blood on the altar, which is analogous to the blood in the offerer's body. Nachmanides argued that offerers performed these acts so that the offerers should realize that the offerers had sinned against God with their bodies. And the offerer's soul and blood should have been spilled and the offerer's body burned, were it not for God's loving-kindness in taking a substitute and a ransom — the offering — so that the offering's blood should be in place of the offerer's blood, its life in place of the offerer's life, and that the limbs of the offering in place of the parts of the offerer's body. Leviticus chapter 8 The Zohar taught that Aaron had to purge himself during the seven sacred days of and after that by means of the calf that directed. The Zohar observed that Aaron had to purge himself, for but for him the Golden Calf would not have emerged. In modern interpretation The parashah is discussed in these modern sources: Leviticus chapters 6–7 Professor James Kugel of Bar Ilan University reported that ancient texts offered several explanations for why peoples of the ancient Near East sacrificed animals: to provide the deity food (see ); to offer the life of the slaughtered animal as a substitute for the offerer's; to give a costly possession as a sign of fealty or in the hope of receiving still more generous compensation from the deity. Kugel reported that more recent explanations saw the sacrifice as establishing a tangible connection between the sacrificer and the deity, while others stress the connection of the sacred with violence or see the function of religion as defusing violence that would otherwise be directed at people. Kugel argued that the Israelites conceived of animal sacrifices as the principal channel of communication between the people and God. Professor William Hallo, formerly of Yale University, described sacrifice as a sacred-making of the human consumption of animal meat that followed. Professor Jacob Milgrom, formerly of the University of California, Berkeley, read the sacrificial system in the parashah to describe the forces of life and death pitted against each other in a cosmic struggle, set loose by people through their obedience to or defiance of God's commandments. Milgrom taught that Leviticus treats impurity as the opposite of holiness, identifying impurity with death and holiness with life. Milgrom interpreted Leviticus to teach that people could drive God out of