Semitic magic : its origins and development

DEMONS ENTICED OUT OF THE SICK MAN. 179
Robertson Smith maintains that in the Hebrew ideas
"all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing
their efficacy to a communication of divine life to the
worshippers, and to the establishment or confirmation of
a living bond between them and their god," ^ and that
" the conception of piacular rites as a satisfaction for sin
appears to have arisen after the original sense of the
theanthropic sacrifice for a kindred animal was forgotten,
and mainly in connection with the view that the life of
the victim was the equivalent of the life of a human
member of the religious community/' ^
^ Religion of the Semites, 439.
2 Ibid., 416. He points out here that "in the older literature, when
exceptional and piacular rites are interpreted as satisfactions for sin,
the offence is always a definite one, and the piacular rite has not a stated
and periodical character, but is directly addressed to the atonement of
a particular sin or course of sinful life," and " in the Levitical ritual
all piacula, both public and private, refer only to sins committed un-
wittingly" (p. 423). For later views on the D^K see Koberle, op. cit., 81.
The recent views on Babylonian sacrifices given in the Encyclopoedia
Bihlica (4120) are those of Jeremias, who says :— " Here, of course, we
must divest ourselves of all theological preconceptions, and put aside
all such notions as that of an atoning efficacy attaching to the blood
as the seat of life, or of a divine wrath that expends itself upon the
sacrificial animal, or even of a ratio vicaria, when we sjDeak of the idea
of propitiation as underlying Babylonian sacrifices. ... At the same
time it is significant and by no means accidental—it has its roots firmly
planted in the very nature of the religious ideas involved—that every-
thing offered with the object of averting evil of any kind whatsoever
was associated with the notions of a propitiatory, cleansing, purifying
efficacy." Further on (4125) he says, " Singular to say, however, that
(the Babylonian cultus) shows not the faintest trace of dsdm, hattdth ;
we may assume that the sin and the trespass offering of the Hebrew
Torah, although all that we know of their technique is wholly of
post-exilic date, were entirely of Israelite growth." I do not think,
however, that this second statement can be upheld for a moment
and the language of the former is so involved and peculiar that it is
difficult to see how far the author has grasped his subject.
;