Scholars of the Hebrew Bible hold opposing readings of the same texts. A strong modern position takes the chatat as purging the sanctuary of accumulated impurity, with the animal never described as punished; older readings take covering as the governing sense of kipper and read a transfer. The answer bears directly on whether the Christian atonement theories may argue from these rites the way several of them do.
What would resolve this Close philological work on the objects and prepositions the verb kipper takes across the whole priestly corpus, read alongside comparative material from neighbouring ritual systems, rather than through the categories of later theology.
OpenHebrew Bible philology; the study of priestly ritual; comparative ancient Near Eastern religionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion