Food Fit For God - VaYikra - Mythic Torah

Feasting in Valhalla

Does God need to eat?

Now you make think that the answer is 'obviously no', of course God, who has no corporeal body in any literal sense of the word, does not need physical sustenance from food and drink. But the Ancient Greeks, and other ancient cultures, would certainly have disagreed with you - the Gods of Olympus dined regularly on nectar and ambrosia in order to maintain their youth and immortality. In Norse mythology too, the Gods of Valhalla feast regularly alongside the Einherjar, the honoured dead who were slain in battle.

As we begin the book of Leviticus (VaYikra) with its long descriptions of the sacrifices that had to be brought in temple times in various life situations, we have to ask ourselves this question about the God of the Bible, and consider what the answer might mean about the Torah and its meaning for us today.

Why might we think that God eats?

Well, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, that predates the Bible includes a really interesting description of how the gods relate to sacrifices, in an image that is both resonant and dissonant with this week's parasha.



When Gilgamesh finally achieves his quest to meet Utnapishtim, the immortal survivor of the flood (the Mesopotamian Noah character) to ask him how you can live forever, Utnapishtim tells him what happened at the time of the flood. He describes the boat he built to escape the torrents, the flood itself and the sending of the raven. And then, when the flood water finally subsides, Utnapishtim emerges into the air once more and offers a sacrifice to the gods:

"When the waters had dried up and land appeared,
I set free the animals I had taken,
I slaughtered a sheep on the mountaintop
and offered it to the gods, I arranged
two rows of seven ritual vases,
I burned reeds, cedar, and myrtle branches.
The gods smelled the fragrance, they smelled the sweet fragrance
and clustered around the offering like flies."
    -Gilgamesh Book XI, adaptation by Stephen Mitchell.

The idea of smelling the sweet fragrance of the sacrifice appears after our flood narrative too, in Genesis 8:21, as well as in our parasha of VaYikra. In fact, a total of 9 times in this week's reading we are told that something is 'pleasing fragrance to God'.

The crucial difference is Gilgamesh's less than flattering image of the gods clustering on the sacrifices 'like flies', a gross image that suggests a physical connection between the gods and the flesh that is absent from the Biblical narrative.

By keeping to the image of smell and fragrance, the Bible has removed any sense of God physically needing or desiring the sacrifice itself.

We can see this trend quite powerfully in Psalm 50, that argues forcefully that sacrifices are not for food but rather meant to be a step towards behaving morally:

⁷ ‘Listen, my people, and I will speak;
    I will testify against you, Israel:
    I am God, your God.
⁸ I bring no charges against you concerning your sacrifices
    or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.
⁹ I have no need of a bull from your stall
    or of goats from your pens,
¹⁰ for every animal of the forest is mine,
    and the cattle on a thousand hills.
¹¹ I know every bird in the mountains,
    and the insects in the fields are mine.
¹² If I were hungry I would not tell you,
    for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
¹³ Do I eat the flesh of bulls
    or drink the blood of goats?

¹⁴ ‘Sacrifice thank-offerings to God,
    fulfil your vows to the Most High,
¹⁵ and call on me in the day of trouble;
    I will deliver you, and you will honour me.’

God doesn't eat or drink, says the psalmist, that isn't the point of sacrifices. Bring them anyway, but don't think that God needs them.

But while the Bible then seems to have steered clear of suggesting that God does eat, this psalm certainly reads like a polemic against people in Israel who believe just that. It certainly looks like some people in ancient Israel really believed that God could be hungry, and wanted the sacrifices as His portion.

What would this view of sacrifice entail?

To say that God gets hungry and that sacrifice is designed to satiate that hunger, is to say that God needs us in the same way that we need food is to have a very different relationship between us than we normally consider. It's to say that God is lacking in some way, that God is deficient and created us to fill that void.

VaYikra and Psalm 50 seem to be saying something different, and, to my mind, far more interesting. God doesn't need our sacrifices, but nevertheless God wants them. We should fulfil our vows to God through sacrifices, and the fragrance of them is pleasing to God, but if we didn't do them, the Bible tells us, God we be fine - it's us that would suffer.

Of course, we no longer perform sacrifices in Judaism. The korbanot (sacrifices) of Vayikra have been replaced in modern ritual life by things like prayer and study, devoting our time, our hearts and minds to God in place of the animals and grain of old.

We shouldn't think then, that we do these things for God. God does not need our prayer, or our learning - we do these things for ourselves, to reshape our personalities on the altar of Torah. We sacrifice ourselves, our time, resources and our ego to God, but not for God, but for ourselves.

And God smells the sweet fragrance of our sacrifices, and is pleased.