A complex of practices commonly identified as “sacrifice” played a cen-tral role in the religion of ancient Israel. When modern scholars investi-gate and interpret ancient Israelite sacrifice, what is this object: “ancient Israelite sacrifice”? To what taxonomic category is it to be assigned? How is it to be understood, made sense of, interpreted? What assumptions about “sacrifice” do scholarly interpreters bring to this specific investiga-tion? What interpretive effects follow from particular assumptions? These broad theoretical and methodological questions form the background for my reflections in this paper on a set of focused questions about sacrifice as symbolic action. Assuming that “sacrifice” is correctly identified as a particular type of ritual activity, is ritual properly identified and inter-preted as symbolic activity; and, on this basis, is Israelite sacrifice cor-rectly interpreted as symbolic activity by scholars? Did ancient Israelites understand and interpret sacrifice to be symbolic activity? Did they inten-tionally construct and perform sacrificial rituals to function symbolically?