By claiming the paschal lamb was slaughtered as the destruction of a pagan idol, post-first century Jewish Sages can situate the slaughter of Jesus of Nazareth with the slaughter of the paschal lamb by using the Christian's own scripture's which label Jesus the paschal lamb of God. In effect, the Jewish Sages use the Gospel writers claim that Jesus is the lamb of God (John 1:29), the true paschal lamb (1 Cor. 5:7), against them, by claiming the original paschal lamb was slaughtered for the same or similar reason as Jesus of Nazareth, vis-à-vis idolatry and blasphemy.
The idea that the paschal lamb represents a pagan deity such that slaughtering it is a service to God appears to go squarely against the very basics of what a Jewish sacrifice always represents elsewhere throughout the Tanakh. In the argument of the Shelah, the slaughtering of the passover lamb finds its efficacious nature in the destruction of the idea of a secondary god lording his authority over God or God's people. The Shelah implies that it pains the Egyptians knowing Israel is slaughtering their god (the lamb) in order to symbolize his inability to restrain them from leaving Egypt. The symbolism is of violence and forceful retribution rather than the typical atonement. In the general concept found elsewhere throughout the Tanakh the sacrifice atones for the sin or failure of the sacrificer:
One of the reasons for animal sacrifice which is discussed by Nachmanides on Leviticus 1,9 is as follows: "It would have been more appropriate if the fools who thought that the animal sacrifice legislation was only an accommodation to the people who were in the habit of offering sacrifices to pagan deities would have paid attention to the reason that Maimonides gave for this. He described the people among whom the Jews lived as deifying the animals in question. The Jewish people had to learn by slaughtering precisely those animals that they were not deities. . . G–d commanded that when man has sinned and offers an animal sacrifice as a sin-offering, he must place his hands (weight) on the animal as a symbol of the sinful act he has committed. He must recite a confession as a symbol of the words that preceded the sinful act for which he is attempting to atone. . . He has to sprinkle the blood of the animal on the altar, the blood representing his life-form, נפש. By performing all these actions, the sinner will concentrate on the enormity of the error he committed against his G–d with both his body and his soul, and he will realize that by rights it is his own life that should have expiated for his sin, not that of an innocent animal. It is only by the kindness extended to him by G–d that he is able to substitute the life of the animal for his own. . . When the animal is slaughtered this is equivalent to the owner killing himself."
Shney Luchot HaBerit, Torah Shebikhtav, Sefer Vayikra, Torah Ohr, Vayikra 24.
Not only does none of this jibe with the seemingly contrived idea that the paschal lamb is sacrificed as a pagan deity ---in a retributive rather than an atoning manner --- but by noting that for the pagans the animal is an avatar of a god, or deity, the Shelah makes one think of a statement by Professor Nahum Sarna to the effect that only by means of the generalized or classical concepts of the pre-existing pagan symbols can anyone make sense of the tranformation of those symbols as they take place in Judaism:
We do not mean to suggest, however, that the biblical b'rit is a slavish imitation of contemporary Near Eastern norms. On the contrary, it displays an originality and independence that transforms it into a wholly new creation, the innovative nature of which can only be adequately appreciated against the background of the classical model.
Professor Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus.
In the classical model, the animal is a symbolic surrogate for a deity. The Jewish sacrifice of that classical model isn't a slavish imitation of the pagan idea. Nevertheless, to appreciate the originality of the Jewish model requires the realization that the Jewish model, coming as it does out of the preexisting thought processes, is a transformation of a preexisting idea and not the wholesale slaughter or retribution against the pagan idea. With that said, the Jewish concepts must be transforming the pagan idea of the animal sacrifice as an avatar of pure unallowed deity, i.e., the "symbol" of their god. Consequently, the Jewish transformation acknowledges the idea that the animal represents deity, while allowing that for Jews, the only animal that's truly created in the image of (as an avatar for) God, is man himself. Man must himself be the sacrifice. In this way the first century Jews who saw a man, created in God's image, as the truth that the paschal lamb merely represented, is such a powerful rendition of Professor Sarna's claim that that powerful idea seems as though it is itself the impetus for the serious crime of rewriting the meaning of the paschal lamb in a manner to cover up what the first century Jews wroght when they appreciated that the only fitting animal sacrifice would needs be of a blameless man not a beast.
In effect, for the first century Jews, an innocent man, born without blemish, conceived apart from the "
evil smelling drop of semen" (R. Horowitz), is sacrificed as the surrogate for the sacrificer. And since there's only one such person claimed to have been born apart from the
evil smelling drop of semen, the sacrifice of that person must do, once and for all, for all sacrificers, for all sins, what multiferous lower mammals symbolized in the pagan rituals as well and the Jewish rituals that pre-seeded the birth of the actuality the paschal lamb ritualized.
For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and ascarlet wool, and chyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and all the people, 20 Saying, This is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you. 21 Moreover he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle, and all the vessels of the ministry. 22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. 23 It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us: 25 Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others; 26 For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: 28 So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.
Hebrews 9:19–28.
John
