This is the reason why the sacrifice combined with a meal, formerly by far the chief, now falls completely into the background.  One could eat flesh at home, but in Jerusalem one’s business was to do worship.  Accordingly, those sacrifices were preferred in which the religious character came to the front with the utmost possible purity and without any admixture of natural elements, sacrifices of which God received everything and man nothing,—­burnt-offerings, sin-offerings, and trespass-offerings.

If formerly the sacrifice had taken its complexion from the quality of the occasion which led to it, it now had essentially but one uniform purpose—­to be a medium of worship.  The warm pulse of life no longer throbbed in it to animate it; it was no longer the blossom and the fruit of every branch of life; it had its own meaning all to itself.  It symbolised worship, and that was enough.  The soul was fled; the shell remained, upon the shaping out of which every energy was now concentrated.  A manifoldness of rites took the place of individualising occasions; technique was the main thing, and strict fidelity to rubric.

Once cultus was spontaneous, now it is a thing of statute.  The satisfaction which it affords is, properly speaking, something which lies outside of itself and consists in the moral satisfaction arising out of the conscientiousness with which the ritual precepts, once for all enjoined by God on His people, are fulfilled.  The freewill offering is not indeed forbidden, but value in the strict sense is attached only to those which have been prescribed, and which accordingly preponderate everywhere.  And even in the case of the freewill offering, everything must strictly and accurately comply with the restrictions of the ordinance; if any one in the fulness of his heart had offered in a zebah shelamim more pieces of flesh than the ritual enjoined, it would have been the worse for him.

Of old the sacrifice combined with a meal had established a special relation between the Deity and a definite society of guests; the natural sacrificial society was the family or the clan (1Samuel i. 1seq., xvi. 1 seq., xx. 6).  Now the smaller sacred fellowships get lost, the varied groups of social life disappear in the neutral shadow of the universal congregation or church [(DH, QHL].  The notion of this last is foreign to Hebrew antiquity, but runs through the Priestly Code from beginning to end.  Like the worship itself, its subject also became abstract, a spiritual entity which could be kept together by no other means except worship.  As now the participation of the “congregation of the children of Israel” in the sacrifice was of necessity always mainly ideal, the consequence was that the sacred action came to be regarded as essentially perfect by virtue of its own efficacy in being performed by the priest, even though no one was present.  Hence later the necessity for a special sacrificial deputation, the anshe ma’amad.  The connection of all this with the Judaising tendency to remove God to a distance from man, it may be added, is clear. 1