and because he's making sure you're safe and secure. One of those things you give is an animal, because in the ancient world that is a very valuable thing to offer. It's also essential to human life. An awful lot of human labor in the ancient world is taken up with growing crops, the basics just to subsist. The ancients often think of God in very tactile and material terms. The gods are often thought of as requiring food, the kinds of nice things we as human beings require. So a temple provides a god with a space to live that is comfortable, pleasant, offers privacy, and has servants, a bit like a king has servants, and those are the priests. There he receives offerings that recognize the relationship of a patron and his subjects. All of this recognizes the relationship of deference that human beings owe to a god.

Johnny Ova: It seems like the theme is, if it's valuable to you and you're going to give it to God, make sure you're giving God your very best. That's kind of the overall theme when we talk New Testament too: give God your first and give God your best. If you're going to sacrifice, don't give him the lamb with no left eye or the gimpy leg. I feel like we can relate to that in the New Testament as well. Whatever you're giving to God, give God your best, give God your all. Would you say that's the overall theme of why God would be upset about those kinds of sacrifices?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: I think absolutely so. In both the Old and the New Testament this can be developed in certain directions, so that it becomes a much more profound theological reflection on what is appropriate to give to God and on honoring God in the proper way. But in the Hebrew Bible there is a lot of interest in making sure that the temple is not defrauded, that God is not defrauded. Now, we might well say when reading these texts, which are authored by priestly writers, that there's quite a lot of self-interest going on there. But there are also basic theological ideas at play: the deity deserves the very best things you've got. Also, if you make a promise to the deity, if you take an oath that says, God, if you do X for me, I'm going to give this offering to you, a contract is formed. You can't go back on it. So there are various texts in the Hebrew Bible, like that text in Malachi, that are very concerned that God and the temple are not defrauded. This is seen as a particularly sacrilegious act, because it's not like an ordinary act of pulling a fast one on a friend or a neighbor. You are impacting the temple, you're impacting God, you're impacting holy things.

Johnny Ova: Besides being an odd thing to think about, there's also some confusion here, because the prophets say some shocking things. Jeremiah has God saying he never commanded sacrifices. Hosea says God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Psalm 51 says God takes no delight in burnt offerings. So how do we make sense of the sacrificial system commanded in the Torah seemingly being dismissed by some of the prophetic writings?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: I would say a couple of things. On the one hand, it's always really important to recognize that the Old Testament writers were often sophisticated theological thinkers. One of the dangers when we read these texts is that we think, Old Testament, and not in the sense of revered and ancient, but in the sense of, well, that's the past, their ideas are limited, they don't have the full revelation. But these are sophisticated thinkers. They may talk in human, analogous ways, but they don't simply think that God is like a big person with a big appetite. They may use that to talk about his majesty, but their thought can be very sophisticated. You have an example in the Psalms: God doesn't need sacrifice, the cattle on a thousand hills are his. So there is a way of speaking about sacrifice, but also a way of saying there's more going on here. That's one thing.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: The other thing is that the prophets in the Hebrew Bible should not be read as being absolute in their rejection of sacrificial worship. They are not saying do not sacrifice at all, it is wrong to sacrifice. There has been a tradition, particularly within Protestantism in the modern period, of taking these texts in the prophets as a complete rejection of sacrifice. Scholars now tend to recognize that what the prophets are doing is rejecting sacrifice when it is disconnected from other aspects of ethical living. Take a text like the one in Isaiah. The idea is that you can't just go into the temple, do your sacrifice, and then start oppressing your neighbor. It's not going to work like that. Sacrifice is fundamentally connected to a whole set of other ideas, a recognition of dependent relationships, what you owe to God and therefore what you owe to other human beings. You can't disconnect temple worship from the way you deal with other people in the marketplace, in labor relations and so forth.

Johnny Ova: What would you say to the opposite angle? What if I said that the people in the Old Testament, in the earlier times, are coming from the ancient Near East with their own thoughts? In the ancient Near East they made a lot of sacrifices to their gods. Now they're asking, how do we worship God? They bring what they know into Judaism and start sacrificing to God, and some of these prophets are course correcting them: no, that's not what God wanted. What would you say to that angle?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Again, it would largely depend. We'd have to look at all the individual references. I think when we did, we would find that they're never an absolute blanket rejection of sacrifice. Having said that, ideas do develop as we move through the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament. Because of some of the changes that happen within Judaism and then later within Christianity, we see prayer, for example, being thought of in ways that are rather like sacrifice. Just as you put a sacrifice on an altar and the smoke ascends to heaven, so when one speaks one's prayers, the words ascend to heaven. There's a tendency to think by analogy. Or think of Daniel. Daniel can't go to the temple because he's been exiled to Babylon, so what does he do? He orients himself toward where the temple is. He faces Jerusalem and prays.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: You have this idea expressed in a text like 1 Kings 8, Solomon's prayer at the inauguration of the temple: even if you are not present in the temple and not able to offer sacrifices, if you orient yourself toward the temple and pray toward it, God will regard that as though you are actually there sacrificing in the temple. So there are ways of turning sacrifice into a way of thinking about all sorts of religious acts. You find that, for example, in Romans 12: present your bodies as living sacrifices. Paul has given eleven chapters about the Christ event and its significance for the Roman world he lives in, and then the question is, what does that now mean? Paul's first way of answering is, present your bodies as living sacrifices. He grabs that sacrificial metaphor to illustrate exactly what the implications are.

Johnny Ova: Dr. MacDonald, can you walk us into the tabernacle itself, for people who skim those chapters in Exodus? And I know who you are. I pastor a bunch of you. So for those who skim through Exodus, what are they missing? Why does the Bible spend more time on this tent than on creation itself?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: That's a great question, and a lovely way of putting it. One of the things we'll want to talk about is the way creation and the tabernacle are paired together so that they speak to one another. But you're right, and I feel some sympathy for your congregation and your listeners. It's often said that Leviticus is the book where ambitions to read the Bible all the way through hit the rocks. In some ways that's harsh on Leviticus, because the ground has already been prepared in Exodus. You get the fantastic story of the Israelites being saved from Egypt, the wonderful stories of going through the wilderness, the Ten Commandments. Exodus is jam-packed. But the second half of the book is taken up with a huge amount of architectural material describing in great detail how they're to build this tent. That's chapters 25 to 31. Then we have the story of the golden calf. Then in Exodus 35 to 40 we are told, in almost the same terms, how the tent was made. You keep reading the lists thinking there's going to be some difference between them, but they're all quite the same. All the materials of the tabernacle are listed again and again. So by the time you get to Leviticus, I have a lot of sympathy. You're already exhausted, thinking, why am I reading this? I need to flick through to something more important.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Let me pull back a little. This is part of what scholars talk about as priestly literature. Various narratives in Genesis and Exodus, and that chunk of material right in the center of the Pentateuch, Exodus, Leviticus and most of Numbers, is what scholars call the priestly literature. It is some of the most profound theological material in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Bible full stop. The priestly writers are thinking about the nature of God and the nature of creation. Scholars attribute Genesis 1 to the priestly writers. They're thinking about God's encounter with his people, so big ideas like covenant are very important to them. They're also thinking about our nature as physical human beings, our bodily nature and the nature of our world. They're thinking about profound issues like sin, guilt and responsibility. Given that we are material beings, what makes God like us or different from us? Why do human beings have this aptitude to worship God? All of these things are being thought about by the priestly writers, and they have a profound influence on the rest of the Bible. Think of Jeremiah as a priest, or Ezekiel, which is profoundly influenced by Leviticus and Numbers, or Malachi and Haggai. Think of the New Testament, when Jesus talks about clean and unclean, or the book of Hebrews, which reflects a great deal on the tabernacle and sacrifice. So this is absolutely central to understanding the Bible.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: The challenge with this material is that the priestly writers are enormously reticent to spell out explicitly what the theological implications of what they're saying are. It's a very unusual way of doing theology that we're not used to. We're much more comfortable with the Gospels or Romans, or even Deuteronomy or Isaiah or the Psalms, which do theology the way we tend to do theology. If you read most of the tabernacle account, or the rules about the sacrifices in Leviticus, you get to the end and think, but what's the point? Why didn't the writer explain why this has to be done and what it means? That can lead to tremendous frustration with the priestly literature, and a failure to realize just how profound its theology is. The priestly writers are asking us to do a lot of work, and they are very subtle in how they do it. But we can get underneath to some very profound ideas.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Take the tabernacle. The account describes the various things that go in this beautiful tent: the Ark of the Covenant, the menorah, the lampstand with seven lamps, the incense altar, the altar outside. We're told how to make them, but not what they're for. For that we need to do a little digging. One helpful way is to look at two of the names the tabernacle is given, which reflect two different concepts. Perhaps the clearest summary of what the tabernacle is about is at the end of Exodus 29, verses 43 to 46. There we meet these names and some theological reflection on them. The first name is the Mishkan, which basically means the dwelling. The tabernacle is a place for God to dwell. Why is that important? Because, and here we go back to the link between creation and tabernacle, God's desire in creating the world is to live with his people. So the tabernacle is the place where God can be comfortable, where his holy presence can be, and where he can live among his people and be present to them.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: The Hebrew term for this dwelling is Mishkan. The root is shakan, which your hearers may know from Shekinah, God's visible glory. The same idea gets picked up in John's Gospel, where God in Jesus dwelt among us, tabernacled among us. The word used for the tabernacle is picked up in John's Gospel, so if you know the Old Testament you can see the link between Jesus dwelling among his people and the tabernacle. That's one of the titles. The other is the Tent of Meeting, the ohel mo'ed. This captures the idea that for God and human beings to encounter one another is a profound and fraught thing. You can't be blasé about it. It's not like stepping out of your house and saying hello to your neighbor. The Tent of Meeting recognizes that there is a profound gap of difference between human beings and God, and that if that encounter is going to happen, human beings need to come to God in the right way and atonement needs to be made.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: One of the places where this language of the Tent of Meeting arises is Leviticus 16, which in my view is probably one of the earliest places it appears historically. This is the Day of Atonement. If human beings and God are going to meet, human beings are impure in God's sight. Job will say even the angels are impure in God's sight, so how much more human beings. So certain sacrificial offerings have to happen for atonement to be made, so that Aaron may go into the Most Holy Place and stand in front of the Ark of the Covenant and this encounter between God and Israel can happen. These two names summarize two very important but somewhat different ideas about what the tabernacle was meant to achieve in the lives of the Israelites. That's also the significance of the temple later on, and some of these ideas are picked up in the New Testament as well.

Johnny Ova: You've argued that the tabernacle was fundamentally about presence, and we hit on that just before, but that presence also comes with danger. Nadab and Abihu are consumed by fire for offering something God did not command. Uzzah dies touching the ark. What do these stories tell us about how Israel understood holiness?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Even within the Hebrew Bible there are slightly different ideas about what holiness means. But one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that holiness particularly pertains to God. We get these statements: I the Lord am holy. The one thing that is absolutely holy is God, and it describes something of God's complete difference from human beings. So the encounter with God is not something human beings can take on in a simple, blasé manner. You can't say, today I'm popping through the tabernacle to say hello to God. It's not going to work like that. If we look at the book of Exodus and the first 16 chapters of Leviticus, holiness is something endowed on certain objects or human beings so that they can come into encounter with God. Holiness is what I like to call a marked category. I hate to say it to you, Johnny, but in the words of the song, we are common people. You're a common person, I'm a common person. If something is anointed with oil and various sacrificial things are done to it, it moves from the common sphere into the holy, and then it becomes a suitable place where God can encounter it. What you don't want is common things coming into encounter with God. That does not end well. Hence Uzzah in the book of Samuel.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: So certain things we might think of as ordinary, people or objects, can be moved into the sphere of the holy to be places where they can encounter God or where God can reveal himself. But we also have other ideas. In the second half of Leviticus we have a much more dynamic concept of holiness. We get the language of be holy as I am holy: ordinary Israelites have an obligation to be ritually and ethically righteous so that God can be present with his people. So there are varied ideas within the Hebrew Bible about what holiness means, but it's particularly characteristic of God and of anyone who wants to come close to the divine.

Johnny Ova: Now I want to shift our conversation to the blood. When an Israelite laid his hand on an animal and slaughtered it, what did he believe was actually taking place? Was this payment, substitution, cleansing, something completely different?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: We might want to say several things. We can talk about what the text might imply, and again that can be difficult because the texts don't always tell us explicitly what it means. But one of the things scholars have increasingly recognized about ritual across the board is that ritual often doesn't have a single meaning. What the leader of a congregation thinks about a ritual, what a member thinks, and what someone from the outside thinks might be completely different. Human language can be ambiguous and playful, and so can actions. Actions might be intended to bring to mind lots of different relationships and things. Rituals that are very important or very contested can take on multiple meanings and significances. An example in the Christian church is the Eucharist. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, because it's become very contested, and of course because it's absolutely central to many Christian denominations' notion of worship. It happens every week in many churches.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Having said all that, which was all ground clearing, what does it mean when somebody brings their animal and rests their hand on it? We are not quite sure. It could mean a number of things, and scholars debate this. One possibility is that the offerer is identifying this as their animal. I've already said that the priestly texts are very concerned about God not being defrauded. They don't want somebody bringing their neighbor's lamb. Remember the story after David committed adultery with Bathsheba, when the prophet Nathan tells of a rich man who had a guest to stay and nicked his neighbor's lamb, because he was rich and he could. Various biblical texts are concerned that you offer your own stuff, not somebody else's. So this may be saying, this animal, which is a valuable object, is mine to sacrifice. The contemporary analogy might be using your credit card to guarantee a large amount at a hotel, and they say, we'd also like to see your driving license, please. They want to know it's really you and you're allowed to do this.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Another idea that has often been suggested is that placing the hand on the animal transfers sin or guilt or impurity onto the animal. We have that sort of idea in the Day of Atonement ritual, where the community, through the person of the priest, recites all the uncleanness onto the scapegoat, and the scapegoat is sent out bearing it. So there are at least two possibilities. And what did it mean for the actual worshiper? We're not sure. They might have thought one thing or another, or a few things at once. Or they might have done what many people, I'm afraid, often do in services, which is be a bit in neutral. Why do we do this? I don't know, we just do it. Let the vicar get on with it. It works for me and I'm chilled out. Slightly dispiriting if you're a pastor, Johnny.

Johnny Ova: But I understand. I know it's hard to know what their mindset was. Just to comment, though, it's a question I get all the time, especially from new Christians. Our church has a lot of new Christians, and when we're showing them the Old Testament, that to atone for people's sins they would take a fatted calf and do that, they're reading it in horror, going, why would God want this? That's the mindset I'm trying to get into, or at least the mindset of the people doing it and why they did it for the Lord.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Let's think about some of these sacrifices. Some of it is to give something valuable to God, and sacrifices are not the only things you can give. We know that in ancient temples you often have what are called votive offerings. As well as sacrificing an animal, which is one of the most common forms of offering, you can bring valuable objects into the temple. In the ancient world, temples were often repositories for huge amounts of valuable stuff. Even down into the Greek period, we have occasions where rulers have a cash shortage, and one of the things they do is go raid the temple. They have no compunction about taking all the stuff that's been offered to the deity. One of the most famous examples in the Hebrew Bible is Goliath's sword. David kills Goliath and takes his sword. When does it emerge again? When David is fleeing from Saul and goes to the sanctuary at Nob. He's fled without weapons or food. He eats the bread of the presence, and he asks, do you have Goliath's sword? This is where I deposited it. And Abiathar gives it to him, and basically says, if anybody should have Goliath's sword, David, it's you. That's what we'd call a votive offering, a very valuable thing won in battle and offered to God.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: We also have different kinds of sacrifices, not just one. The beginning of Leviticus has several. There are two very old offerings: the burnt offering, the olah, and the fellowship offering, the shelamim. One can debate what we should call them, but I'll stick with those for simplicity. The burnt offering is where the smoke goes up. You might think of it as ringing the divine doorbell. The smoke goes up to God and it's like, we're here. It alerts God to the human being's presence and that they want to engage with God. You do that first because the second offering is the fellowship offering. Some of it is burnt on the altar and offered to God, some is given to the priest as payment, and the rest is eaten by the offerers. So it's a way to eat meat, but also a way of eating and having fellowship with God. God receives some of the sacrifice and so do you as a human participant.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Then there are a couple of other sacrifices that scholars now think are probably later. One is the sin offering, sometimes called the purification offering. There's a lot of discussion about whether sin offering is a helpful name or whether we should call it the purification offering. There is a good case that many of the times we encounter it, it describes purifying the people from sins or impurities they've committed, and impurity is a whole other area. Then there's the guilt offering, very often for things where you might have inadvertently done something that impacts the temple. You made an oath and didn't realize the situation wasn't what you thought, or you offered something you ought not to have, but by mistake. You accidentally took your next-door neighbor's lamb. How did that happen? Did you not check? You have to make recompense, and you do that through the guilt offering. So when we think of sacrifice, there's not just one sacrifice. There are several, and they have different functions.

Johnny Ova: I want to go over to your book, because I want to hit this topic before we leave today. Your book traces how the priests went from cultic servants to the most powerful men in the nation. How did the family of Aaron end up holding that kind of authority, and what role did the tabernacle text play in building it?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Johnny, you ask that right at the end? I wrote a whole book on this!

Johnny Ova: Listen, you've got forty-five seconds. No, I'm kidding. Take your time.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: This is a fascinating question. If we take the historical long view, at the end of the kingdom of Judah we have the last Davidic king, and Judah is ruled by a king. Fast forward to around 160 BCE and we have the Judahites, becoming Jews at this point, ruled by a family of priests, the Maccabees. So something has happened in the meantime, and some of what I was trying to do in the book is work out exactly what happened. We have various texts that give us a bit of a view of this, scattered all over the Hebrew Bible and in some texts outside it. One of the most important sets is these texts in Exodus and Numbers, because they contain an awful lot of talk about priests, but not about kings, since this is the time before David and the monarchy. What picture is being presented of the priests, the Aaronides, in these narratives, and how does that differ from monarchy? It seems to me these chapters in the Pentateuch prepare the ground for a way of thinking about Israel's world and existence where priests are absolutely at the center. It's no longer the king who defines what the kingdom looks like. It's the priest.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: There are subtle shifts that come along with that. One of the most interesting is this. If you're a king, you rule your people. You're not a representative of the people. They're your subjects. But look at how the high priest is presented in the tabernacle account. He goes into God's presence, and what does he have on him? The breastpiece with the names of the twelve tribes written on the gems. So the high priest is not seen as a monarch or a ruler. He has profound authority and is a leader, but there's much more a sense that he's going into God's presence representing Israel. When God looks at the high priest, he sees the breastpiece with the names of the tribes, and he remembers his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There's something profoundly different going on there. What I was trying to do in the book was trace some of those changes and show how the tabernacle and the material around it create profoundly different ways of thinking about the world. It's not that the priests simply took power by force of arms. Over several centuries they created a way of thinking about Israel that's profoundly different from how Israel was thought about in the time of the kings.

Johnny Ova: Reading through this myself, I feel like most people don't even see this. There's a tension in the text between the sons of Aaron and the rest of the Levites. What's the rivalry about? What does it reveal about how worship developed over time? It's like these priests have beef with each other.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: It's a profoundly difficult problem on a historical level to work out exactly what happened. Certainly within the texts as we now have them, you get gradations within the clergy. You have the priests, who do the sacrifices, go into the temple and light the lamps. Then you get the lower clergy, the Levites, who do subordinate jobs. The text is quite clear: the priests serve God and the Levites serve the priests. That's not such a great thing if you're a Levite. Tracing out the history of how that developed is profoundly difficult. That would be another podcast in itself, and even with a whole podcast we'd be left with a lot we simply do not know. Part of that is that we don't quite know the origins of the Levites. Their name seems to suggest those who are attached. Some of the earliest texts that talk about Levites see them as a rather marginalized group. They're scattered around Israel. They look a little like the resident alien, the ger, an outsider who attaches himself to a family. They don't have their own possessions or land. So there are difficulties even tracing what's going on in this history. But yes, it's better to be a priest than a Levite. There's no question about that.

Johnny Ova: My last question today, Dr. MacDonald, and thanks again for your time, your wisdom and this conversation. The question underneath everything we've talked about: if sacrifice was never about feeding God or buying his favor, what is the whole system ultimately pointing toward?

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: I want to say several things. On the one hand, the God-human relationship is fundamentally not one of equality. Human beings bring sacrifices to God, not the other way around. It's also a recognition of the profoundly bodily nature of human existence, which within Christian theology is worked out in different ways through the incarnation. The priestly literature is fundamentally, in a very good sense, materialistic. It's very realistic about the fact that we as human beings have bodies, and God is talked about in very bodily terms as well, surprisingly. I would also say that coming into God's presence is a profound, dangerous and fraught thing. It's not done lightly. Nowhere is sacrificing an animal seen as a quick flick of the wrist. It's always a profoundly significant and fraught act that one should never undertake lightly, and there is something to be learned there.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: In our Christian worship, I wouldn't want that to be the only thing one thought about, because there is a profound sense of God's accessibility in Christian worship, of the way Christians approach God as Father and can speak to God. But whenever you're speaking theologically, you always want to say, yes, but don't forget this. The other side is that to enter into God's presence is something profound. To go back to that verse in Malachi, you're not simply approaching your human governor. You're approaching the one who in Genesis 1 created the whole world and on whom the whole world depends. To enter into his presence is a profound and unprecedented and marvellous thing.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. Listen, I'm going to link your book and your resources in our description box on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. Dr. Nathan MacDonald, thank you for your time today. I truly enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald: Johnny, it's been a delight. Thanks for having me.