Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/796

 God, which was essential to them. It is rather demanded as their complement, inasmuch as, without this, the sacrificial worship would degenerate into a soulless opus operatum, and would even lose its typical character. This symbolical significance is strikingly expressed in the instructions relating to the nature of the sacrificial gifts, and the ritual connected with their presentation; and in the law it comes into the foreground just in proportion as the typical character of the sacrifices was concealed at the time in the wise economy of God, and was only unfolded to the spiritual vision of the prophets (Isa 43) with the progressive unfolding of the divine plan of salvation. The leading features of the symbolical and typical meaning of the sacrifices are in their general outline the following. Every animal offered in sacrifice was to be תּמים, ἄμωμος, free from faults; not merely on the ground that only a faultless and perfect gift could be an offering fit for the Holy and Perfect One, but chiefly because moral faults were reflected in those of the body, and to prefigure the sinlessness and holiness of the true sacrifice, and warn the offerer that the sanctification of all his members was indispensable to a self-surrender to God, the Holy One, and to life in fellowship with Him. In connection with the act of sacrifice, it was required that the offerer should bring to the tabernacle the animal appointed for sacrifice, and there present it before Jehovah (Lev 1:3), because it was there that Jehovah dwelt among His people, and it was from His holy dwelling that He would reveal Himself to His people as their God. There the offerer was to lay his hand upon the head of the animal, that the sacrifice might be acceptable for him, to make expiation for him (Lev 1:4), and then to slay the animal and prepare it for a sacrificial gift. By the laying on of his hand he not only set apart the sacrificial animal for the purpose for which he had come to the sanctuary, but transferred the feelings of his heart, which impelled him to offer the sacrifice, or the intention with which he brought the gift, to the sacrificial animal, so that his own head passed, as it were, to the head of the animal, and the latter became his substitute (see my Archäologie i. 206; Oehler, p. 267; Kahnis, i. p. 270). By the slaughter of the animal he gave it up to death, not merely for the double purpose of procuring the blood, in which was the life of the animal, as an expiation for his own soul, and its flesh as