The Priestly conception of god, you will recall, is of an immortal and asexual being. Think back to the first creation story, which is the Priestly creation story. To enter the realm of the holy, in which there is neither death nor procreation, requires a separation from death and procreation. It is association with death and sexuality that renders one impure and disqualifies one from entering the holy sanctuary. That is not to say that one shouldn’t deal with death or sexuality in the ordinary course of life. On the contrary, God explicitly commands humans to be fruitful and multiply, and he does that in the P-source, right? In Genesis 1. He commands proper care of the dead, and he also does that in the P-source. It simply means that one cannot enter the holy sanctuary, God’s realm, when impure through contact with death or sexuality.

So according to Klawans, ritual purification involved separation from those aspects of humanity, death and sex, that are least God-like. To enter God’s realm requires imitation of God or imitatio dei, right, an idea that I put up here, imitatio dei: imitation of god. And Klawans further argues that the concept of ‘imitatio dei’ also explains the practice of sacrifice which, on the face of it, contradicts the idea that you must avoid death in connection with the holy, right? Because sacrifice entails killing right in the sanctuary, killing of animals right in the sanctuary. So Klawans argues, and I quote, that ‘sacrifice involves in part the controlled exercise of complete power over an animal’s life and death.’ Which is, he says ‘…precisely one of the powers that Israel’s God exercises over human beings. As God is to humanity, humans in imitation of God are towards their domesticated animals.’ So the process of sacrifice, I won’t go into his argument here, but Klawans develops a strong argument that the process of sacrifice can be understood itself as an act of imitatio dei, because sacrifice involves a variety of behaviors in the biblical text that are analogous to behaviors attributed elsewhere in the biblical texts to God: the care and feeding and raising of domestic animals, the selection of one that is deemed perfect, control over its life and death and so on. And these are all spoken of in terms that are analogous to terms used to describe God as the shepherd of his flock of Israel and in control of life and death and so on. So Klawans argues that the process of sacrifice, which grants the offerer complete control over life and death, is a kind of ‘imitatio dei.’

— Prof. Christine Hayes, Introduction to the Old Testament (Lecture 9 - The Priestly Legacy: Cult and Sacrifice, Purity and Holinessin Leviticus and Numbers)