This chapter advances a thesis about how to make progress on “the problem of sacrifice.” What is the problem of sacrifice? Emerging from a long history of learned discussion, the problem of sacrifice centers on the notion that sacrifice in its many refractions carries some deep and perhaps universal power. The problem for the researcher comes in attempting to evaluate and to explain this notion. Paradigmatically, the question would take the following form: How does the seemingly straightforward and even mundane act of killing an animal in a religious context exhibit this power? Even though grain and plant offerings were much more common than animal offerings, and one did not kill the cakes or grain, the question has typically focused on animals, and thus often death. Thinkers have proposed many explanations for its power. Is it a deep meaning, a symbol, a psychological transformation, a power of social cohesion and social transformation or one of many other proposals?

Any critical interrogation of this “problem” must involve noticing that that the idea seems to have arisen in the ancient Mediterranean. This discussion will find its examples there, especially with the abundant Greek examples. Central facts must include that sacrifice was the focus of the Judean temple and that Christians came eventually to describe Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, and in the Medieval West also the Mass. But sacrificial practices were ubiquitous across the Mediterranean and West Asia. And there was mutual recognition. Judeans, for instance, readily identified what Romans, Syrians, Lydians, Romans and Libyans did with plants and animals in relation to gods as in the same category as what they did in their Judean temple. Romans and the others also recognized the Jews as sacrificers.

When the study of religion as part of the study of other cultures developed, missionaries and anthropologists found that numerous cultures around the globe had sacrificial practices, offerings to gods and ancestors. Some of these Europeans saw the ubiquity of the practices as the proof of an original true monotheistic religion recorded in the Bible that had degenerated into polytheism. Others interpreted the ubiquity as the sign that a kernel of an innate religiosity implanted by God in human nature had survived. How did the sacrificial practices relate to the kernel of truth?