The sacrificial ordinaries (P and D literary strands) 1 in the Pentateuch are anachronisms relative to their stated source, Horeb. They define two sorts of sacrifices: atonement and thanksgiving, grief and gratitude.

The literary bases for these ordinaries are various and of various date, all post-Moses. Anything that is cum-or ante-Moses is not visible to us as being definitely cum-or ante-Moses. For critical exegesis, therefore, we may assume that the sacrificial ordinaries of P and D strands are all post-Moses.

Jeremiah 7:22-23 states that God did not give any sacrificial ordinaries to Moses and the people who came with him from Egypt. That is, God did not give any sacrificial ordinaries to this His people during the period when He is establishing the canonical relationship between Himself and them, during the Exodus.

Jeremiah is living during the reign of Josiah and after, when priests and scribes are collecting and formatting the strands that are becoming the Pentateuch. The sacrificial ordinaries from various periods of the operation of the Temple of Solomon are being blended together into a relatively coherent pattern. And this pattern, this blend of post-Davidic sacrificial ordinary, is being presented as coming from the mouth of God at Horeb and relayed through the pen of Moses.

Jeremiah is himself a priest at the Temple of Solomon. He is aware of what is going on, the literary invention that is being concocted. He is aware that the king supports the effort -- for reasons not entirely savory. He is aware that the people will believe it, as they believe most things their leaders tell them.

He sees that the essence of religion, the key to happiness (Micah 6:6ff and elsewhere) is once again going to be swamped by self-serving clerical creativity. He appeals to God and God gives him the language to put the lie to the whole venture: He did not give sacrificial ordinaries to Moses and the people who were with him during the Exodus.

Jeremiah delivers the message and is paid appropriately by his auditors.

Now, what is it that causes the concern in the first place? Two things: one, killing of animals; and two, the idea of surrogate atonement -- substituting an innocent for yourself in the day of penalty for sin. Of these, the second is the worse, although the first is an abomination.

Isaiah, Amos and Micah specifically say that ritual sacrifice is not wanted by God. But this leaves open the possibility that the Torah is still right that God ordered it. So from these seers the sense could be "Yes, God ordered the ritual, only ... don't abuse it." Jeremiah 7:22-23, however, is different. It is unique in all the Bible. It says downrightly that God did not order the ritual sacrifices during the Exodus experience. To grasp the significance of this statement, we must understand that from the point of view of the redactors' standard of canonicity, the period of the Exodus experience is the only period in the people's history when the fundamentals of the religion and especially the cultic worship can be prescribed. Everything truly important in the people's piety has to come from God through Moses during the Exodus experience. Ritual sacrifices, which priests and people take as a fundamental of the religion, could be ordered, therefore, only during the Exodus. So the redactors posit and so they compose.

Alive to the need, the redactors are busily loading their traditions of sacrificial ordinaries into the mouth of God and the pen of Moses at Horeb. Equally alive to the implications -- destruction of the prophetic imperative, which is the heart of the religion -- Jeremiah confronts the redactors with a flat denial of sacrificial ordinaries at all during the Exodus. Jeremiah says they were not ordered then and are therefore spurious and, by implication, injurious to the people's welfare.

Jeremiah's point is that the ordinaries are not canonical. And since the ordinaries are not canonical, neither is the dogma of surrogate atonement, which those ordinaries mainly promulgate. Jeremiah has identified the creative heart of spirituality -- "... listen to and obey My Voice" -- as well as its deformity: kill these animals in expiation for your sin. 2

And furthermore, by the principle of extension, if the dogma of surrogate atonement is not allowed in the Torah, neither is it in the secondary literature, the New Testament, which links and derives its dogma of surrogate atonement directly to and from that of the Torah.

The dogma of surrogate atonement is promoted by clergy in order to provide themselves with income, either in the form of meat (as the Pentateuchal ordinaries stipulate) or in the form of money (as in church indulgences). The dogma of surrogate atonement is the engine of institutional religion, such as that called churchianity.

The idea of indulgences arises as an operations option derived from this dogma of surrogate atonement. Indulgences are much more than a quirk of Medieval Romanism. They are the spirit of every denominational stewardship drive. The only way to be rid of them is to remove their base, the dogma of surrogate atonement. This is the point of Jeremiah 7:22-23.

Jeremiah 7:22-23 preserves religion by preserving canon in the face of its degradation by self-centered parties. Followed through, these sentences invalidate 75% of the Christian canon. They also invalidate the organization of that canon. For, the division into Old and New Testaments is promulgating the dogma of surrogate atonement, which is disallowed.

A canonical structure for organizing the Christian canon is required. I have suggested taking the Christian canon as a series of songs and changing the name from Bible to Cantos.

As the last Church Reformation was based on Habakkuk 2:4, the present one is based on Jeremiah 7:22-23.

Some will say I am a radical for proposing this. I have to agree that I am. Radical means rooted. A radical is a conservative, and so I am. I am weeding the garden, cleaning out the weeds and pests that do not belong there. This is a conservative activity, not a revolutionary one.

The people who put the sacrificial ordinaries in the mouth of God and the pen of Moses at Horeb and who promulgate the dogma of surrogate atonement are the revolutionaries, the radicals in the sense of despoilers. They are the spoliators of the Peace of God and the Sanctity of the Church.

I rest with the Primogenitors, Bharadwaja, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, Jerome, Francis and Teresa in the Ancient Way, the Old Guard, the Tried and True, the Invariant Imperative.

Footnotes

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1- During the 18th and 19th Centuries, primarily in Germany, scholars discovered Vedic and Near Eastern religious literature. They discovered, also, that this literature often paralleled Christian religious literature, both compositionally and theologically. This discovery had many profound effects throughout Western civilization. One of them was the identification -- again, mainly by German scholars -- of literary strands in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Four main Pentateuchal literary strands were identified: one, called J, which uses YHWH for the Name of God; another, called E, which uses Elohim for the Name of God; another, called D, which comprises the bulk of the book of Deuteronomy; and another, called P, which is the work of priests, probably at Jerusalem. Return

2- Jeremiah foreshadows Luther's doctrine that unity with God is the condition for goodness, that ethics follows religion. He implies that the only thing which expiates sin is union with the Divine Principle. Return