Korban to Qurbana: Exodos to Passover to Pasch

korban pesach pesaho pascha
>> korban, qurban >> Holy Qurbana


Passover:
excerpt
The term Pesach also refers to the lamb or kid
which was designated as the Passover sacrifice, called the Korban Pesach in Hebrew.


Korban:
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It is known as a Korban in Hebrew
because its Hebrew root K [a] R [o] V (קרב)
means to "[come] Close (or Draw Near) [to God]"
which the English words "sacrifice" or "offering" do not fully convey.


Sacrifice:
excerpt
In Judaism, a sacrifice is known as a Korban from the Hebrew root karov meaning to "[come] Close [to God]."
The centrality of sacrifices in Judaism is clear, with much of the Bible, particularly the opening chapters of the book Leviticus, detailing the exact method of bringing sacrifices. Sacrifices were either bloody (animals) or unbloody (grain and wine). Bloody sacrifices were divided into holocausts (burnt offerings, in which the whole animal was burnt), guilt offerings (in which part was burnt and part left for the priest) and peace offerings (in which similarly only part of the animal was burnt). Yet the prophets point out that sacrifices are only a part of serving God, and need to be accompanied by inner morality and goodness.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, ritual sacrifice ceased except among the Samaritans (see). Maimonides, a medieval Jewish rationalist, argued that God always held sacrifice inferior to prayer and philosophical meditation. However, God understood that the Israelites were used to the animal sacrifices that the surrounding pagan tribes used as the primary way to commune with their gods. As such, in Maimonides' view, it was only natural that Israelites would believe that sacrifice was a necessary part of the relationship between God and man. Maimonides concludes that God's decision to allow sacrifices was a concession to human psychological limitations.

In the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches,
as well as among some High Church Anglicans, the Eucharist ... is seen as a sacrifice.
It is however, not a separate or additional sacrifice to that Christ on the Cross; it is rather the exact same sacrifice, which transcends time and space: “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8)




Propitiation:
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The Hebrew (kaphar), means "to propitiate, to atone for sin."
According to Scripture, the sacrifice of the Law only covered the offeror's sin, and secured divine forgiveness for that year. The Old Testament sacrifices never removed man's sin.
Propitiation is translated from the Greek (hilasterion), meaning "that which expiates or propitiates" or "the gift which procures propitiation".
The word is also used in the New Testament for the place of propitiation,
the "mercy seat". Hebrews 9:5.
There is frequent similar use of (hilasterion) in the Septuagint, Exodus 25:18 ff. The mercy seat was sprinkled with atoning blood on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:14), representing that the righteous sentence of the Law had been executed, changing a judgment seat into a mercy seat (Hebrews 9:11-15; compare with "throne of grace" in Hebrews 4:14-16; place of communion, Exodus 25:21-22).
Another Greek word, (hilasmos), is used for Christ as our propitiation. 1 John 2:2; 4:10, and for "atonement" in the Septuagint (Leviticus 25:9). The thought in the Old Testament sacrifices and in the New Testament fulfillment, is that Christ completely satisfied the just demands of a holy God for judgment on sin, by His death on the Cross of Calvary.

Propitiation vs. Expiation
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The Greek word hilasterion is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew kapporeth which refers to the Mercy Seat of the Arc.
Hilasterion can be translated as either "propitiation" or "expiation" which then imply different functions of the Mercy Seat.
Propitiation literally means to make favorable and specifically includes the idea of dealing with God’s wrath against sinners.
Expiation literally means to make pious and implies either the removal or cleansing of sin.
The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means, but the word "expiation" has no reference to quenching God’s righteous anger. The difference is that linguistically the object of expiation is sin, not God (i.e. sin is removed, not God).
Linguistically, one propitiates a person (makes them favorable), and one expiates a problem (removes it). Christ's death was therefore both an expiation and a propitiation. By expiating (removing the problem of) sin God was made propitious (favorable) to us.



Qurban & Sacrifice:
“Christ and Nothing” by David B. Hart
excerpt
In a narrow sense, then, one might say that the chief offense of the Gospels is their defiance of the insights of tragedy--and not only because Christ does not fit the model of the well-born tragic hero. More important is the incontestable truth that, in the Gospels, the destruction of the protagonist emphatically does not restore or affirm the order of city or cosmos. Were the Gospels to end with Christ's sepulture, in good tragic style, it would exculpate all parties, including Pilate and the Sanhedrin, whose judgments would be shown to have been fated by the exigencies of the crisis and the burdens of their offices; the story would then reconcile us to the tragic necessity of all such judgments. But instead comes Easter, which rudely interrupts all the minatory and sententious moralisms of the tragic chorus, just as they are about to be uttered to full effect, and which cavalierly violates the central tenet of sound economics: rather than trading the sacrificial victim for some supernatural benefit, and so the particular for the universal, Easter restores the slain hero in his particularity again, as the only truth the Gospels have to offer. This is more than a dramatic peripety. The empty tomb overturns all the "responsible" and "necessary" verdicts of Christ's judges, and so grants them neither legitimacy nor pardon.

In a larger sense, then, the entire sacrificial logic of a culture was subverted in the Gospels. I cannot attempt here a treatment of the biblical language of sacrifice, but I think I can safely assert that Christ's death does not, in the logic of the New Testament sources, fit the pattern of sacrifice I have just described. The word "sacrifice" is almost inexhaustible in its polysemy, particularly in the Old Testament, but the only sacrificial model explicitly invoked in the New Testament is that of the Atonement offering of Israel, which certainly belongs to no cosmic cycle of prudent expenditure and indemnity.

It is, rather, a qurban, literally a "drawing nigh" into the life-giving presence of God's glory. Israel's God requires nothing; He creates, elects, and sanctifies without need--and so the Atonement offering can in no way contribute to any sort of economy.

It is instead a penitent approach to a God who gives life freely, and who not only does not profit from the holocaust of the particular, but who in fact fulfills the "sacrifice" simply by giving his gift again. This giving again is itself, in fact, a kind of "sacrificial" motif in Hebrew Scripture, achieving its most powerful early expression in the story of Isaac's aqedah, and arriving at its consummation, perhaps, in Ezekiel's vision in the valley of dry bones. After all, a people overly burdened by the dolorous superstitions of tragic wisdom could never have come to embrace the doctrine of resurrection.

I am tempted to say, then, that the cross of Christ is not simply a sacrifice, but the place where two opposed understandings of sacrifice clashed.
Christ's whole life was a reconciling qurban: an approach to the Father, a real indwelling of God's glory in the temple of Christ's body, and an atonement made for a people enslaved to death. In pouring himself out in the form of a servant, and in living his humanity as an offering up of everything to God in love, the shape of the eternal Son's life was already sacrificial in this special sense; and it was this absolute giving, as God and man, that was made complete on Golgotha. While, from a pagan perspective, the crucifixion itself could be viewed as a sacrifice in the most proper sense--destruction of the agent of social instability for the sake of peace, which is always a profitable exchange--Christ's life of charity, service, forgiveness, and righteous judgment could not; indeed, it would have to seem the very opposite of sacrifice, an aneconomic and indiscriminate inversion of rank and order. Yet, at Easter, it is the latter that God accepts and the former He rejects. . .