Does God desire animal sacrifices?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Genesis 4:4 reports YHWH's regard for Abel's animal offering, and the Priestly legislation of Leviticus makes blood sacrifice the mandatory center of Israelite worship. Yet Psalm 40:6 ('sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire'), Psalm 50:13 ('Will I eat the flesh of bulls?'), and Psalm 51:16 ('thou desirest not sacrifice... thou delightest not in burnt offerings') appear to repudiate the very cult the Torah commands. The same posture recurs in the prophets — Amos 5:21-24, Hosea 6:6 ('I desired mercy, and not sacrifice'), Isaiah 1:11-17, Jeremiah 7:21-23, Micah 6:6-8.

The traditional harmonization reads these as instances of 'relative' or 'dialectical' negation, a recognized Hebrew idiom in which a stark 'not X but Y' actually means 'Y more than X.' Derek Kidner's Tyndale Psalms commentary and Tremper Longman argue that the Psalms and prophets reject sacrifice offered hypocritically, without obedience or a contrite heart — not the institution itself. The internal evidence is genuinely strong. Psalm 51 pairs the rejection of sacrifice (v. 16) with the claim that 'the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit' (v. 17), and then, in vv. 18-19, anticipates that God will 'be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering' once Zion is rebuilt — the psalm as we have it ends affirming the cult, not abolishing it. Hosea 6:6 uses the comparative construction (mercy 'and not' sacrifice) that Jesus later cites approvingly (Matt 9:13; 12:7) without any sense of abolishing the Temple. On this reading the texts critique misuse, not use. The idiom is well documented elsewhere: Proverbs 8:10 ('receive my instruction, and not silver') does not forbid silver, and the 'not... but' of comparative Hebrew rhetoric is a standard way of expressing priority rather than negation.

A critical caveat sharpens the picture rather than dissolving it. Psalm 51:18-19 is widely regarded by critical scholars and noted in many commentaries as a likely post-exilic editorial appendix: vv. 16-17 reject sacrifice outright, and vv. 18-19 — invoking the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls — reverse course to affirm restored-Temple offerings. The most economical explanation is that a later editor added the closing couplet precisely to reconcile the psalm's anti-sacrifice statement with re-established cultic worship; the shift from individual penitence to corporate restoration, and the explicit reference to walls not yet standing, are the standard internal grounds. This cuts two ways. At the canonical level it supports the harmonization, since the received text does end by endorsing sacrifice. But it also illustrates, in microcosm, the very editorial reconciliation of competing stances that the critical reading posits — the tension was real enough that someone felt obliged to resolve it within the text itself.

The history behind these passages is contested. Jacob Milgrom's Anchor Bible Leviticus situates the offerings within a coherent priestly system in which sacrifice is not magic but a structured response to sin and impurity. Jonathan Klawans's Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple is important here precisely because Klawans argues AGAINST the older supersessionist reading that pitted 'spiritual' prophets against a 'mechanical' cult: he contends the prophets did not reject sacrifice per se but condemned its misuse, and he is therefore better cited on the harmonizing, relative-negation side than as evidence of a cult-versus-anti-cult historical war. Abraham Heschel's The Prophets frames the prophetic protest as directed against a cult divorced from justice — worship that proceeds while the poor are crushed — again a critique of misuse rather than of the institution. Gary Anderson's study of Israelite sacrifice situates the offerings within a broader economy of gift and divine pleasure that the prophets could invoke critically without repudiating. Where genuine scholarly disagreement remains is over the sharpest formulations — Jeremiah 7:22, 'I spake not unto your fathers... concerning burnt offerings,' which on its face denies that sacrifice was part of the original Sinai mandate at all, and the bluntest Amos and Isaiah oracles — which some read as hyperbole within the relative-negation idiom and others as evidence of a real diversity of evaluative stances toward the cult preserved side by side in the canon. Jeremiah 7:22 is especially hard to fold cleanly into comparative negation, since it makes a historical claim about what was commanded, not merely a ranking of priorities.

The upshot: the relative-negation reading is well grounded and resolves most of the surface contradiction. The Psalms, on balance, subordinate sacrifice to obedience and contrition rather than abolishing it, and Psalm 51 as transmitted closes by affirming the cult — even if that closing is itself an editorial harmonization. Beneath the idiom, however, the canon plainly preserves more than one emphasis, and the sharpest prophetic lines are not fully tamed by the comparative reading. The Genesis 4 and Leviticus material reflects a priestly piety in which sacrifice is central and divinely desired; certain Psalms and prophetic oracles reflect a sapiential and prophetic piety in which it is, at best, secondary.

Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable via relative negation (critique of cult-without-obedience), with a residual, deliberately transmitted diversity of emphasis between priestly and prophetic-sapiential pieties.