d by the nourishment offered him assumed more definite
form;[1886] but it is doubtful whether on such occasions man was
regarded as the guest of the deity.[1887]

+1045+. However this may be, it is the effect of the food on the god
that has been made by W. Robertson Smith the basis of an elaborate
theory of sacrifice;[1888] his view is that the assimilation of the
flesh and blood of the kindred divine animal strengthens the deity's
sense of kinship with his worshipers, and thus, promoting a kindly
feeling in him, leads him to pardon men's offenses and grant them his
protection. Smith's argument is mainly devoted to illustrating the
ancient conception of blood-kinship between gods, men, and beasts. He
assumes that sacrifice is the offering of food to the deity (the blood
of the animal, as the seat of life, coming naturally to be the most
important part of the offering), the sacredness of the victim, and the
idea of communion, and further that the victim is a totem--the existence
of totemism in the Semitic area, he holds, though not susceptible of
rigid proof, is made practically certain by the wide diffusion of the
totemic conception elsewhere.[1889] As evidence that the effective thing
in sacrifice is the sharing of sacred flesh and blood, he adduces a
great number of offerings (such as the shedding one's own blood and the
offering of one's hair) in which there is no death of a victim, and no
idea of penal satisfaction of the deity. In the Israelite ritual he lays
special stress on the common clan-sacrifice (the _zeba[h.]_) in which a
part of the victim is given to the god and a part is consumed by the
worshiper; this he contrasts with offerings that are given wholly to the
god, and, leaving aside piacula and holocausts, this distinction he
makes correspond to that between animal and vegetable offerings, the
latter, he holds, being originally not conciliatory. Thus, he concludes,
the expiatory power lies in the sharing of animal flesh. Here the theory
is confronted by the holocaust and the piaculum, expiatory sacrifices in
which there is no communal eating. Smith meets this difficulty by
suggesting that these two sorts of sacrifice belong to a relatively late
period, when, in the progress of society, the original conception had
become dim. As time went on, he says, the belief in kinship with animals
grew fainter. Sacrificial meals became merely occasions of feasting, and
at the same time the establishment of kingly gover