Entry #14: A River of Blood
Jerusalem must have been a giant feedlot and at the center of it was a temple that spewed blood and belched choking fumes. The altar burned night and day with priests shoveling meat carcasses...
The tale of Two Pigeons continues. If you’re new to this start with Entry #1: The Job.
Stuck inside — day three now. The center of the storm has stalled off the coast…hovering over the Farallon Islands with big wisps seeping inland, covering northern California and pushing up against the Sierra Nevadas. Forecasters say it’ll be stuck like this for a days…maybe a week…something about a high pressure system locking it in place like a dome, preventing it from dispersing in the upper atmosphere. This is a bad one. The worse we’ve had in a couple of years. I don’t want to think about the amount of strontium and cesium it’s dumping on our streets. The whole city will have to be power-washed and scrubbed. We’ll be wearing leaded suits outside for weeks after this.
These radiation clouds do something strange to quality of the light, making everything shiny and translucent. Yesterday the feed was filled with news of looter crews running around the city hitting targets — stores, a couple of mansions… There was a video going around of a crew ramming the garage of a Pacific Heights house…and the owners shooting at them from the balcony. Cops have been pretty much useless since the war. During storms like this there’s a zero chance they’ll respond to calls. No one even bothers to dial them. Everyone is on their own. And if you get hurt…well…good luck, the ambulance isn’t coming either — unless you’ve got enough money to cover a live-in nurse and doctor. Dark days. Society in retreat. I used to like The Purge. Now I’m living in it.
What have I been doing the last two days? Not much. Texting with people, doing pushups and squats, pacing around the apartment…and reading the Torah and commentaries on the Torah. I’ve been researching the whole sacrifice thing…trying to figure out what it could mean with Misha. Leah didn’t believe me when I told her about the retreat and the fact that people at the resort suspected he and his crew were sacrificing animals in the hills. “This is ridiculous,” she told me. “We’re paying you to figure out what happened to Misha not to believe every crazy story you hear.” I’m just going where the trail leads me, I told her, explaining that this is how investigations work — sometimes they go in directions you don’t expect…and realize things aren’t quite what you thought they were. But this sacrifice stuff is fascinating. I mean…I’ve read big parts of the Torah so I knew that ritual sacrifice was a thing that ancient Jews did. But looking at it now I am surprised by just how obsessed the text is with animal sacrifices. Sacrifice isn’t just important, it is central. That’s pretty much what the religion is all about. If you go by the Torah, you do two things as a pious Jew: 1) follow rules laid down by God and 2) constantly sacrifices animals. That’s how you communicated with your God, how you demonstrated your faith.
Studying texts, praying, doing good deeds? None of that stuff is in there as far as I can tell. What there are, though, are careful instructions about ritual slaughter: the layout of the space in which it’s done, the exact dimensions and shape of the altar, the specific outfits that priests had to wear, including a complex breastplate inlaid with some sort of jewels…stones that functioned as some sort of God-given technology that communicated with the priests, divining and judging and commanding… Then there are pages and pages of instructions of how to carry out sacrifices — what organs to use for various types of offerings, when to sprinkle blood and when to pour it, what animal to use. It’s all explained in minute detail, compete with little vignettes and examples of how-to’s and big no-no’s…what to avoid so YHWH doesn’t burn you alive. It’s all very OCD and serious and gruesome. This God is very particular about the priests who do the slaughtering, too. He strictly forbids midgets, men with crushed testicles, men whose arms are too long…
And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying: “Speak unto Aaron, saying: A man of your seed throughout the generations — if he has a defect, he cannot bring the food offering to his God. Indeed, no man that has a defect should be allowed to even approach the space: blind or lame or mutilated are forbidden, so are those whose limbs too long or those with a broken arm or leg, so are hunchbacks and dwarfs and cross-eyed men. Barred are also those with weeping sores or those with crushed testicles…
Wonder if crushed testicles were a common ailment back then. I guess there was a lot of donkey riding…which could lead to accidents.
I had mostly skipped Leviticus when reading the Torah. It seemed to me one of the most boring parts — like the genealogy lists in Genesis of who begot who. But now I see it differently. It gives a glimpse into ancient Jewish society — the values, the power structures, the economy… And the undeniable fact is that this Judaism was filled with gore: tubs of blood splattered daily, fat sizzling by the ton…It’s like an industrial slaughterhouse…and this slaughterhouse was located in the the holiest places…where their god YHWH dwelled on earth.
I don’t recall this being taught to me in my progressive San Francisco synagogue Sunday school Jewish classes. I do remember sacrifice being mentioned. But in passing…as parables or metaphors…interpreted to mean that we should sacrifice things that are dear to us — our time, our wealth — for charity, for the greater good. Now that I think about it…the section of the Torah that I had to read for my Bar Mitzvah touched on sacrifices. It was about the detailed instructions God gave Moses on how to construct the Tabernacle, the mobile temple/altar where this God expected the newly freed Israelites to worship their deity. But I don’t remember anyone ever discussing the everyday seriousness of the sacrifices, nor the monumental scale of slaughter that this God demanded. I mean…people had to sacrifice goats, cows, sheep, and pigeons for just about everything. On the big holidays several hundred thousand animals were sacrificed in the temple in Jerusalem over a single day. The blood of all these sacrificed animals would be spilled on the altar. The sheer scale of it…it was a river of blood.
If you had a cold, you had to sacrifice two pigeons to cleanse yourself of sin. If you had a skin rash, you’d have to sacrifice two pigeons. If you were a man and shot your sperm anywhere other than into a woman, you had to sacrifice two pigeons. If you had a venereal disease and liquid dripped out of your dick (the text is very specific about the dripping part), you had to sacrifice two pigeons. If you were a woman and gave birth, you had to sacrifice two pigeons. If you miscarried, you had to sacrifice two pigeons. If you finished menstruating, you had to sacrifice two pigeons. On and on it goes like this. I looked up population numbers just to get a sense of the numbers here and the volume of pigeons that had be sacrificed is staggering.
The Torah implies that when Moses liberated his fellow Jews from slavery in Egypt there were about 600,000 women of adult age in the crew that left. Let’s say that a third of them were pregnant at any given time. That would leave roughly 400,000 regularly menstruating women slaughtering two pigeons for a total of 800,000 pigeons a month. Nearly a million pigeons — just to purify women after they have their periods. That doesn’t include men and women and children who’d be always getting sick. Or women having miscarriages and giving birth. Or men ejaculating where they’re not supposed to. All those required a two pigeon sacrifice, too. So what are we talking about here? Two million pigeons a month — give or take a few hundred thousand in either direction? Where the hell are they breeding all these birds. This is feels like production on an industrial scale…And we’re only on sins/defilements that could be cleansed with the blood of a pigeon…minor issues, really. Important rites and more serious offenses required bigger animals: cows and bulls, sheep, goats. So the scale of sacrifice was immense.