the sanctuary by polluting it with their moral and ritual sins. But the priests could periodically purge the sanctuary of its impurities and influence the people to atone. The blood of the purification offerings symbolically purged the sanctuary by symbolically absorbing its impurities, in a victory for life over death. Similarly, Gordon Wenham of Trinity College, Bristol, noted that the sacrificial system regularly associates sacrifices with cleansing and sanctification. Wenham read Leviticus to teach that sacrificial blood was necessary to cleanse and sanctify. Sacrifice could undo the effects of sin and human infirmity. Sin and disease profaned the holy and polluted the clean, whereas sacrifice could reverse this process. Wenham illustrated with the chart at right. Wenham concluded that contact between the holy and the unclean resulted in death. Sacrifice, by cleansing the unclean, made such contact possible. Sacrifice thus allowed the holy God to meet with sinful man. The 20th century British anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote that to find the underlying logic of the first chapters of Leviticus about how to make a sacrifice and how to lay out the animal sections on the altar, one needs to look carefully at what Leviticus says about bodies and parts of bodies, what is inner and outer, and what is on top and underneath. Douglas suggested this alignment of the three levels of Mount Sinai, the animal sacrifice, and the Tabernacle: Douglas argued that the tabernacle ran horizontally toward the most sacred area, Mount Sinai went up vertically to the summit, and the sacrificial pile started with the head underneath and went up to the entrails, and one can interpret each by reference to the others. Douglas noted that in mystical thought, “upper” and “inner” can be equivalent. The pattern is always there throughout creation, with God in the depths or on the heights of everything. Likening the tabernacle to a body, the innards corresponded to the Holy of Holies, for the Bible locates the emotions and thought in the innermost parts of the body; the loins are wrung with remorse or grief; God scrutinizes the innermost part; compassion resides in the bowels. The Tabernacle was associated with creation, and creation with fertility, implying that the innermost part of the Tabernacle was a Divine nuptial chamber, depicting the union between God and Israel. Douglas concluded that the summit of the mountain was the abode of God, below was the cloudy region