Scholarly Reflections
Daly, Robert J. "Part 1: Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Chapter One: The Texts." Christian Sacrifice: The Judaeo-Christian Background Before Origen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1978, 11-32.
Daly begins his survey of the concept of sacrifice by reviewing the text information from the Old Testament which he considers essential to building his case. He freely admits that much of the work in this chapter is closely related to Rolf Rendtorff's 1967 book, Studien zur Geschichte des Opfers im Alten Testament (WMANT Neukirchen-Vluyn). "This chapter is little more than a summary of Rendtorff's work, taken up and rearranged a bit in order to suit our own purposes" (Daly 1978, 11-12).
Daly asserts a typical higher critical point of view regarding Old Testament redaction. Since he assumes a priestly layer of redaction as some of the last revisions, he assumes the concept of sacrifice to be heavily influenced by a priestly perspective (Daly 1978, 12). Having said this, Daly proceeds to describe the rich vocabulary used for sacrifice in the Old Testament. His description is fairly technical, requiring knowledge of both Hebrew and Greek. Daly then provides an annotated catalog of the sacrificial texts which he considers priestly in nature (Daly 1978, 14ff), describing the content in brief. He concludes that the various sacrifices bear different levels of frequency and importance (Daly 1978, 20).
Outside the texts Daly would identify as priestly, he finds texts on sacrifice to be relatively scattered and to speak of sacrifices rather incidentally. He does proceed to catalog these texts as well (Daly 1978, 21ff). In his summary, Daly observes considerable difference in the usage of various words denoting sacrifice (Daly 1978, 32). The distinctions among the various terms and the nuances of their usage pose an ongoing challenge to scholars.