All over the world communities of people fight over scarce resources. It has always been so. Before there was law or money, victors of these conflicts had to ensure, at the least cost to themselves, the fruits of their victory: access to the resources. The victor’s solution to the problem was to make as high as possible the price of renewing the conflict. The most effective way to accomplish this would be to wipe out the entire vanquished community, and when feasible this is in fact the solution. We see this in First Samuel, where God punishes his people for failing to wipe out the vanquished. But the problem of this approach is also revealed in this account. Like two animals fighting over the privilege of mating, the fight stops when the winner is established, not when the vanquished is killed. If my community wants to ensure the vanquished remains so, the price I exact will be something from you that you value highly but that will not be a threat to me. It will be a person among you. It could be anyone as long as you will feel the weight of that loss. Sometimes it is a wise old man or woman. Sometimes it is the king. Sometimes it is a virgin or child. There are no rules; there is a logic to it, one we can see repeated in the informal tribal structures of gangs, cartels, or high schools.
As tends
to happen, what starts as spontaneous and immediate becomes codified. So in
various places around the world different systems that we will call sacrifice
emerge. One place it is kings, another it is virgins.
A
virgin is a likely choice because she will represent the future for the vanquished.
Taking her is a severe blow. We can take her for breeding stock. Or we can take
her just to humiliate you. We can take your beautiful young woman and kill her
before your eyes. What is valuable to you is meaningless to us. Ha ha. Now stay
away from our prey animals and our foraging sites.
But a problem arises: the theft of
the king or virgin is as likely to elicit violence as it is appeasement.
Everything depends on the real threat dynamic between the communities. We can
miscalculate in killing your virgin and bring a delayed reacting, regrouping.
Now we’re fighting not for forage and prey but for revenge.
Now we have to invent or invoke
God. Now we have to formalize the system of exchange that brings peace. Maybe.
More likely we reimagine the event
of the price of the virgin or the king. The meaning develops and transmutes the
way that the meaning of words develops and transmutes. Our community is not
threatened by the neighboring community for resources. It’s threatened instead
by deluge or drought or earthquake or some other natural phenomenon. This beating
is so much like the beating of the neighboring community, we say that we are
under attack, and the attacker is the community of invisible beings. Call them
gods. We invent the idea of the sacred—which is just another word for “valuable”—to
increase the value of the sacrifice and therefore its effectiveness. We now
give one of our own to the gods to stop the attack. Sometimes it works. When it
does we thank the gods. When it does not, we blame ourselves and try again.
It’s very expensive to sacrifice
virgins or kings. We decide as we do with words—so that humor (liquid) can come
to mean funny with time—that what mattered was not the value of the virgin but
her innocence. Or what made her valuable was her innocence. We can say it
either way. What else is innocent? Animals. Animals are more innocent even than
virgins. And according to the principle of greatest value for least cost, we
choose to sacrifice an animal instead. Only the best animals because they are
closest to the virgin of course.
The system is developed and also
copied. We can institute sacrifice in our community too because we learned that
the neighboring community does it and it works great for them. We don’t
necessarily understand it as they do, but we do it because we’re desperate and
it works. We do it to show them we respect them. We do it for any reason people
do things with partial or different understandings or just in pure imitation
with no understanding at all. Understanding develops later as necessary.
Again in the Old Testament, in the
story of Lot and his daughters, Lot offers his daughters to the violent crowds to
save as much of his household as he can. It’s a sacrifice before the name.
Sacrifice doesn’t start as a
religious practice. It doesn’t even start as an economic practice. It starts as
bullying.
Hammurabi’s code is a way of
getting a handle on the system. Sacrifice may develop a religious sheen that is
intended to strip from it the threat of revenge. But violence is violence. And
it doesn’t always work. Moreover the conditions that lead to the development of
a system of sacrifice never go away. Murder, revenge, bullying, humiliation—they
all continue outside the sacrificial system. Hammurabi codifies the economic principle
of equal cost to quell the violence. You can have your revenge, but you can’t elevate.
We develop the concept of justice.
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