According to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, Abigail was 17 that fateful spring. She'd met John Proctor while living as a servant under his roof, and at first discharged her duties with hardly a thought for the man. But as she helped with the chores and dined with his family, feelings of attraction began to grow in her heart. She dared to exchange a few flirtatious glances with her master — and was nervously delighted when they were returned.

The hard work of rural life and parenting; the toll that years of unintentional neglect take on a marriage — these pressures had transformed John's wife Elizabeth into little more than a dutiful housemate. John, for his part, had lost interest in his cold, uncommunicative spouse. So when Abigail favored him with meaningful glances, John was ready for tender companionship.

He and Abby began to exchange whispered words, then met after dark and bared their hearts. Finally, one midnight while the family slept, as they lay on the straw beside the barn's cattle stalls, temptation overcame them ... and John knew Abigail.

Elizabeth couldn't help but become suspicious. She watched an affectionate warmth she hadn't known for years pass between her serving girl and husband. As the distance between the couple steadily widened, Elizabeth decided to find a new servant — one with less obvious attractions.

John was overcome with guilt as the affair ended, and he confessed his sin to his wife. He resolved to be faithful to his spouse. He vowed to work through the coldness and distrust, and when he saw Abby around town, he gave her nothing but a "good morning." Naturally, Elizabeth found it impossible — at first — to love again. Yet she didn't seek a divorce, and it seemed likely that their marriage would make a slow recovery.

Until Abigail resolved not to let that happen.

For months, she'd harbored dark dreams that somehow, Elizabeth would be removed from the equation so John could be hers alone. She dreamed of running away to the city of Boston to begin a new life with her lover. John's renewed commitment to his marriage vows had not figured into her plans at all. So clearly, something had to be done — and Abigail's solution was black magic.

In 1692, Abby and John lived in a culture steeped in the supernatural — mostly faith in God, but also fearful superstitions. It was an open secret that another servant in the town, Tituba, practiced voodoo learned in her native Barbados. So Abby sought out this woman known for her depraved knowledge.

One night in the forest outside of town, Abigail gathered Tituba and her own friends for a dark ritual. Tituba sacrificed an animal before the unclean gods; kindled fire and prepared her voodoo spells. Abby and her friends danced naked around the blaze in pagan ecstasy as Tituba murmured incantations. Then finally, she handed Abigail a cup filled with the blood of the slaughtered beast. Abby drank it down while praying to Darkness that Elizabeth Proctor would die.

In the end, the ritual did not work. Elizabeth lived. John, for his part, remained faithful to her.¹

But blood had been spilled. Abigail violated one of the most fundamental laws of Scripture and conscience: She drank an animal's precious red life. And she did it in a quest to spill something even more valuable; something profoundly sacred: human blood.

Blood

In the 17th century, shed blood was not unique to voodoo rituals — in fact, its stench had permeated all of life for millennia. Bloodletting was a common cure-all for various diseases. To treat a sick patient, a physician would simply withdraw the fluid of life from her veins — sometimes until the patient fainted; sometimes with more dire results.²

Wars and executions were almost routine. European battlefields were filled with bloody conflicts, and even without the hazards of war, there was always the executioner to contend with. Blasphemy, theft, slave-stealing and witchcraft were all capital crimes at one time.³ A thin red line ran through the brief, difficult lives of men.

Animal blood was also commonplace: Meat did not arrive on shrink-wrapped foam trays. A knife-wielding chef prepared dinner by spilling a beast's life on the ground, for in the supreme irony of fallen existence, it was only through a bloody death that one animal could give life to another. The trip to the slaughterhouse always preceded sustenance.

Blood was everywhere, from Biblical times until well into the 20th century. But in our modern, peaceful nation full of sanitized surgery and commercial slaughterhouses, we pale at the sight of blood, forgetting its spilling is still an everyday occurrence. It's become easy to ignore the reality that the chicken breasts in my freezer were recently covered in feathers.

Yet a few blocks from my house on the other side of the railroad tracks, rivers of warm gooey redness still pour from carcasses daily at a "meat processing plant." Pigs and poultry are brought in and rendered unconscious with an electric current or a sharp blow to the head. Then their primary blood vessels are cut as they bleed to death before their flesh is sliced into pieces. Their life spills onto the ground so I can have my pork chops.

In fact, almost any animal being used for food is slaughtered through a loss of blood. It keeps good meat from being damaged, and helps prevent bacteria from growing.⁴ But long before bacterial growth was understood, God forbade the ancient Israelites to eat flesh with blood left inside for another reason. "The life of every creature is in its blood," he pronounced.⁵

In other words, blood was to be treated as the stuff life was made of: the precious commodity that brought consciousness to living creatures. Animal or human, blood was sacred.

Sacrifice

Blood could be sprinkled on the altar as part of an offering to the Almighty. It could be drained out on the ground before carving up the meat. But no matter what, it could not be eaten. It was simply too valuable — and too important for another purpose. "I have given [blood] to you to make atonement for yourselves," God proclaimed.

Jewish priests in the time of the Temple were not theologians ensconced in ivory towers. They daily unleashed rivers of blood in the temple, wielding a knife for the endless slaying of animals that atoned for human guilt before the Almighty.⁶

When Aaron was consecrated as the first Levitical priest, he was first washed and anointed with oil. Then he put his hands on a bull's head as its throat was cut, symbolically transferring transgressions to the animal who died for his sins.⁷ Only spilled life could overcome death; only a bloodstain could remove sin stains.

Why blood? Because sin, by its very nature, is death.

Name any transgression, and you will find that it slowly eradicates the relationships between you and others — or you and the Almighty. Disobedience is a radical statement of pride; an assertion of your independence and superiority over those you selfishly hurt and over the God you grieve. The arrogant contempt that slowly kills your friendships; the Gospel of Me that draws you always further from God ... these slow breakdowns of the soul irresistibly pull you towards the grave. Sin is nothing but the slow letting of blood until only a carcass of life and relationships are left behind.

And so for the remission of sins, there is no solution besides the shedding of blood — a physical death to represent all of the relationships you quietly put to the sword yesterday, and the day before, and every hour of your life.

Not because God is cruel — simply because that is sin's natural consequence.

Bloodthirsty

Still, our modern minds are repulsed by the law of sacrifice. We find it distasteful, even morally repugnant, to contemplate a God who demands death for atonement. "Why did so many animals die?" we ask. "Why was a loving Creator thirsty for blood?"

We've become too accustomed to our sanitized lives, where every hint of blood and death is hidden. So we forget that there is a difference between private, vengeful bloodlust, and justice that metes out punishment to fit the crime. Think about the difference between a vigilante who hangs a killer from the nearest tree, and a judge who orders a sentence of death in court. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, they are still two distinct motivations in view here. One is a hotheaded lust for death; a private vendetta. The other is, we hope, a sincere desire to not allow the guilty to escape punishment. The murderer's wickedness has offended the community, the victims, the law — and God Himself. That's why his sin brings death.

Of course, this is retributive justice in view — a justice that looks to satisfy the debt owed for a sin.⁸ "Shouldn't God be above that kind of 'pettiness'?" we ask. "Shouldn't He, of all people, know that 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'? Shouldn't He be more interested in restorative justice, where the goal is repentance and reconciliation?"

God is interested in restorative justice: His heart aches for it. But what happens when the terrorist continues to believe to the end that his acts of violence were motivated by a worthy cause, and refuses to repent of his actions? What about the Hitlers of the world, great and small, who commit unspeakable crimes, and their only regret in the end is that they got caught? Should they escape with impunity — or is there an incontrovertible moral law that must be satisfied? Should they finally realize the depths of their sin, however forcibly ... if they won't reckon with it for themselves?⁹

Perhaps there is some measure of retributive justice — in the righteous sense of giving power to the moral law — hardwired into our DNA. Perhaps that is because it is in God's "DNA" as well.

Yet we like to come up with objections to this idea of atonement — or at least, I do. I think blood sacrifice, if it exists at all, should only be necessary for murder, or maybe rape and treason — the big sins I don't commit. Surely the unrepentant terrorists and the Hitlers of the world aren't me.

But is it possible that when I slowly demolish my relationships with my addiction to sin, I'm killing the people around me slowly and far more painfully than if I stuck a knife between their ribs? When I hurt my wife with lust and my co-workers with lies and my friends with gossip, am I any better than the cold-blooded killer who wastes away in prison? Is it possible that I, the control freak who wants to play God over my little fiefdom and usurp the place of the Almighty in my life, is causing more grief to Jehovah than the killer who did his deed in a fit of rage, as he unthinkingly plunged a knife?

After all, my relationship-killing is premeditated — intentional — repeated — designed to inflict pain ... in short, the epitome of wickedness. Most of us would agree that a torturer is even worse than a murderer. We simply don't want to admit that the torturer is us.

Perhaps we should accept the justice of Scripture, and simply be grateful that God allows substitutions for its bloody demands. Otherwise, we would all be dead already.

Continue to part 2.

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1. This narrative is drawn from Arthur Miller's brilliant play The Crucible (New York: Penguin Books, 1952). His work is not a history lesson: Miller took significant liberties with the facts. However, it is true that some voodoo practitioners sacrificed animals and drank blood in their rituals.
2. "Bloodletting." Found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting on 22 Aug. 2009.
3. The list of capital crimes is drawn from Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty, by Mark Costanzo (New York: Macmillan, 1997): 6-8.
4. Some facts on the exsanguination of slaughtered animals are drawn from "Techniques and Hygiene Practices in Slaughtering and Meat Handling." Found at http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/T0279E/T0279E04.htm on 6 Aug. 2009.
5. The laws that forebade the Israelites from eating blood are found in Leviticus 17:10-14. All scripture quotations in this article are taken from, or adapted from, the NIV.
6. Some details on sacrifices under the Mosaic Law are drawn from "Qorbanot" and "Kashrut" in The Jewish Virtual Library. Accessed 6 Aug. 2009.
7. See Exodus 29.
8. Information on these two forms of justice was taken from "Retributive and Restorative Justice." Found at http://www.apsu.edu/oconnort/3300/3300lect03b.htm on 10 Aug. 2009.
9. C. S. Lewis develops this idea in much more depth in his book The Problem of Pain, particularly in chapter 8 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 — first published 1940).