This post is Claude.ai’s summary on 9/22/2026 of an essay by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine published and downloaded from TheTorah.com at the links below. The essay presents a core Jewish-Christian divide that is a puzzle: many Jews find the Christian belief in atonement through Jesus’s blood strange, while many Christians assume Jews lack any path to atonement now that Temple sacrifice has ended. They also point out that the grain offering is equivalent to blood for the forgiveness of sin.
Prompt: Summarize the post at this link maintaining the headings and flow of the article. The article is at https://www.thetorah.com/article/is-atonement-possible-without-blood-a-jewish-christian-divide.
Is Atonement Possible Without Blood? A Jewish-Christian Divide
By Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine (TheTorah.com, 2021)
The article opens by naming the puzzle: many Jews find the Christian belief in atonement through Jesus’s blood strange, while many Christians assume Jews lack any path to atonement now that Temple sacrifice has ended. Leviticus does tie atonement to blood rites, but Judaism today centers repentance, prayer, and fasting, while Christianity — which also values those practices — centers Jesus’s crucifixion. The essay traces how two communities reading the same Bible arrived at such different answers.
Blood in the Bible
Blood is portrayed as powerful and dynamic in the Hebrew Bible — it defiles and purifies, and represents life itself. Genesis 9:4 forbids eating flesh with its blood, and Leviticus 17:11 explains that “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Blood on the doorposts protects Israel during the Exodus plague, and Moses uses sacrificial blood to seal the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 24:8).
Blood Expiation in Israelite Sacrifices
Sacrificial blood is central to biblical ritual, especially in the chatat (“sin offering”) and asham (“guilt offering”), which are explicitly linked to forgiveness and expiation (Lev 4:35, 5:9). The authors highlight Jacob Milgrom’s influential 1976 argument that the chatat doesn’t cleanse the sinner but purges impurities that sin generates in the sanctuary itself — his famous “ritual detergent” model, based on reading k-p-r as “purge” rather than “atone.” This is especially visible in the Yom Kippur texts (Leviticus 16), where repeated blood rites purge the sanctuary of Israel’s uncleanness — leading Milgrom to render “Yom Kippur” as “Day of Purgation” rather than “Day of Atonement.”
The Power of Blood in the New Testament
Early Christ-believers adapted these biblical blood images, starting with Jesus himself. At the Last Supper he calls the wine “my blood of the covenant… poured out… for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28), and John’s Gospel intensifies this into a command to “drink his blood” (John 6:53–56). Because Jesus died at Passover, his followers connected his death to the Passover lamb, even though that offering wasn’t originally a sin offering. Paul repeatedly frames the crucifixion in sacrificial and covenantal terms (1 Cor 10:16, 11:25; Rom 3:25, 5:9), as does Ephesians (2:13) and Colossians (1:20). Hebrews goes furthest, insisting “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22) and presenting Jesus’s blood as uniquely and permanently effective (9:13–14). 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation continue this sacrificial imagery. The authors note that neither Testament explains why blood atones or seals covenants — in the ancient world, sacrifice’s power was simply assumed by Jews and pagans alike.
Atonement in Judaism Without Sacrifices
After the Temple’s destruction made chatat and asham offerings impossible, the rabbis needed a new framework — and found precedent within the Torah itself. Leviticus 5:11–13 already permits a bloodless grain offering to substitute for animal sacrifice in cases of poverty, showing that even Priestly law didn’t consider blood strictly indispensable.
Deuteronomy and Turning to God — Unlike the Priestly texts, Deuteronomy never mentions atonement sacrifices, instead stressing “turning” (shuv) to God, even from exile (Deut 4:29–30, 30:2–3).
Solomon’s Prayer — 1 Kings 8 (an exilic, Deuteronomic text) has Solomon pray that when Israel turns back to God, God will forgive — with no sacrifice required (1 Kgs 8:46–50).
Rabbis, Repentance, and Prayer
Building on Deuteronomy, the rabbis treated repentance (teshuvah, now understood as internal contrition) as fully sufficient without blood sacrifice. Prayer, repentance, and charity are said to replace the Temple offerings — echoed liturgically in the Unetaneh Tokef prayer (“repentance, prayer, and charity cancel the harsh decree”). Other rabbinic traditions credit fasting, Torah study, or “the death of the righteous” with atoning power. Crucially, the authors stress that no rabbinic text ever claims atonement became impossible after the Temple fell.
Understanding the Roads Not Taken
The essay closes by framing the divergence: rabbinic Judaism built its theology mainly on Deuteronomy, treating sacrifice as one legitimate path to forgiveness but not the only one. Christianity built on the Priestly corpus, but relocated the ongoing need for blood sacrifice onto Jesus’s crucifixion, understood as a perpetual chatat. The authors suggest that mutual understanding — Jews grasping how blood-atonement imagery was applied to Jesus, and Christians grasping the Deuteronomic and rabbinic traditions of repentance without sacrifice — would help each side see why the other’s theology makes internal sense.
