1. communion sacrifice. There is some uncertainty as to precisely what category of sacrifice this is, especially since the second term of the Hebrew designation, zevaḥ shelamim, could be related to “whole,” shalem, “repay,” shilem, or “well-being,” “greeting,” or “peace,” all meanings of shalom. Jacob Milgrom understands this as a “well-being sacrifice,” but Baruch Levine argues plausibly, citing Ugaritic parallels, that it means “a sacred gift of greeting.” The translation used here, “communion sacrifice,” conveys that sense compactly and follows the rendering of the term in 1 Samuel by Kyle McCarter Jr.

3. the fat covering the innards. Modern readers may be perplexed as to why a sacred text should devote such attention to details of butchering and, in particular, why the suet covering the inner organs must be stripped from them (verse 4) and burned for the deity alone, taboo for human consumption (no suet pudding allowed in the Israelite diet). This is, of course, a Priestly text, and the officiants in the cult need to know precisely how to go about their business. But the anthropologist Mary Douglas proposes that all the details of sacrificial butchering are fraught with symbolic significance. For her, Leviticus is a prime instance of subtle and elaborate analogical thinking (in contradistinction to the analytic thinking with which we are more familiar). Thus, following Nahmanides, she sees a system of correspondences between the tripartite structure of the Tabernacle—Holy of Holies, sanctuary, and outer court—and Mount Sinai as it is represented in Exodus—the summit, where only Moses may go, the perimeter of dense cloud, restricted to Aaron, his sons, and the seventy elders, and the foot of the mountain, to which the people have access. She goes on to propose that the animal sacrifice is correspondingly divided in three—the entrails, intestines, and genitals at the summit of the butchered pile, the midriff area with the covering of fat, to be burned on the altar, and the head and meat sections, which may be consumed by the priests and the people. “The suet,” she contends, “that divides the body at the diaphragm below the lower ribs is not just a covering. It corresponds in the body to the boundary of a forbidden sacred space on the mountain.”

11. fire-offering bread. The Hebrew leḥem, which has the primary meaning of “bread,” is often a synecdoche for food, as here, where the sacrifice is meat, not cereal. In the pagan Near East, sacrifice was generally thought of as food provided by man for the gods. It is not clear whether the religious elite of monotheistic Israel preserved this belief—the idiom could be no more than a linguistic fossil—though one may suspect some persistence of the idea in the popular imagination.

17. no fat and no blood shall you eat. The prohibition on consuming blood is grounded in the idea of the sacredness of life (see Genesis 9:4). The prohibition on eating fat seems strictly related to the fact that it is reserved for the deity alone in the sacrificial rite—and, if one follows Douglas, because it marks a barrier of exclusion in a system of analogies between body and sacred cosmos. It is instructive that when the seventeenth-century antinomian messianic leader Sabbatai Zebi wanted to demonstrate to his followers that he was empowered to abrogate the Torah, he chose to demonstrate this by the public consumption of suet—the violation of a seemingly arbitrary prohibition, and a violation that could scarcely have given him much pleasure.