" The gift serves to reinforce the question
or the request, and to express thankfulness; and the prayer
is its interpretation. This of course is rather incidentally
indicated than expressly said (Hos. v. 6; Isaiah i. 15; Jeremiah
xiv. 12; 1Kings viii. 27 seq.; Proverbs xv. 8); we have a specimen
of a grace for the offering of the festival gift only in Deuteronomy
xxvi. 3 seq.; a blessing is pronounced when the slaughtering takes place
(1Samuel ix. 13). The prayer of course is simply the expression
of the feeling of the occasion, with which accordingly it varies
in manifold ways. Arising out of the exigencies and directed
to the objects of daily life, the sacrifices reflect in themselves
a correspondingly rich variety. Our wedding, baptismal, and funeral
feasts on the one hand, and our banquets for all sorts of occasions
on the other, might still be adduced as the most obvious comparison,
were it not that here too the divorce between sacred and secular
destroys it. Religious worship was a natural thing in Hebrew antiquity;
it was the blossom of life, the heights and depths of which it was its
business to transfigure and glorify.
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