The Old Testament Background of Sacrifice

Dennis O'Brien: When we turn to these Old Testament sacrifices, we enter a world which is utterly foreign to modern Western readers. Most of us have never seen an animal butchered, much less done it ourselves, and used as we are to buying our meat or poultry in antiseptically wrapped packages and refrigerated bins. And so these Old Testament rituals may often strike us as bizarre and opaque. In general, the sacrifices served the twin fundamental purposes of the expiation of sin and the propitiation of God.