Olah (The Burnt Offering)

Every other class of offering ends with somebody eating something. The burnt offering does not, and that is the whole of its definition. The animal is flayed, jointed, washed and placed on the altar, and the fire takes all of it. The offerer receives nothing, and the priest receives only the hide, which Leviticus 7 assigns to whichever priest performed the rite. In a society where meat was expensive and rarely eaten outside a sacrificial context, a class of offering that fed nobody was a substantial expense with no return, and that is precisely what it was for.

The victim is a male without blemish from the herd or the flock. Where an offerer could not afford one, Leviticus 1 provides for a turtledove or a young pigeon, handled by a shorter procedure at the side of the altar: the priest pinches the head, drains the blood on the wall, removes the crop with its contents and splits the bird without severing it. The instruction is given with the same formula of acceptance as the bull, which is the text making a point about who the system is for.

The olah is also the backbone of the public calendar. Two lambs a day, one in the morning and one towards evening, are burnt offerings; so are the additional offerings of the sabbath, the new moon and each of the festivals, whose numbers Numbers 28 and 29 set out beast by beast. On the great days the additional burnt offerings ran into the dozens. Privately it was brought as a freewill gift, in discharge of a vow, or at the close of a purification, and it opens the sequence when several classes are brought together on one occasion.

The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible needed a word for an offering that was burned in its entirety, and they built one: holokautoma and its relatives, from holos, whole, and kaustos, burned. The Latin translators took it over as holocaustum. In English it arrives by way of French as holocaust, and for several centuries it meant what it says, a sacrifice consumed by fire, and nothing else. It was still being used that way in the seventeenth century of the offerings of Leviticus.

The extension of the word to mass slaughter by fire is much later, and its application to the murder of European Jews became fixed only after the Second World War. That the term now names the destruction of a people and once named an offering brought by that people is an accident of translation history rather than a connection anybody intended, and it is the reason the Hebrew word Shoah is often preferred. The atlas records the etymology because the descent is real and traceable, not because the two senses illuminate one another.

The Hebrew is more literal and less dramatic. Olah is a participle of the verb to go up. The ascent it names may be the animal's, taken up onto the raised altar, or the smoke's, and the sources do not settle which. The other name that appears in the text, kalil, means simply entire. Neither carries the sense of destruction that the Greek word acquired, which is worth holding onto when reading the class: what the tradition emphasises about the olah is that all of it is given, not that all of it is destroyed.