When an honoured guest arrives, there is slaughtered for him a calf, not without an offering of the blood and fat to the Deity.  The occasion arising out of daily life is thus inseparable from the holy action, and is what gives it meaning and character; an end corresponding to the situation always underlies it.  Hence also prayer must not be wanting.  The verb H(TYR, to “burn” (fat and minha), means simply to “pray,” and conversely BQ# )T YHWH, “to seek Jehovah,” in point of fact not unfrequently means to “sacrifice.”  The gift serves to reinforce the question or the request, and to express thankfulness; and the prayer is its interpretation.  This of course is rather incidentally indicated than expressly said (Hos. v. 6; Isaiah i. 15; Jeremiah xiv. 12; 1Kings viii. 27 seq.; Proverbs xv. 8); we have a specimen of a grace for the offering of the festival gift only in Deuteronomy xxvi. 3 seq.; a blessing is pronounced when the slaughtering takes place (1Samuel ix. 13).  The prayer of course is simply the expression of the feeling of the occasion, with which accordingly it varies in manifold ways.  Arising out of the exigencies and directed to the objects of daily life, the sacrifices reflect in themselves a correspondingly rich variety.  Our wedding, baptismal, and funeral feasts on the one hand, and our banquets for all sorts of occasions on the other, might still be adduced as the most obvious comparison, were it not that here too the divorce between sacred and secular destroys it.  Religious worship was a natural thing in Hebrew antiquity; it was the blossom of life, the heights and depths of which it was its business to transfigure and glorify.

The law which abolished all sacrificial seats, with a single exception, severed this connection.  Deuteronomy indeed does not contemplate such a result.  Here, in marked opposition to what we find in the Priestly Code, to eat and be merry before Jehovah is the standing phrase for sacrificing; the idea is that in concentrating all the worship towards Jerusalem, all that is effected is a mere change of place, the essence of the thing remaining unaltered.  This, however, was a mistake.  To celebrate the vintage festival among one’s native hills, and to celebrate it at Jerusalem, were two very different things; it was not a matter of indifference whether one could seize on the spot any occasion that casually offered itself for a sacrificial meal, or whether it was necessary that one should first enter upon a journey.  And it was not the same thing to appear by oneself at home before Jehovah and to lose oneself in a large congregation at the common seat of worship.  Human life has its root in local environment, and so also had the ancient cultus; in being transplanted from its natural soil it was deprived of its natural nourishment.  A separation between it and the daily life was inevitable, and Deuteronomy itself paved the way for this result by permitting profane slaughtering.  A man lived in Hebron, but sacrificed in Jerusalem; life and worship fell apart.  The consequences which lie dormant in the Deuteronomic law are fully developed in the Priestly Code.