Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism

Jonathan Klawans's Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism, published by Oxford University Press in 2006, argues that much modern scholarship on ancient Jewish sacrifice and purity has unconsciously inherited a Christian supersessionist framework, reading Temple practice as spiritually inferior to what replaced it rather than examining it on its own symbolic terms. Klawans is a specialist in ancient Judaism whose earlier work on purity and impurity in ancient Israel is itself a standard reference. Its strength is that reflexive critique, turning scholarly attention to the assumptions historians of religion bring to sacrifice rather than only to the ancient sources themselves, a genuinely field shaping argument. Its limit is that a book built around critiquing other scholarship necessarily engages a specific, named body of earlier work, so a claim resting on the primary ancient evidence for Temple sacrifice itself needs a source presenting that evidence directly, with this book cited for how that evidence has been interpreted.