In his quotation from Hosea--"I desire charity, and not sacrifice"--Jesus speaks as if with a transitional accent, as compared with the declaration that sacrifices imply deified Wrath. The contempt of Ecclesiastes for "the sacrifice of fools who know not that they are doing evil" (v. 1), has here become a great and far-reaching affirmation, which must have impressed the orthodox Jews as atheism. For, although there are passages in several psalms and in the prophets which disparage sacrifice, they were all interpreted by the Rabbins, as now by Christian theologians, as meaning their purification and spiritualization--by no means their abolition. Indeed, this higher interpretation of sacrifices appears to have given them fresh lease; and in the time of Jesus, when to the priesthood remained only control over their religious ordinances, the sacrifices were apparently preserved with increased rigour. Jesus himself, unless the gospeller (Matt. v. 23, 24) has softened his language, had at one time only demanded that none should offer a gift at the altar until he had done justice to any who had aught against him. But a remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 5) represents Jesus as going to the world with a quotation from Psalm xl. 6, 7, for a clause of which a parenthesis is given, saying: "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not (Thou hast furnished me this body)-- In whole burnt offerings and sin offerings thou delighted not: Then said I (in that chapter of the book it is written for me), 'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.'" The sentence preserved by Eusebius, however, shows that his attitude toward sacrifices was not merely to "lift" from men (Heb. x. 9, anairei) the burden of sacrifice, but to denounce it as an offering to the devil. "Unless ye cease from sacrificing, the Wrath shall not cease from you." In this sentence "the Wrath" (hê orgê) is clearly a personification. It does not in the same form occur elsewhere in the Bible. Matthew and Mark report John the Baptist as speaking of "the impending wrath," and Paul occasionally gives "Wrath" a quasi-personification (e. g., "children of Wrath," Eph. ii. 1-3). These expressions, and the "destroyer" Abaddon or Apollyon, of Revelations ix. and (xii. 12) the devil "in great temper" (thymon), all show that the Jewish mind had become familiar with the idea of a dark and evil power quite detached from official relation to Jahveh, no longer "the wrath of God" executing divine judgments, but organized Violence, eager to afflict mankind as the creation of his enemy.