father, would go with him to Egypt and bring him up again to Canaan, and so maintain the covenant which He had made with his fathers, and assuredly fulfil it in due time. The expiatory offerings, properly so called, viz., the sin and trespass-offerings, were altogether unknown before the economy of the Sinaitic law; and even if an expiatory element was included in the burnt-offerings, so far as they embodied self-surrender to God, and thus involved the need of union and reconciliation with Him, so little prominence is given to this in the pre-Mosaic sacrifices, that, as we have already stated, no reference is made to expiation in connection with them.[1]
The reason for this striking fact is to be found in the circumstance, that godly men of the primeval age offered their sacrifices to a God who had drawn near to them in revelations of love. It is true that in former times God had made known His holy justice in the destruction of the wicked and the deliverance of the righteous (Gen 6:13., Lev 18:16.), and had commanded Abraham to walk blamelessly before Him (Gen 17:1); but He had only manifested Himself to the patriarchs in His condescending love and mercy, whereas He had made known His holiness in His very first revelation to Moses in the words, “Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes,” etc. (Exo 3:5), and unfolded it more and
- ↑ The notion, which is still very widely spread, that the burnt-offerings of Abel, Noah, and the patriarchs were expiatory sacrifices, in which the slaying of the sacrificial animals set forth the fact, that the sinner was deserving of death in the presence of the holy God, not only cannot be proved from the Scriptures, but is irreconcilable with the attitude of a Noah, an Abraham and other patriarchs, towards the Lord God. And even Kahnis's explanation, “The man felt that his own ipse must die, before it could enter into union with the Holy One, but he had also his surmises, that another life might possibly bear this death for him, and in this obscure feeling he took away the life of an animal that was physically clean,” is only true and to the point so far as the deeper forms of the development of the heathen consciousness of God are concerned, and not in the sphere of revealed religion, in which the expiatory sacrifices did not originate in any dim consciousness on the part of the sinner that he was deserving of death, but were appointed for the first time by God at Sinai, for the purpose of awakening and sharpening this feeling. There is no historical foundation for the arguments adduced by Hoffmann in support of the opinion, that there were sin-offerings before the Mosaic law; and the assertion, that sin-offerings and trespass-offerings were not really introduced by the law, but were presupposed as already well known, just as much as the burnt-offerings and thank-offerings, is obviously at variance with Lev 4 and 5.
