“Hierarchical” Sacrifices in Philo of Alexandria

• In Event: Philo as a Biblical Exegete

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the biblical sacrificial system—and in particular on the “Priestly” corpus—has demonstrated the importance of the principle of “hierarchics” in organizing animal sacrifices. According to this scholarship, the Priestly literature develops a hierarchical structure in which lower-level sacrificial units—like the full-burnt offering, the sin-offering, and the peace-offering—can be combined in varying ways to create higher-level, compound sacrifices. Often these compound sacrifices have their own unique names, identities, functions, and even special ceremonial requirements. They are, in other words, greater than the sum of their parts.
In this presentation, I will seek to demonstrate that, already in antiquity, Philo of Alexandria had discerned the workings of this same organizational structure within his interpretation of the three-part sacrifice of the Nazirite in Numbers 6. Additionally, I hope to show that Philo even began to develop a rudimentary technical vocabulary of sorts to articulate such composite functioning. We can discern in Philo, then, an early attempt to conceptualize the biblical sacrificial system as a series of basic components, combined in various arrangements to create new and distinct compounds.
Furthermore, I will seek to deploy this principle of “hierarchics” as a lens to analyze Philo’s numerological conception of the seventy full-burnt bull-offerings prescribed for Sukkot in Numbers 29, as well as his symbolic conception of Abraham’s combined five sacrifices in the so-called ‘covenant between the parts’ in Genesis 15. This latter case is, I believe, particularly intriguing, as it presents us with an example of the principle of ‘hierarchics' at work not only in the ‘plain-sense’ interpretation of the biblical sacrificial system, but even within Philo's allegorical exegesis of it.

Author

• Jesse Mirotznik, Hebrew University of Jerusalem