Two Old Testament Sacrifices? Part 1

Girard's anthropology of the cross is just a piece to the atonement/sacrifice puzzle. This has been a journey for me ever since I became a Christian ten years ago and could not (in spite of some very good explanations) swallow the traditional view of crucifixion/atonement/sacrifice. It went against everything that God put into my heart during a time of crisis when I felt him "tap me on the shoulder" and whisper in my ear, "See I really am here" Since then I have used that "inner knowing" to guide me. Keith and I have had some lively discussions about things I have stumbled upon....and he has...in so many words....expressed that I am "blown about by every weird doctrine that comes along". But it has been a journey of precept upon precept for me. Stumbling on things in the weirdest of ways and places. Many times, thanks to google. It was John Gavazonni's writing "The Great Misrepresentation" where I first read an alternate view of substitutionary atonement and the following words that stuck with me:

In the old covenant, we begin to see the meaning of the blood when Jehovah says to the Israelites, "I have given you the blood upon the altar" (Lev. 17:11). We need the blood, not God! The Lord spoke these words to me as He unfolded the meaning of reconciliation. he said, "I am not the god who demands blood. I am the God who gives blood" Oh, precious words!

Since then, I have come upon many things that have explained this further....sometimes veering off on a rabbit trail, but sometimes when we ponder things for a while, the realization of what we do not believe, solidifies what we do believe. Thus far, it has been a fairly straight course....precept upon precept. Now one might argue that if the original precept is wrong, we can go really far off course as we journey. I can only go with what annie calls the "gut check"....although I might be more inclined to call it the "heart check" and each time I find something that establishes what I know in my heart...another precept to add to the stack, I am thrilled. I cannot believe that God wants/needs bloody sacrifice...but rather that he desires mercy. The directives he lays down in the OT for animal blood sacrifice are a concession to the hardness of man....his violent, selfish, coveting ways which so often lead to violence and bloodletting and his need for a way to appease the angry deity he worships. A sacrifice of another (be it an animal sacrifice, a human sacrifice....anyone or thing but a self sacrifice) But there have been things I had no answer to. Today I stumbled upon what I think are perfectly legitimate "scriptural" ways to explain two situations in the OT that dealt with sacrifice. One is the clothing of Adam and Eve in the Garden with "skin". The other is God's displeasure with Cain's sacrifice and his acceptance of the sacrifice of Abel......which on the surface appears to be a blood offering of the firstlings of Abel's flock.

I came upon a vegetarian site with a series on sacrifice and its origins.....quite a bit to check out. The one that provided these answers for me was called "When Did Animal Sacrifices Begin?" by AJ Fecko. It presents several possibilities for the skin God provided for Adam and Eve and insights into the offering Abel presented to God. Nowhere in the text (in either of these examples) does it say an animal was killed. It does not say it was not....but neither does it clearly say that an animal was sacrificed. We read it with the assumptions that we already have because of the traditions we have been taught. Some of the possibilities?

The skin was created from the ground or the bark of a tree (would that have been harder for the Lord to do than to slaughter an animal? Adam is from the dust, the clay man. Is this really that much of a stretch?)

Their flesh changed from mortal to immortal which is suggested by the verse in Job ("Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, And knit me together with bones and sinews." Job 10:11

It was the skin of the serpent.
They expand on that line of thinking with the following snippets

Snakes shed their skin repeatedly through life, and the serpent is the only species named in the account of Adam's fall. Also they would in essence be wearing their guilt. Since they obeyed the serpent, they were given his skin to wear.

There are also the renderings of the Targums. The Targums are Aramaic interpretive renderings of the Hebrew Scriptures. Such versions were needed when Hebrew ceased to be the daily language of the Jewish people. In Synagogue services the reading of the Scriptures was followed by a translation into the Aramaic vernacular of the populace. Targums on this are:
PS. Jonathan: And the Lord God made garments of glory for Adam and for his wife from the skin which the serpent had cast off (to be worn) on the skin of their flesh, instead of their (garments of) fig leaves of which they had been stripped, and he clothed them.

There are a couple other views expressed in this short article including that it was from natural causes that the animal died (since death was the result of the fall) or that it was merely clothing God made to cover their already existing skin when they realized they were naked. Of course the Genesis story is all allegory and full of symbolism unless you take a literal interpretation of it...which nobody here does I don't think. So there are other possibilities presented that have nothing to do with the sacrifice of an animal to cover them. Link to the article follows

http://www.all-creatures.org/discuss/whendid.html