I am getting to a point in my novel retelling the Exodus as historical fiction where I am starting to think about not only the physical realities of my main characters’ escape from indentured labor in Egypt, but also the spiritual practices that they might have been familiar with. Those rituals, I believe, represent the most essential roots of my own Judaism — so they are not only important to my book, but to my Jewish soul as well.
The Hebrew Bible mentions offerings of gratitude within its first few chapters, when Cain and Abel bring the fruits of their labor to God in thanks (Genesis 4:3). These types of sacrifices are pretty straightforward, and understandable to most people. But the Torah also describes all kinds of ritual activities in bizarrely opaque detail, leaving out virtually all explication of their meaning. One early example occurs when Jacob sets up a stone pillar, pouring a “drink offering” as well as oil on it, in Genesis 35:14. What was in the drink offering? Wine? Water? Beer, which was probably consumed more than any other type of drink because fermentation killed the bacteria living in the water? Why not specify what type of liquid refreshment was supposed to be sacrificed, and how Jacob was supposed to decide? And why were both drink and oil necessary to pour onto the pile of rocks? Not a word is written about any of this.
And then in Exodus 29:36, Moses is told to “make atonement” for an altar before consecrating it with anointing oil in preparation for sacrificing a series of seven bulls on it in seven days. This is not only a fabulously expensive show of religious commitment, given the value of bulls to those who owned them, but also begs the basic question of how one apologizes for the existence of an altar that one has been commanded by God to build. What is the sense of this ritual, and how might it be carried out?
These two episodes, along with many others, come before we even get to Leviticus and its array of legal dicta regarding, in order of the chapters, burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings, and the consecration of priests.
For my purposes of writing in the first person from the point of view of non-biblical characters who experienced the Exodus as teenagers, I’d like to know whether any of these behaviors reach as far back as the 13th century BCE. Is it possible that the Israelites made sacrifices to their god while they were still in Egypt? And if they did, which of the many types of offerings described in the Bible are likely candidates for having the greatest antiquity?
There is a whole section of the article dedicated to the treatment of animal blood when it comes to Hebrew Bible sacrifice. All of the blood is supposed to be caught in a basin, and then it can be sloshed around the altar or painted onto the “horns” of the altar or sprinkled onto the heads of people. In the case of Moses’s covenant offering at the base of Mt. Sinai as he is readying the Israelites for receiving the Ten Commandments, half of the blood from the bull sacrifice is splashed out (presumably dirtying Moses’s own robes in the process, leaving me with the image of a meatpacker rather than a religious leader). The other half is sprinkled on people close by, necessitating that Moses bloody his fingertips in the basin. The Hebrew is very specific, using entirely different verbs for “swing” and “sprinkle.” And a similar commandment is given to the Israelites on the Night of the Death of the Firstborn: “Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin, and brush the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe” (Exodus 12:22, using yet another verb that can also mean “apply”).
So I decided that, along with building and anointing stone altars, blood-related rituals probably dated far back enough in Israelite culture that my characters could have been conversant with them. Gane also points out that the earliest “burnt offerings” described in Genesis also involved stone altars on which cookfires were built, almost like sacred barbecues, so I incorporated them into my story as well.
On the question of how ritual is an exponent of culture,I found some even more fascinating pieces about possible rituals that dwarf the oldest human religious practices — because they were observed among chimpanzees. A piece in Scientific American by wildlife researcher Laura Kehoe details the discovery of “repeated activities unconnected to food or status,” caught on hidden forest cameras in limited areas of Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. Chimps sit next to a tree for a little while, looking around, then suddenly pick up a big rock with both hands, throw it powerfully at the trunk and start screaming as they run away. The scientists found many trees with marks of being hit by these stones as well as piles inside their hollows, “eerily similar” to stone collections at “sacred trees” made by West African people. But, Kehoe writes, the team found “nothing east of this, despite searching across the entire chimp range from the western coasts of Guinea all the way to Tanzania.”
Meanwhile, in Tanzania where Jane Goodall made her breakthrough discoveries about chimp behavior, a different sort of possibly ritualistic behavior was caught on video near waterfalls. A Jane Goodall Institute videographer, Bill Wallauer, recorded images of bigger, furrier chimps than in Guinea Bissau swinging back and forth rhythmically on vines right at the edge of the cascade, not using the vines to travel or avoiding the water as per usual. Goodall describes this as a “dance,” going on to explain in the video how the primates then sit in the water itself and gaze reverently upwards at the roaring cataract. This band of monkeys don’t throw stones at trees, although the same types of trees exist in Tanzania as in Guinea Bissau, hence the argument that these activities are culturally inflected.
These videos said to me that the awe and gratefulness so many of us feel gazing at a sunrise or a star-filled night sky is as deeply embedded in us as the urge to hug or eat our favorite foods, behaviors we share with our nearest evolutionary cousins.
And our sense of wonderment at the existence of the universe, along with our place in it, is profoundly shaped by the community that surrounds us. It ignites our souls.
