Sacrifices for the Dead

Providing food for the dead or honoring them with a meal was a common practice in the ancient world. People believed that the dead could influence the world of the living; they could help the living if the latter attended to their needs, or harm them if they neglected them. Is there any evidence of this custom in the Bible?

Deuteronomy 26:12-14

Scholars cite Deuteronomy 26:12-14 in this context.¹ These verses are part of the declaration to be made when a person finished removing all the tithes from his house, concluding with a prayer that the Lord bless His nation and land. As part of this declaration, the household must state that I have not eaten of the tithe while I was mourning, or removed any of it while I was unclean, or offered any of it to the dead (v. 14). Some say the clause means that tithed produce may not be used as an offering to the dead — a common pagan practice — whether by leaving it at tombs or eating it at a feast in the dead’s honor. The practice is attested in Second Temple times: the book of Tobit (Syriac version) advises, “My son, pour out thy wine on the graves of the righteous, rather than drink it with evil people” (4:17), and similar advice appears in the book of Ahiqar and in Sirach 7:33.

Tigay notes that niches used to hold food and drink for the dead, like those found at Ugarit, have also been excavated in tombs at Samaria. He maintains that the Torah does not ban the practice itself, only the use of tithes for it, since contact with the dead is defiling.² It is possible, however, that “to the dead” refers not to leaving food for the dead but to eating the funeral meal — the view of S.D. Luzzatto, who reads the declaration as denying that the householder used the second tithe to prepare a funeral feast for mourners. From Jeremiah 16:7 we learn that bread and a cup of consolation were given to mourners after burial, and the Talmudic sages rule that “a mourner is forbidden to eat of his own bread on the first day [of mourning].”³ Other commentators read the phrase differently still: Rashi takes it to mean preparing a coffin and shrouds, while Abarbanel suggests it addresses cheaters who avoided the tithe obligation by falsely claiming they had given it to poor people who were already dead.

Thus, the weight of the evidence is that even in mourning the Israelites were instructed to remember their commitment to the underprivileged, and were forbidden to employ their tithes when in mourning or consoling others. Nothing suggests that the passage refers to regular offerings to the dead.

Baal Peor

An explicit reference to offerings to the dead is found in Psalm 106: They attached themselves to Baal Peor, ate sacrifices offered to the dead (Ps. 106:28), apparently expanding on Numbers 25:2. The phrase zivhei metim, “sacrifices to the dead,” is a biblical hapax that can be read two ways: as offerings made to idols — “dead” as opposed to the living God — or as offerings to the shades of dead ancestors.⁴ David Kimhi and others read “their gods are the dead,” equating the two, since a number of biblical passages parallel “gods” and “the dead.”⁵

According to the primary account in Numbers 25:1-5, the Moabite women invited the Israelite men to “the sacrifices for their gods,” which Psalm 106 renders as “sacrifices to the dead.” Milgrom rejects the idea that the festival at Baal Peor included sexual ritual, understanding the Israelites as having simply transferred their allegiance from the Lord to Baal; Levine likewise reads the Numbers account as concerned with paganism and forbidden intermarriage. On the alternative reading, that the ritual of Baal Peor was a funerary cult, “the dead” of Psalm 106:28 would mean the spirits of the dead who were appeased by sacrifice — though the explicit reference to foreign gods in Numbers weighs against this, and the tradition reflected in the Psalm may simply date to a later period.

Psalms 16:3-4

There may be an allusion to libations of blood to the dead in Psalm 16:3-4: To the holy and mighty ones that are in the earth… their libations of blood I will not pour out. Spronk reads “holy ones” (qedosim) as underworld spirits, supported by the fact that eretz (“earth”), like its Akkadian cognate, can denote the netherworld, parallel to Sheol.⁶ Schmidt rejects this, insisting qedosim always refers to angels or living saints — but qedosim is also the name given to Canaanite deities in the Yehawmilk Inscription from Byblos, and its parallel term addirim (“mighty ones”) elsewhere describes waters associated with the underworld. The poet rejects the gods of Canaan, or the cult of the dead, and wants no part of their libations of blood — a standard libation was of wine, but here it is blood, the custom of idolaters. Support for the cult-of-the-dead reading comes from the continuation of v. 4, “their names will not pass my lips”: the attendants of ancestral shades were obligated to invoke their names, since calling the name of the dead was believed to bring up their presence.

Isaiah 65:4

“Inquiring of the dead” appears among the magical practices condemned by the Bible (Deut. 18:11), and Isaiah refers to the practice when he condemns those who sit inside tombs and pass the night in secret places (Isa. 65:4). Sitting inside a tomb was apparently part of a rite to raise the spirits of the dead. According to Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah, the reference is to incubation — sleeping in a tomb or temple to obtain an oracular dream — a phenomenon also attested in Genesis 46:1-4 and I Kings 3:4. The second half of the verse, describing those who eat the flesh of swine, may refer to a form of totemism in which consuming a totem animal linked the eater with the ancestors it symbolized; the pig was sacred to a number of ancient peoples, including the Egyptians and the Greeks of Argos and Cyprus.⁷ Isaiah thus condemns people who slept in graves believing the spirit of the dead would appear to them in a dream, eating forbidden food as part of a rite to receive a message about the future.

Conclusion

The practice of offering food and libation to the dead prevailed in the wider ancient world and, per Psalm 106:28, penetrated Israelite religion at least at Baal Peor. Psalm 16:3-4 may allude to libations of blood to the dead, and Isaiah 65:4 describes incubation rites involving forbidden food eaten in tombs. Deuteronomy 26:14, however, does not display a reference to offering food and libation to the dead; rather, the Israelites were instructed to remember their commitment to the underprivileged. Although the practice of offering food and libation to the dead is attested, the Bible is clearly antagonistic to providing the dead with food and drink. This practice was not part of Israelite culture, and when it did penetrate, it was rebuffed.