Appendix E

The Sacrificial System, Death, and Substitution — Responding to Rillera on Old Testament Sacrifice

Introduction

Andrew Remington Rillera's Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus's Death is an ambitious book that sets out to dismantle the exegetical foundations of penal substitutionary atonement by arguing that the Old Testament sacrificial system has nothing to do with substitutionary death, punishment, or penalty.¹ In his opening pages, Rillera makes bold claims: that "there is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah," that the notion of substitutionary sacrifice "simply needs to be abandoned," and that the entire framework of penal substitutionary atonement rests on a series of misunderstandings about how Old Testament sacrifice actually worked.² Douglas Campbell's foreword goes even further, declaring that "PSA is dead, and Andrew Rillera just killed it."³

These are extraordinary claims. And they deserve a careful, honest response.

I want to say up front that Rillera's book is not without genuine merit. He raises important correctives to popular-level misunderstandings of sacrifice, and his engagement with Jacob Milgrom's landmark work on Leviticus is often careful and illuminating. I have learned from this book, and I think other readers — even those who, like me, ultimately disagree with its central conclusions — will learn from it too. A good scholar sharpens our thinking even when we believe he has gone wrong, and Rillera has sharpened mine.

It is also worth acknowledging the pastoral motivation behind Rillera's project. He writes as someone who has seen, in his own words, "first- and secondhand how much destruction this theology has caused." He is concerned about how certain versions of penal substitutionary atonement have been used to justify punitive politics, authoritarian family structures, and a vision of God as fundamentally retributive and violent. These are legitimate pastoral concerns that deserve serious engagement, and I address them more fully in Section 6 below and in Chapters 20 and 35 of the main book. We do not serve the gospel well when we dismiss the human cost of theological distortion.

But having acknowledged what Rillera gets right — and the genuine concerns that motivate his work — I believe his central thesis overstates the evidence, misreads key texts, and ultimately fails to account for the full range of sacrificial theology as it develops across the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and into the New Testament. In this appendix, I will examine Rillera's arguments from chapters 1 through 4 of Lamb of the Free and show that, while his correctives are sometimes helpful, his categorical denials are unsustainable.

A word about methodology before we begin. One of the recurring features of Rillera's argument is what I would call the "nothing but" fallacy — the tendency to take a valid observation about one aspect of the sacrificial system and extend it into a universal denial. The hand-laying gesture communicates ownership; therefore it communicates nothing but ownership. The death of the animal is ritually reconceptualized; therefore the death has no theological significance. Kipper purges the sanctuary; therefore kipper does nothing to or for the offerer. At each step, a genuine insight is pressed into a categorical denial that the evidence does not support. I will try to show, section by section, where the overextension occurs.

As argued extensively in Chapters 4 through 6 of this book, and as summarized in Chapter 19's full case for penal substitutionary atonement, the sacrificial system contains genuine substitutionary elements — hand-laying and identification, life-for-life blood atonement, the scapegoat ritual, and the trajectory that culminates in Isaiah 53 — that, while not exhausting the meaning of sacrifice, are theologically significant and provide the very foundation for the New Testament's understanding of Jesus' death.

Section 1: What Rillera Gets Right

Fairness demands that we begin by acknowledging where Rillera makes genuinely valuable contributions. His first four chapters offer a detailed overview of the Old Testament sacrificial system that corrects several widespread misunderstandings, and we do ourselves no favors by dismissing these insights simply because we disagree with his broader conclusions.

First, Rillera is right that many popular treatments of sacrifice are oversimplified. Too many sermons and devotional books reduce the entire sacrificial system to a single transaction: "the animal dies instead of the sinner." This is a caricature that flattens the rich diversity of sacrificial practice in ancient Israel. There were burnt offerings, grain offerings, well-being (or "peace") offerings, purgation offerings, and reparation offerings — each with its own purpose, its own ritual actions, and its own theological significance. Anyone who reduces all of these to "substitutionary death" has not read Leviticus carefully enough.⁴

Second, Rillera's distinction between atoning and non-atoning sacrifices is genuinely helpful and often overlooked. He provides a clear criterion for telling them apart: "if the laity eat from it, then it cannot be an atoning sacrifice."⁵ The well-being offerings (šǝlāmîm), including the Passover, the thanksgiving offering, and the covenant-inauguration sacrifice, are communal meals shared between God, the priests, and the worshipers. They are not about atoning for sin. They are about fellowship, celebration, and commemoration. Rillera is right that conflating all sacrifices with sin-atonement distorts the system.

Third, his observation that the death or slaughter of the animal is not given independent ritual significance in the priestly texts is an important one. The blood rites — the sprinkling, daubing, and pouring — are the focal ritual actions in the sacrificial system, not the act of killing itself. As Rillera notes, drawing on Eberhart's work, "the priestly texts lack any indication that this ritual element [the act of killing the animal] had special significance."⁶ The offerer slaughters the animal, but the priest handles the blood. The atoning action centers on what is done with the blood, not the act of slaughter as such.

Fourth, his point that kipper (purgation/atonement) is limited in scope and cannot address all sins is a legitimate observation that tracks with Numbers 15:30–31. The regular purgation sacrifices handle inadvertent sins and certain ritual impurities; they cannot atone for high-handed, deliberate sins that produce what Rillera, following Milgrom, calls "moral impurity." This is a genuine limitation of the Levitical system, and Rillera is right to emphasize it.

Finally, his reliance on Milgrom's groundbreaking work on Leviticus is responsible scholarship. Milgrom's insights into the purgation function of the ḥaṭṭāʾt offering — that its blood purges the sanctuary rather than the offerer — have rightly transformed how scholars understand the Levitical system. We cannot simply ignore these insights, and any serious defense of penal substitutionary atonement must reckon with them honestly.

So where does Rillera go wrong? He goes wrong, I believe, in pressing these valid observations into a categorical denial of any substitutionary dimension in the sacrificial system. The corrective becomes an overcorrection. The nuance becomes a new reductionism — just in the opposite direction from the one Rillera is critiquing.

Section 2: The Hand-Laying Ritual and the Question of Identification

One of the pillars of Rillera's argument is his treatment of the hand-laying (sǝmîkâ) ritual. In chapter 1, he argues that the single-hand-laying gesture performed on certain sacrifices means only "ownership" — the offerer is declaring, "This is mine; I am giving it to God" — and nothing more. He follows David P. Wright's work closely on this point and quotes Klawans approvingly: "the laying of a single hand conveys the notion of ownership. The rite is not intended to express some abstract identification between the offerer and the offering — it is not intended to say 'This offering represents me.' Rather, the statement is more along the lines of 'This offering belongs to me, and I am hereby giving it to YHWH.'"⁷

Now, Wright's argument about ownership has merit, and it should be taken seriously. The hand-laying gesture clearly does communicate that the animal belongs to the offerer — it is a declaration of legitimate possession and voluntary dedication. But is ownership the only thing the gesture communicates? I do not think so, and here is why.

Consider Leviticus 1:4 directly: "He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him." The Hebrew is striking here. The language of acceptance "for him" (lô) combined with kipper strongly suggests that something more than bare ownership is being communicated. The offerer's identity is bound to the offering. The offering is accepted on his behalf — that is, it stands in some kind of representative relationship to the one who brings it. As David Allen notes in his comprehensive treatment, the hand-laying gesture establishes a connection between the offerer and the animal that goes beyond merely marking the animal as the offerer's property. It involves what Allen describes as a representative identification in which the fate of the animal becomes linked to the standing of the offerer before God.⁸

Rillera acknowledges that the well-being offerings (šǝlāmîm) also require single-hand-laying (Lev 3:2, 8, 13) and argues that since these offerings have no atoning function, the gesture cannot signify substitution. This is a reasonable observation, but it proves less than Rillera thinks. The hand-laying gesture may carry a range of meaning — ownership, dedication, identification, and representative connection — that functions differently depending on the type of sacrifice. In a well-being offering, it marks the animal as the offerer's legitimate gift for the communal meal. In an atoning sacrifice, it establishes the representative link between the offerer and the animal whose blood will purge the sanctuary on the offerer's behalf. The gesture is the same; the context determines its full significance.

More importantly, Rillera himself concedes that the double-hand-laying on the scapegoat (Lev 16:21) clearly involves the transfer and designation of sins. "Aaron's act of [double-]hand-laying and confession serves to transfer the contamination caused by these sins and transgressions from the sanctuary to the goat," he writes.⁹ This is a significant concession. If the double-hand ritual can involve transfer and designation, then the categorical denial of any identification dimension in the single-hand ritual is too sweeping. The difference between single and double hand-laying may be one of degree — not an absolute wall between "ownership only" and "identification and transfer." Milgrom himself, though generally cautious, acknowledges that the hand-laying in Leviticus 1:4 is explicitly connected with atonement being accepted on the offerer's behalf — a connection that resists a purely ownership-based reading.¹⁰

William Lane Craig argues similarly that the hand-laying gesture in the sacrificial system, particularly when linked with the atonement language of Leviticus 1:4, establishes a representative identification between the offerer and the victim that anticipates the fuller substitutionary logic developed in Isaiah 53 and the New Testament.¹¹ Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach note the same connection in their treatment of the biblical foundations: the offerer's hand on the animal's head is the ritual moment when the animal's fate and the offerer's standing before God become linked.¹²

There is another dimension to consider. Rillera notes that birds and grain offerings do not require hand-laying because they are small enough to be carried and handed directly to the priest (Lev 1:14–17; 2; 5:7–10, 11–13). He takes this as evidence that the gesture is about ownership — bigger animals need a formal ownership declaration because they cannot simply be handed over.²⁸ This is a reasonable inference, but it is not the only one available. Alternatively, the absence of hand-laying for smaller offerings could reflect the diminished theological significance of these substitute offerings. When an offerer cannot afford a lamb, they bring birds or flour instead (Lev 5:7–13). Rillera himself notes this "substitutionary logic" within the system — birds substitute for quadrupeds, and flour substitutes for birds when the offerer is poor.²⁹ Ironically, he uses the word "substitution" here without seeming to notice the tension with his overall thesis. If a flour offering can substitute for a bird, and a bird can substitute for a lamb, then the concept of substitution is not as foreign to the Levitical system as Rillera claims.

We should also note that the scholarly consensus on hand-laying is far from settled in the way Rillera implies. Wright's ownership theory, while influential, has been contested by numerous scholars. Péter Balla, for example, has argued that the gesture carries dedicatory and identificatory dimensions that cannot be reduced to a simple property claim. Nobuyoshi Kiuchi has connected the hand-laying gesture with the idea of the offerer's life being symbolically invested in the animal — a reading that aligns naturally with the substitutionary logic of the offering being "accepted for him" in Leviticus 1:4.³⁰ Even Milgrom, whose work Rillera relies on heavily, acknowledged that in Leviticus 1:4 the hand-laying is linked to the acceptance of the burnt offering "for him" (lô) "to make atonement for him" (lǝkapper ʿālāyw), and that this connection suggests a representative relationship that goes beyond bare ownership.³¹

The point I want to press is not that hand-laying definitively proves substitutionary atonement. It does not, and I would not claim that it does. What I want to press is that Rillera treats a genuinely debated question as though it were settled. He presents Wright's ownership theory as the last word, when in fact it is one proposal among several, contested by serious scholars working carefully with the same textual evidence. A more cautious conclusion — that the hand-laying gesture communicates ownership at minimum, but may also carry dedicatory and representational significance, especially in atoning contexts — is better supported by the evidence than Rillera's flat denial.

None of this proves that the hand-laying ritual communicates full-blown penal substitution. I want to be clear about that. What it does show is that Rillera's categorical denial — the gesture means only ownership and nothing more — is an overstatement. The textual evidence points to a richer range of meaning that includes representative identification, particularly in atoning contexts.

Section 3: The Death of the Animal — Does Ritual Reconceptualization Eliminate Substitutionary Meaning?

Perhaps the most creative argument in Rillera's first chapter is his claim, building on Jonathan Z. Smith's ritual theory, that Leviticus 17 ritually reconceptualizes animal death into a "not-a-killing." Because death and bloodshed defile sacred space, and because sacrifice must be kept free from any association with death, the Torah transforms the slaughter of the animal into something other than what it obviously is — a killing. Therefore, Rillera concludes, sacrifice "cannot be conceptualized as a 'killing,' let alone a substitutionary killing."¹³

This is a fascinating argument, and Rillera's engagement with Smith's work on the "gap" between ritual and reality is thoughtful. But I believe it proves too much, and ultimately undermines Rillera's own position in ways he does not recognize.

Rillera's argument from Leviticus 17:3–4 is that killing a domesticated animal outside the sacrificial context constitutes murder and incurs bloodguilt. Therefore, the sacrificial ritual transforms the death of the animal from a "killing" into a "not-a-killing." The ritual framework strips the death of its death-associations. So far, so interesting. But here is the problem: Rillera's claim that "death has no intelligibility in this ritual framework" conflates the ritual transformation of how the death is perceived with whether the death carries theological significance. The ritual does not eliminate the reality of death — it sanctifies and reframes it. The animal still dies. Its blood is still poured out. And the Torah tells us why that blood matters.

This verse is the Torah's own theological rationale for blood atonement, and it deserves much more careful attention than Rillera gives it. Three things are clear from this text. First, the blood is identified with the life (nephesh) of the creature. Second, God has "given" this blood "for you" (lākem) on the altar. Third, the blood makes atonement "by the life" — that is, the life contained in the blood is the active agent of atonement. The "for you" language is beneficiary and potentially substitutionary: the blood of the animal, representing its life, is given on the altar for the benefit of the offerer. The life of the animal serves as the cleansing agent precisely because it is life poured out in death.

Rillera spends considerable effort engaging the scholarly debate about whether kipper in Leviticus 17:11 means "ransom" (as Milgrom argues for this specific verse) or "decontaminate" (as Liane Feldman prefers).¹⁴ He argues that even on Milgrom's reading of kipper as "ransom," substitutionary death is ruled out because the offerer's life is only at risk at the moment of slaughter — not prior to it. The sacrifice resolves a liability that the act of killing itself creates, not a prior liability that the animal's death absorbs in the offerer's place.¹⁵

This is a clever argument, but it only works for the specific scenario Rillera describes — the well-being offerings that serve as communal meals. It does not work for the purgation offerings brought for inadvertent sins (Leviticus 4–5), where the offerer comes to the sanctuary already bearing a liability (the contamination caused by their sin) that the sacrifice addresses. In these cases, the offerer is not merely resolving a liability created by the act of slaughter; they are dealing with a pre-existing problem — the contamination of the sanctuary caused by their sin. The blood of the animal, representing its life, purges that contamination on the offerer's behalf. The animal's life-blood does for the offerer what the offerer cannot do for himself.

To illustrate the point: when a person commits an inadvertent sin (Leviticus 4:27–31), that sin generates a contamination that — in the priestly conception — is attracted to the sanctuary like a magnet. The contamination is already there, clinging to the outer altar, before the offerer brings the animal to the priest. The offerer comes to deal with a problem that already exists. They lay their hand on the animal, kill it, and the priest applies the blood to the horns of the altar to purge the contamination. The entire ritual sequence — hand-laying, slaughter, blood application — is directed at resolving a pre-existing liability that the offerer bears. To say that the animal's death "has no intelligibility in this ritual framework" is to drain the ritual of its own stated purpose. The blood is effective because it is life-bearing blood given on the altar, and the blood is available because the animal dies. The death makes the blood available; the blood makes the atonement possible. These are not disconnected facts — they are steps in a unified ritual process.

We should also ask whether Rillera's application of Smith's ritual theory is doing the work he needs it to do. Smith's point about the "gap" between ritual and reality is a general observation about how rituals function across human cultures. It tells us that ritual communities often reframe difficult realities — death, violence, the taking of life — through symbolic and ceremonial action. This is undoubtedly true of the Levitical system. The Torah does ritually reframe the killing of the animal so that it is not perceived as mere bloodshed. But reframing is not the same as eliminating. A wedding ceremony reframes the union of two people into a covenantal bond, but it does not eliminate the reality that two people are being joined. A funeral service reframes the grief of death into a communal act of mourning and hope, but it does not eliminate the reality of loss. In the same way, the Levitical sacrificial ritual reframes the death of the animal into a sanctified offering, but it does not eliminate the reality that a life has been given.

Rillera also draws on Smith's analogies from hunting societies to show how ritual communities deal with the "gap" between what they actually do (kill an animal) and what they want to have happened (a willing gift, a non-killing). This is culturally interesting and anthropologically suggestive. But analogies from hunting societies are hardly dispositive for Israelite theology. The Israelite priests were not simply borrowing from general human religious patterns — they were operating within a distinctive covenantal framework in which God revealed the purpose and meaning of the sacrificial system. To assume that the Israelite understanding of sacrifice must conform to general patterns found in hunting rituals is a methodological leap that Rillera does not adequately justify.

Furthermore, Rillera's argument that the priest, not the offerer, performs the atoning blood rites is used to argue against substitution. Since the offerer kills the animal but the priest handles the blood, Rillera claims, the atoning action is separated from the offerer's act of slaughter, and therefore substitution is not in view.¹⁶ But this actually supports a mediatorial and priestly framework that is entirely compatible with substitution. The priest mediates the offering on behalf of the offerer. The offerer kills the animal and lays hands on it; the priest applies the blood. Both actions are part of a unified ritual sequence. The priestly mediation does not negate the representative identification established by the hand-laying; it channels it through the proper ritual framework. As John Stott observed, the entire sacrificial system operates on a logic of mediation in which the priest stands between the offerer and God, and the animal stands as the bearer of the offerer's liability — a structure that anticipates the ultimate self-substitution of God in Christ.¹⁷

There is a further irony in Rillera's argument worth noting. He argues that the distinction between the offerer's act (killing) and the priest's act (blood application) separates the death from the atonement and therefore undermines substitution. But the very text Rillera champions — Leviticus 17:11 — explicitly connects the blood (which comes from the animal's death) with the atonement. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls." The blood is the medium of atonement, and the blood comes from the life poured out in death. The Torah draws a direct line from the animal's life, through its death, to the blood, to the altar, to the atonement made "for you." Rillera's own key text undermines his claim that the death is theologically disconnected from the atonement.

Leon Morris's classic treatment of the blood-as-life theology in Leviticus 17:11 remains pertinent here. Morris argued that the blood represents not merely "life" in the abstract, but specifically "life given up in death" — that the atoning power of the blood derives from the fact that a life has been poured out, yielded up, on behalf of the offerer.¹⁸ This reading has been contested — Milgrom, for instance, preferred to see the blood as representing "life" without necessarily emphasizing the death — but Morris's argument has not been refuted. The debate is ongoing, and Rillera's presentation gives the impression that it has been settled in favor of his view when it has not. Henri Blocher similarly argued that the blood of the Levitical sacrifices derives its purifying power from the yielding up of life that the shedding of blood represents, and that this life-for-life dynamic is foundational to the entire system of atonement.³²

In the end, Rillera's ritual reconceptualization framework may reframe how the death is perceived within the sacred space, but it does not eliminate the theological significance that the Torah itself attaches to the blood as life given on the altar "for you." The ritual reconceptualization proves that the Israelites took death seriously — so seriously that they had to reframe it in order to bring it into the presence of a holy God. That is not evidence that death is theologically insignificant in the system. It is evidence of precisely the opposite.

Section 4: Capital Offenses, the Limits of Kipper, and What This Actually Proves

Rillera argues in chapter 1 that because no sacrifice can atone for capital offenses (Numbers 15:30–31), substitutionary death cannot be the logic of sacrifice. If the animal were dying "instead of" the offerer, why would the system be limited to inadvertent sins? Why could it not address deliberate sins that carry the death penalty?¹⁹

This argument has genuine force, and I do not wish to minimize it. It is true that the Levitical sacrificial system is limited in its scope. It cannot handle every kind of sin. High-handed, deliberate sins — murder, sexual immorality, idolatry — generate what Milgrom calls "moral impurity" that pollutes not only the sanctuary but the person and the land, and no sacrifice can address them. Rillera is right about this.

But the argument does not prove what Rillera thinks it proves. It demonstrates that the Levitical sacrificial system has limits — not that substitutionary logic is entirely absent within those limits. The system covers inadvertent sins (Leviticus 4–5) precisely because those sins would otherwise bring consequences — contamination of the sanctuary, the threat of being "cut off" from the community — and the sacrifice is offered to deal with those consequences on the offerer's behalf. The animal's blood, representing its life, does for the offerer what the offerer cannot do alone: it purges the contamination from the sanctuary and releases the offerer from their liability. Within the admittedly limited scope of the system, a substitutionary dynamic is at work.

Think of it this way. The fact that a fire extinguisher cannot put out a forest fire does not prove that fire extinguishers do not put out fires. It proves that their capacity has limits. In the same way, the fact that the Levitical sacrifices cannot atone for capital offenses does not prove that they contain no substitutionary logic. It proves that their substitutionary capacity has limits. Within those limits, the sacrifice genuinely deals with the offerer's liability: the animal's blood, representing its life, is offered on the altar to purge the consequences of the offerer's sin from the sanctuary. The offerer needed atonement; the sacrifice provided it. The animal's life-blood accomplished what the offerer's own resources could not.

Rillera is also not entirely fair to the theological trajectory of the system when he isolates this point. As he himself carefully demonstrates in chapter 4, the system includes a remarkable provision: deliberate sins can be "downgraded" to atonable inadvertencies through repentance (Lev 5:21–22 [6:2–3 in English]).³³ This means the scope of the sacrificial system was not as rigidly limited as it might first appear. Repentance opens the door for the sacrificial system to address sins that would otherwise be beyond its reach. This is an important qualification that Rillera notes but does not adequately integrate into his argument against substitution. If the system could be extended through repentance to cover sins that were initially deliberate, then the system was designed with a flexibility that anticipates its own expansion — an expansion that the New Testament authors saw fully realized in Christ.

As Craig argues in his treatment of the Levitical system, the New Testament authors did not merely apply existing Levitical categories mechanically to Jesus. They understood Jesus' death as exceeding the Levitical system — dealing with the sins that the Levitical system could not address. The author of Hebrews makes this explicit: the old sacrifices were "a shadow of the good things to come" (Heb 10:1), offered repeatedly because they could never perfectly accomplish their purpose. Jesus' once-for-all sacrifice does what the entire Levitical system could not.²⁰ Rillera's own emphasis on the limits of kipper actually strengthens the case for understanding Jesus' death as a uniquely sufficient sacrifice that breaks through those very limits.

Allen makes a complementary point: the limited scope of the Levitical system is a feature, not a bug, of the typological relationship between Old Testament sacrifice and the cross. The system's inadequacies create the theological space for the New Testament's claim that Christ's sacrifice accomplishes what all previous sacrifices could only anticipate.²¹ Ironically, Rillera's careful demonstration of the limits of kipper provides one of the strongest arguments for why the New Testament authors needed a new framework — one in which a truly substitutionary sacrifice could address not just inadvertent contamination but the full weight of human sin and guilt.

Section 5: The Suffering Dimension and Isaiah 53

In chapter 1, Rillera argues that sacrifice has nothing to do with "suffering." The slaughter of the sacrificial animal was meant to be swift, painless, and humane — a quick cut to the throat, not a prolonged torment. Animals with defects or injuries were ineligible for sacrifice precisely because a blemished animal would be unworthy of God. Therefore, Rillera claims, when the New Testament speaks of Jesus' sufferings, it cannot be drawing on sacrificial categories. "When Jesus's sufferings and/or death qua death are the topic, then sacrificial metaphors are avoided."²²

Rillera is correct on the narrow point about animal sacrifice: the Levitical system did not envision the sacrificial animal suffering prolonged torment. This is a valid corrective to crude caricatures of penal substitutionary atonement that picture God slowly torturing an animal as a stand-in for the sinner's deserved punishment. That is not what happened at the altar.

However, this observation about animal sacrifice does not settle the question of how the New Testament authors understood Jesus' death. The crucial bridge text is Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the Suffering Servant passage, and Rillera's treatment of it — spread across chapters 1 and 7 — is, in my judgment, one of the weakest parts of his book.

In chapter 7, Rillera argues that Isaiah 53 functioned in Second Temple Judaism primarily as a "script" for righteous suffering — a paradigm for what it looks like when a faithful person endures persecution. He cites the reception of the Servant in Daniel, the Wisdom of Solomon, and 1 Clement to argue that the passage was read as an ethical example, not a substitutionary sacrifice. He notes that the Septuagint of Isaiah 53:10 differs from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and that the term ʾāšām (guilt offering) in 53:10 is rendered differently in the Greek tradition.²³

Rillera is right that Isaiah 53 was indeed read as a paradigm for righteous suffering in parts of the Second Temple tradition. I concede this point readily. But he minimizes — and sometimes simply ignores — the explicit substitutionary language in the Hebrew text that goes far beyond mere ethical example:

"But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53:5–6, ESV)

"Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt [ʾāšām], he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand." (Isaiah 53:10, ESV)

"By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities... because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors." (Isaiah 53:11–12, ESV)

The language here is not merely exemplary. The Servant does not simply suffer like others who suffer unjustly. He is pierced for our transgressions. He is crushed for our iniquities. The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He bears their iniquities. He makes his soul an ʾāšām — a guilt offering, the very Levitical sacrifice that Rillera discusses in chapter 4 in connection with reparation and restitution.²⁴ The substitutionary dimension here is not something later theologians read into the text. It is embedded in the Hebrew grammar itself: the prepositions and the directional language all point to a transfer of liability from "us" to "him."

Let me press on this a bit more, because Rillera's treatment of Isaiah 53 is central to his overall project. He argues that the reception history of the Suffering Servant in Second Temple Judaism does not support a substitutionary reading — the Servant was understood as a paradigm for righteous suffering, not as a substitute dying in the place of others. He cites Daniel, the Wisdom of Solomon, and 1 Clement as evidence.³⁴ But this argument is more selective than it appears. While it is true that some Second Temple texts emphasize the exemplary dimension of the Servant's suffering, others — including the Targum Jonathan on Isaiah, which modifies the Servant figure significantly but still preserves elements of vicarious action — show awareness of the substitutionary logic. More importantly, the reception history does not determine the meaning of the text itself. Even if every Second Temple reader had missed the substitutionary dimension (which they did not), the Hebrew text of Isaiah 53:5–6, 10–12 would still say what it says: the Servant was pierced "for our transgressions," the LORD laid "on him" the iniquity "of us all," and his soul was made an ʾāšām for others.

The connection between Isaiah 53:10 and the Levitical guilt offering (ʾāšām) is especially significant and deserves closer attention than Rillera gives it. In the Levitical system, the ʾāšām is specifically about reparation — it addresses cases where a sacred boundary has been violated and restitution is required. The offerer must pay back what was taken, plus a twenty percent surcharge, and then bring a ram as a reparation offering (Lev 5:14–16). The ʾāšām is the sacrifice that most explicitly involves the offerer's liability being addressed through the offering of an animal. When Isaiah 53:10 says the Servant makes his soul an ʾāšām, it is connecting the Servant's suffering with the Levitical concept of reparation for violated holiness — a concept that involves one entity bearing the cost of another's liability. This is not merely ethical paradigm; it is sacrificial theology.

Rillera seems to be aware that Isaiah 53 poses problems for his thesis, which is why he spends considerable energy arguing that the passage is "not about sacrifice" and "not about substitution" even though the Hebrew text uses sacrificial language (ʾāšām) and substitutionary grammar (the prepositions "for" and "on behalf of" with the directional transfer of iniquity). His argument amounts to saying that even though the text sounds substitutionary, it is not — because his framework of participation and solidarity better explains the Servant's role. But this is circular reasoning. He defines what the Servant can mean based on his prior commitment to a participatory model, and then reads the text through that lens, screening out the substitutionary grammar that does not fit.

Simon Gathercole's treatment of 1 Corinthians 15:3 — "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures" — demonstrates that the earliest Christian confession explicitly links Christ's death with the bearing of sins, and that this connection is "according to the Scriptures," almost certainly referring to Isaiah 53. This is not a late theological invention. It is embedded in the oldest layer of Christian proclamation.²⁵ Craig's extensive treatment of Isaiah's Servant in Atonement and the Death of Christ further demonstrates that the substitutionary reading of Isaiah 53 is not the imposition of later categories but the natural reading of the Hebrew text in its own literary context.²⁶

Rillera's argument that the LXX of Isaiah 53:10 differs from the Hebrew is noted but not decisive. The New Testament authors had access to both traditions — the Hebrew and the Greek — and the substitutionary reading is well attested even within Second Temple Judaism. The Targum Jonathan on Isaiah, despite its modifications to the Servant figure, preserves elements of the substitutionary framework. And the New Testament's own use of Isaiah 53 — in passages like Acts 8:32–35, Romans 4:25, and 1 Peter 2:24 — consistently foregrounds the vicarious, sin-bearing dimension of the Servant's suffering.

I find it telling that Rillera asks why Hebrews and 1 John — the two New Testament texts that explicitly connect Jesus with kipper — do not quote Isaiah 53 as their prooftext.²⁷ He seems to think this is evidence that Isaiah 53 was not understood sacrificially. But this argument from silence is fragile. Hebrews has its own well-developed sacrificial framework drawn from Leviticus 16 and the Day of Atonement; it does not need to quote Isaiah 53 to establish its point. And the broader New Testament — Paul, Peter, and the Gospels — draws extensively on Isaiah 53's language of sin-bearing and vicarious suffering. The absence of a specific quotation in Hebrews does not erase the presence of the theology everywhere else.

Before moving to my concluding summary, I want to note one broader methodological concern about Rillera's treatment of Isaiah 53 and the sacrificial system generally. Throughout Lamb of the Free, Rillera engages extensively with scholars who support his conclusions — Milgrom, Feldman, Klawans, Smith, Shauf, Moffitt, Eberhart — while giving minimal attention to the major pro-PSA scholars who have addressed the very same texts. William Lane Craig's detailed treatment of Isaiah 53 in Atonement and the Death of Christ is not engaged. Stott's classic argument about the self-substitution of God is not addressed. Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach's Pierced for Our Transgressions, which devotes an entire chapter to the biblical foundations of substitution including the Levitical system, is not mentioned. Leon Morris's influential arguments about blood theology are not substantively rebutted. Henri Blocher's work on the atonement is absent. Thomas Schreiner's treatment of penal substitution is not discussed. This is a significant lacuna. When one is making the claim that an entire theological tradition — one defended by major scholars for centuries — has "no scriptural anchor," the burden of proof demands serious engagement with the best representatives of that tradition. Rillera dismantles the popular caricature of PSA with considerable skill. But the popular caricature is not the strongest form of the argument, and a book that claims to have delivered the definitive blow to PSA ought to engage its strongest defenders, not just its weakest versions.³⁶

Fr. Joshua Schooping, writing from within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, has demonstrated in An Existential Soteriology that penal and substitutionary language is pervasive not only in Western theology but in the Orthodox hymnography, patristic writings, and canonical sources that Rillera and Campbell assume stand opposed to PSA.³⁷ If substitutionary and penal themes are present even in the tradition that is supposedly most hostile to them, then the claim that these themes have "no scriptural basis" requires much more careful argumentation than Rillera provides.

Section 6: Conclusion — The Sacrificial System Contains Substitutionary Seeds

Let me now draw together the threads of this appendix and state my conclusion plainly.

Rillera's Lamb of the Free helpfully complicates overly simplistic accounts of Old Testament sacrifice. His distinctions between atoning and non-atoning sacrifices, his attention to the limited scope of kipper, and his insistence that we take the ritual details of Leviticus seriously on their own terms are all valuable contributions. I am genuinely grateful for these correctives, and I believe the popular-level discussion of sacrifice in many churches and Bible studies would benefit from engaging with Rillera's work on these points.

But his categorical denial of any substitutionary dimension in the sacrificial system is unsustainable. The evidence points in a different direction:

The hand-laying ritual in Leviticus 1:4, whatever else it communicates, is explicitly connected with atonement being "accepted for him" — language that resists a purely ownership-based reading and points toward representative identification. The scholarly debate about this gesture is far from settled, and Rillera's presentation of Wright's ownership theory as the final word is not warranted by the current state of the discussion.

Leviticus 17:11 provides the Torah's own theological rationale for blood atonement: the life of the animal, contained in the blood, is "given for you on the altar." The "for you" language is beneficiary and at minimum representational, and the identification of blood with life-given-in-death means that the animal's death, however ritually reframed, carries theological weight. Rillera's application of Smith's ritual reconceptualization theory is creative but ultimately proves too much — it shows that the Israelites took death so seriously in sacrificial contexts that they had to reframe it, not that they regarded it as theologically meaningless.

The scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16:21 — which Rillera concedes involves transfer of sins — demonstrates that the sacrificial system is not allergic to the concept of transferring liability from the community to the animal. Rillera insists on calling the scapegoat a "tote-goat" and emphasizes that it is not sacrificed but sent alive into the wilderness.³⁵ This is true — the scapegoat is not a sacrifice in the technical sense. But the ritual still involves the high priest confessing the sins of the people over the goat and the goat carrying those sins away. The concept of one entity bearing the sins and liabilities of another is embedded in the Day of Atonement ritual. Whether we call this "substitution" or "transfer" or "designation," the underlying logic is one in which the goat bears what the people cannot bear — and that is, at minimum, a proto-substitutionary concept. If transfer can happen in the double-hand ritual, the wall between "ownership only" (single hand) and "transfer" (double hand) is less absolute than Rillera claims.

Isaiah 53, the crucial bridge text between Old Testament sacrifice and the New Testament understanding of Jesus' death, is saturated with substitutionary language that goes far beyond ethical paradigm: "pierced for our transgressions," "the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all," "he bore the sin of many," and the identification of the Servant's suffering as an ʾāšām (guilt offering). Rillera's treatment of this passage is one of the least persuasive parts of his book, requiring him to minimize the plain directional and substitutionary grammar of the Hebrew text in order to maintain his participatory framework.

The limits of the Levitical system — the inability of kipper to address capital offenses and "moral impurity" — point not away from substitution but toward the need for a greater, more effective substitute. This is precisely the argument of Hebrews. Rillera's own meticulous demonstration of these limits inadvertently strengthens the case that the New Testament authors were doing something genuinely new — and genuinely substitutionary — when they proclaimed that Christ died for our sins.

I want to add one further reflection that I think is important for understanding the overall direction of Rillera's project. Rillera is not simply making exegetical arguments in a vacuum. He is making exegetical arguments in service of a larger theological and political program. Campbell's foreword makes this explicit: the goal is to dismantle PSA because of its perceived connections to "retributive" politics, authoritarian family structures, and mass incarceration. Rillera shares these concerns, and I take them seriously — as I argue in Chapters 20 and 35 of this book, the misuse of atonement theology to justify cruelty is a genuine problem that deserves attention. But the cure for misuse is not misreading. If the Old Testament sacrificial system contains substitutionary elements — and I have argued that it does — then the response to the political misuse of those elements should be to properly understand them, not to deny that they exist. Properly understood within a Trinitarian framework of divine self-giving love, the substitutionary dimensions of the sacrificial system point not toward authoritarian violence but toward a God who bears the cost of our failures Himself. That is not a theology of domination. It is a theology of staggering humility and grace.

It is worth noting that the author's own position — defended at length in Chapters 4 through 6 and Chapter 19 of this book — does not claim that substitution is the only thing happening in the sacrificial system. Rillera is right that sacrifice involves food and fellowship (the well-being offerings), purification and consecration (the purgation offerings), divine attraction and invitation (the regular burnt offerings), and celebration and commemoration (the Passover and thanksgiving offerings). The sacrificial system is multi-dimensional, and any account that reduces it entirely to "substitutionary death" is indeed inadequate.

But the multi-dimensional nature of sacrifice does not mean that substitutionary dimensions are absent. They are present — in the hand-laying, in the blood-as-life theology of Leviticus 17:11, in the scapegoat, in Isaiah 53's explicit language of vicarious sin-bearing — as genuine threads within the larger tapestry. And when the New Testament authors reach for sacrificial categories to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross, they weave these substitutionary threads into the center of the fabric.

As we will see in Appendix F, Rillera's treatment of the Lord's Supper and the non-atoning sacrifices raises important questions about the relationship between Passover, covenant inauguration, and the atoning significance of Christ's death. And in Appendices G and H, we will engage his handling of key New Testament texts and his broader argument that substitution and participation are incompatible. But the foundation has been laid: Rillera's denial of substitutionary elements in the Old Testament sacrificial system, while stimulating and well-argued in places, ultimately does not hold up under the weight of the textual evidence.

The Lamb who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29) was not dreamed up out of nothing by the New Testament authors. They were drawing on deep roots — roots that grow in the soil of Leviticus, Numbers, and Isaiah, and that flower in the New Testament's proclamation that Christ died for our sins, in our place, bearing what we could not bear. Rillera's pruning shears have trimmed away some dead branches, and we are grateful for that. But the tree itself — the tree of substitutionary sacrifice — still stands.