1. Ritual Activity Systems and the Character of God
Roy E. Gane
Prof. of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Languages
Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary
Andrews University

2. The Question: What does the Purification Offering (so-called Sin Offering) teach us about God and his remedy for human evil?

3. Raw Data
Purification offering blood applied to part of sanctuary, never to a person.
The more serious a sin, the deeper its blood remedy penetrated into the sanctuary (court—HP—MHP; Lev 4, 16).
In Lev 16 (Day of Atonement), blood applied to sanctuary explicitly purged sanctuary.
In Lev 20:3; Num 19:13, 20, sins automatically affected sanctuary when committed.

4. Jacob Milgrom’s interpretation
Function of every purification offering: to purge sanctuary from dynamic moral or ritual evils that had already reached it from a distance.
The more serious the evil, the deeper it penetrated into the sanctuary, from which it was removed by blood acting as “detergent.”
So sanctuary reflected moral state of Israelites and had to be purged so God would not leave (cf. Ezek 9-11).

5. Penetration of sins into the sanctuary according to Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991), 258.

6. Implications for SDA theology
If the purpose of purification offerings throughout the year was to purge the sanctuary, Christ began cleansing it as soon as he ascended to heaven, not in 1844.
Therefore the SDA two-stage interpretation of atonement (sins in and then out of heavenly sanctuary) is fatally flawed.
Therefore, since the sanctuary doctrine has been the only unique SDA theological contribution, we have nothing unique to offer.

7. Is Milgrom’s theory correct?
Has he taken all relevant data into account?
Does he make leaps of logic that are unsubstantiated by the relevant data?
Has he accurately “connected the dots,” i.e., made proper connections between elements of data?
How do his presuppositions shape his reading of the data?

8. Cautions when critiquing someone else’s theory and developing an alternative one:
Am I an apologist trying to back up an a priori conclusion or an exegete attempting to arrive at whatever conclusion the data indicates?
Am I adhering to the standards of data treatment that I demand of others, or do I bend the data to support my desired outcome?
Am I overreacting, or am I learning all I can from someone else’s theory?

9. Data that Milgrom missed
Privative preposition min, “from,” in formulae assigning meaning to purification offerings during the year, e.g. Lev 4:26—”…the priest shall make expiation for him from his sin…”
So evil is removed from the sinner. Purgation of the sanctuary on the Day of Atonement is the exception.

11. 2. Reversal of blood applications in the holy place (comparing Lev 4 & 16).

13. 3. Personal purification of lay assistant(s)
Disposing of purification offering carcasses on the Day of Atonement makes an assistant impure (Lev 16:28). Why? The carcasses serve as ritual “sponges” that absorb impurities and sins removed from the sanctuary.
Disposing carcasses on other days does not defile assistants (Lev 4:11-12, 21). The carcasses are not functioning as ritual sponges to remove defilement from the sanctuary.

14. 4. Trajectories of evils show that expiable sins (tafj) were removed from the offerer and later purged from the sanctuary, implying that they were left at the sanctuary when they were removed from the offerer.

15. Milgrom’s leaps of logic
1. Milgrom assumes that blood applied to the sanctuary in Lev 4 purged it because this was the stated function in Lev 16 (Day of Atonement).
Principle of basic ritual theory: Meanings are attached to activity systems, not inherent in them (F. Staal).
Therefore, a given ritual activity may carry more than one meaning (F. Staal).
Support: In the same Lev 16 ritual, sprinkling blood 7x purges (v. 16) and reconsecrates (v. 19).
Therefore Milgrom’s assumption is invalid.

16. 2. Milgrom assumes that because Lev 20:3 and Num 19:13, 20 refer to sins automatically defiling the sanctuary, this dynamic can be generalized to cases of sin remedied by subsequent purification offerings.
These verses deal with egregious cases incurring terminal divine punishment (“cut off”).
“Cut off” is terminal punishment, with no opportunity for subsequent expiation.
Therefore Milgrom’s assumption is invalid.

17. 3. Milgrom assumes that the Day of Atonement involved more of the same, i.e., more powerful expiation to remedy more serious evil, but in basically the same way.
In Lev 16:30, purging (kipper) the sanctuary morally cleanses people who have committed expiable sins. This is unique.
Elsewhere ritual expiation (kipper) for moral faults is prerequisite to divine forgiveness (Lev 4-5, etc.).
Forgiveness is not mentioned in connection with the Day of Atonement.
Therefore there is a qualitative, and not merely quantitative, difference in ritual function and Milgrom’s assumption is invalid.

18. Problems with Milgrom’s connections
1. Milgrom interprets Lev 6:27 (Hebrew v. 20) to mean that purification offering blood pollutes a bespattered garment because the blood has already contacted the already polluted altar.
The verb for “spatter” (Qal of nzh) describes airborne motion, but blood sticks to what it touches.
The blood carries defilement before it contacts the altar. Where could it come from? The offerer.
This explains why such blood is not physically applied to the offerer: It carries evil from him/her.

19. 2. Milgrom extends the gradation of purification offerings in Lev 4—blood applied to the outer altar or in the holy place—to Lev 16 (Day of Atonement), where blood goes in the most holy place.
In Lev 16, blood is also applied to the outer altar and in the holy place. So this is not just to remedy the most serious grade of sins.
Lev 16:16 says that the high priest purges the most holy place from all expiable sins that have affected the sanctuary since the last Day of Atonement.

20. An alternate theory
Critique of Milgrom’s theory through examination of data and collection of additional relevant data by close reading of the Hebrew text, syntactic analysis, and application of ritual theory has generated an alternate theory.
My theory builds on Milgrom’s work in important ways and radically departs from it in others.

21. My theory: two stages
Stage 1: Throughout the year, individual purification offerings removed sins from their offerers, prerequisite to forgiveness by YHWH.
Stage 2: On the Day of Atonement, such sins were treated again, but this time they were corporately removed from YHWH’s sanctuary by unique purification offerings.

22. Why the need for Stage 2, involving atonement (kipper) after forgiveness?
Why would forgiven sins pollute the Lord’s sanctuary so that it would need to be cleansed on the Day of Atonement?
Metaphor for relational/legal dynamics: God bears judicial responsibility when he forgives truly guilty people.
Compare 2 Sam 14:9—”On me be the culpability, my lord the king, and on my father’s house; let the king and his throne be clean.”

23. God’s sanctuary and character
God’s sanctuary where he was enthroned (e.g. 1 Sam 4:4) was the place of his administration and reputation for justice.
So purging human sins from God’s sanctuary represented vindication/clearing of his character of justice with regard to those sins.
Vindication of God’s forgiveness of his loyal people also cleansed/vindicated them (Lev 16:30).

24. Day of Atonement as judgment
Israelites were required to show loyalty on the Day of Atonement by practicing self-denial and abstaining from work (Lev 16:29, 31).
Those who did not do this were condemned (Lev 23:29-30).
So the Day had a real judgment, distinguishing between God’s nominal people according to their loyalty or disloyalty.
Jewish tradition recognized it to be a day of judgment (e.g., Mishnah and Babylonian Talmud tractates on Rosh Hashanah).

25. Ancient Near Eastern Parallels
In the Sumerian “Nanshe Hymn” (c B.C.), those working at the temple of the goddess Nanshe or economically dependent on it were required to obey her ethical and ritual rules. They were judged annually at the New Year festival, which they were required to attend.
On the fifth day of the Babylonian New Year Festival of Spring, the king appeared before the statue of the god Marduk for judgment and confessed his innocence.

26. Implications for SDA theology
Now we understand why God’s sanctuary must be “justified” in Dan 8:14: to vindicate his forgiveness of the loyal and condemnation of the disloyal among his nominal people.
God is justified (Dan 8) through judgment (Dan 7).
The question in the judgment is not “who has sinned?” but “who remains loyal and forgiven?”

27. Books by Roy E. Gane dealing with Ritual Activity Systems and the Character of God
Altar Call. Berrien Springs, MI: Diadem, 1999.
Leviticus-Numbers. NIV Application Commentary series; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004.
Ritual Dynamic Structure. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004.
Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005.
Who’s Afraid of the Judgment? Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2006.
“Leviticus.” In the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009.