Sacrifice

Leviticus 1–7 (selections)

Biblical Period

Chapter 1

¹The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying: ²Speak to the Israelite people, and say to them:

When any of you presents an offering of cattle to the Lord, he shall choose his offering from the herd or from the flock.

³If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall make his offering a male without blemish. He shall bring it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, for acceptance in his behalf before the Lord. ⁴He shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering, that it may be acceptable in his behalf, in expiation for him. ⁵The bull shall be slaughtered before the Lord; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall offer the blood, dashing the blood against all sides of the altar which is at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting [ . . . ]. ⁹[ . . . ] and the priest shall turn the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the Lord. [ . . . ]

Chapter 2

¹When a person presents an offering of meal to the Lord, his offering shall be of choice flour; he shall pour oil upon it, lay frankincense on it, ²and present it to Aaron’s sons, the priests. The priest shall scoop out of it a handful of its choice flour and oil, as well as all of its frankincense; and this token portion he shall turn into smoke on the altar, as an offering by fire, of pleasing odor to the Lord. ³And the remainder of the meal offering shall be for Aaron and his sons, a most holy portion from the Lord’s offerings by fire. [ . . . ]

Chapter 3

¹If his offering is a sacrifice of well-being^a—

If he offers of the herd, whether a male or a female, he shall bring before the Lord one without blemish. ²He shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering and slaughter it at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall dash the blood against all sides of the altar. ³He shall then present from the sacrifice of well-being, as an offering by fire to the Lord, the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails; ⁴the two kidneys and the fat that is on them, that is at the loins; and the protuberance on the liver, which he shall remove with the kidneys. ⁵Aaron’s sons shall turn these into smoke on the altar, with the burnt offering which is upon the wood that is on the fire, as an offering by fire, of pleasing odor to the Lord. [ . . . ] ¹⁶[ . . . ] All fat is the Lord’s. ¹⁷It is a law for all time throughout the ages, in all your settlements: you must not eat any fat or any blood.

Chapter 4

¹The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ²Speak to the Israelite people thus:

When a person unwittingly incurs guilt in regard to any of the Lord’s commandments about things not to be done, and does one of them—[ . . . ].

²⁷If any person from among the populace unwittingly incurs guilt by doing any of the things which by the Lord’s commandments ought not to be done, and he realizes his guilt—²⁸or the sin of which he is guilty is brought to his knowledge—he shall bring a female goat without blemish as his offering for the sin of which he is guilty. ²⁹He shall lay his hand upon the head of the purification offering, and the purification offering shall be slaughtered at the place of the burnt offering. ³⁰The priest shall take with his finger some of its blood and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering; and all the rest of its blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar. ³¹He shall remove all its fat, just as the fat is removed from the sacrifice of well-being; and the priest shall turn it into smoke on the altar, for a pleasing odor to the Lord. Thus the priest shall make expiation for him, and he shall be forgiven. [ . . . ]

Chapter 5

¹If a person incurs guilt—

When he has heard a public imprecation^b and—although able to testify as one who has either seen or learned of the matter—he does not give information, so that he is subject to punishment;

²Or when a person touches any unclean thing—be it the carcass of an unclean beast or the carcass of unclean cattle or the carcass of an unclean creeping thing—and the fact has escaped him, and then, being unclean, he realizes his guilt;

³Or when he touches human uncleanness—any such uncleanness whereby one becomes unclean—and, though he has known it, the fact has escaped him, but later he realizes his guilt;

⁴Or when a person utters an oath to bad or good purpose—whatever a man may utter in an oath—and, though he has known it, the fact has escaped him, but later he realizes his guilt in any of these matters—

⁵when he realizes his guilt in any of these matters, he shall confess that wherein he has sinned. ⁶And he shall bring as his penalty to the Lord, for the sin of which he is guilty, a female from the flock, sheep or goat, as a purification offering; and the priest shall make expiation on his behalf for his sin.

⁷But if his means do not suffice for a sheep, he shall bring to the Lord, as his penalty for that of which he is guilty, two turtledoves or two pigeons [ . . . ].

¹¹And if his means do not suffice for two turtledoves or two pigeons, he shall bring as his offering for that of which he is guilty a tenth of an ephah of choice flour for a purification offering; he shall not add oil to it or lay frankincense on it, for it is a purification offering. [ . . . ] ²⁰The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ²¹When a person sins and commits a trespass against the Lord by dealing deceitfully with his fellow in the matter of a deposit or a pledge, or through robbery, or by defrauding his fellow, ²²or by finding something lost and lying about it; if he swears falsely regarding any one of the various things that one may do and sin thereby—²³when one has thus sinned and, realizing his guilt, would restore that which he got through robbery or fraud, or the deposit that was entrusted to him, or the lost thing that he found, ²⁴or anything else about which he swore falsely, he shall repay the principal amount and add a fifth part to it. He shall pay it to its owner when he realizes his guilt. ²⁵Then he shall bring to the priest, as his penalty to the Lord, a ram without blemish from the flock, or the equivalent,^c as a guilt offering. ²⁶The priest shall make expiation on his behalf before the Lord, and he shall be forgiven for whatever he may have done to draw blame thereby. [ . . . ]

Chapter 7

²⁸And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ²⁹Speak to the Israelite people thus: The offering to the Lord from a sacrifice of well-being must be presented by him who offers his sacrifice of well-being to the Lord: ³⁰his own hands shall present the Lord’s offerings by fire. He shall present the fat with the breast, the breast to be elevated as an elevation offering before the Lord; ³¹the priest shall turn the fat into smoke on the altar, and the breast shall go to Aaron and his sons. ³²And the right thigh from your sacrifices of well-being you shall present to the priest as a gift; ³³he from among Aaron’s sons who offers the blood and the fat of the offering of well-being shall get the right thigh as his portion. ³⁴For I have taken the breast of elevation offering and the thigh of gift offering from the Israelites, from their sacrifices of well-being, and given them to Aaron the priest and to his sons as their due from the Israelites for all time.

³⁵Those shall be the perquisites^d of Aaron and the perquisites of his sons from the Lord’s offerings by fire, once they have been inducted^e to serve the Lord as priests; ³⁶these the Lord commanded to be given them, once they had been anointed, as a due from the Israelites for all time throughout the ages.

Notes

Others “peace offering.”

Namely, against one who withholds testimony.

I.e., in currency; cf. v. 15.

Lit. “anointment,” i.e., accruing from anointment.

Lit. “brought forward.”

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Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 1.

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About Tabernacle and Sacrifices

The basic form of religious worship in the Torah is sacrifice. It goes back as far as Cain and Abel, who, as a farmer and a shepherd, respectively, brought offerings to God from the products of their labors (Genesis 4:1–5), and Noah, who made sacrifices to God after the end of the flood. In both cases, the sacrifices follow good fortune and seem to express gratitude. Sacrifices, common in ancient religions, were generally understood as providing sustenance for the gods. The Bible, however, gives no indication that God consumed the sacrifices.1 It is telling that the “Bread of Display,” the loaves of bread placed “before” God in the Tabernacle, was placed in the antechamber and separated from the Holy of Holies by a curtain (Exodus 25:23–40; 26:31–35). This contrasts with food offerings in Mesopotamian rituals in which curtains were drawn around the image of the deity and the table when sacrificial food was brought in for the deity to eat. The biblical partition makes clear that the bread of display is not actually eaten by God but is only a token gift.

The laws delineate two main types of sacrifice: gift offerings and expiatory offerings. Gift offerings express devotion, reverence, and gratitude to God. They include the burnt offering, in which an animal is burned in its entirety as a gift to God;2 the grain offering, an act of tribute, which is mostly burned as a gift to God but part of which is eaten by priests; and the sacrifice of well-being (the exact meaning is uncertain; some translations render this as “peace offering”), which is mostly eaten by the worshiper who is celebrating by feasting in God’s presence. Expiatory offerings are brought for various types of offenses: the purification offering (older translations rendered the term, incorrectly, as “sin offering”), to purge the sanctuary of impurity caused by bodily impurities and by certain types of wrongdoing, which defile it, and the penalty or guilt offering, to make reparations for deliberate or unintentional trespass against sacred objects and the sacred domain, and for false oaths in property offenses.

The laws about the Tabernacle—God’s sanctuary in the Israelite camp (also known as the Tent of Meeting and the Sanctuary)3—include detailed instructions about its design and construction (see Sanctuaries) and about the types of sacrifice that will be offered in it, as well as rules about ritual purity and impurity to protect the sanctuary from becoming ritually impure.4 Many instructions about sacrifices and ritual impurity deal with procedures performed exclusively by the priests. In Mesopotamia the priests were forbidden to reveal such instructions to laypersons. Their inclusion in the Torah reflects the principle that God’s instructions on every subject, even those expressly addressed to the priests, are made known to the public as a whole. There are no esoteric teachings reserved for a spiritual, intellectual, or clerical elite.

The Tabernacle is to consist of three carefully delimited sections, listed in descending order of holiness and restricted access: (a) the inner sanctum or “Holy of Holies,” where the Ark and Tablets of the Covenant are kept; (b) its antechamber, “the Holy Place”—both of these are inside the Tent of Meeting, the Tabernacle proper; and (c) the surrounding courtyard, with the sacrificial altar. The law describes the daily activities of the Tabernacle—the kindling of its lamps, the daily sacrifices and incense burning—and it describes the priestly vestments and the ceremony for ordaining the priests. Finally, God identifies the artisans he has endowed with the skills to carry out the construction.

These laws were given at Mount Sinai. While Moses is on the mountain with God he receives the instructions about the Tabernacle’s design and construction. After it has been constructed, God transfers his Presence to the Tabernacle and, from within the Tabernacle, God gives Moses detailed laws about sacrifices and laws to protect it from ritual impurity so that it will remain fit for God’s Presence (Leviticus 1–16). The Tabernacle serves as God’s portable earthly abode; he will continue to dwell among the people as their divine lord after they leave Sinai. The people will worship God at the Tabernacle, and he will issue future commandments there (Exodus 25:22). Thus Israel will always experience God’s guiding Presence, thereby fulfilling the purpose of the exodus.

Various allusions in these chapters relate the Tabernacle to the creation of the world. The instructions appear as seven separate divine commands, culminating in the Sabbath (see Exodus 25:1; 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1, 12), like the creation of the world in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. The dietary laws, which require the separation (“setting apart”) of pure species of animals from impure ones (Leviticus 11; 20:24–26), emulate God’s acts of separation whereby he created an orderly world out of chaos, separating light from darkness, the upper waters from the lower waters, the oceans from the dry land, and day from night. This lends a cosmic significance to the construction of the Tabernacle and the laws of food purity.

Notes

1. A few references, apparently vestigial, call sacrifices “food of God” (Leviticus 21:6 and Numbers 28:2), because, as B. A. Levine explains, they are offered to God in the same way as food is served to humans. Most ancient societies believed that gods required food and relied on sacrifices for energy and strength. (These societies had rituals for feeding the statues of gods.) The Torah, however, preserved the common ancient idiom but understood the process differently. God did not need sacrifices for his sustenance but because he desired the devotion and the fellowship of his worshipers. B. A. Levine, “Leviticus,” in The JPS Torah Commentary [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989], 17.

2. Some old translations translate the term for burnt offering as “holocaust,” a term derived from Greek, meaning “wholly burnt.” The term was aptly adopted to refer to the Nazi extermination of Jews in World War II.

3. The Tabernacle is referred to by three terms, each expressing different aspects of it: mikdash (“sanctuary”), lit. “holy place,” “sanctum,” referring to its sacred dimension; mishkan (“Tabernacle”), lit. “abode,” that is, God’s dwelling; and ohel mo’ed (“Tent of Meetingh”), an oracle site, the place where God would communicate with Moses. “Sanctuary” refers to the entire sacred compound.the covered structure and the courtyard surrounding it. “Tabernacle” and “Tent of Meeting” sometimes refer to the entire compound and at other times only the covered structure.

4. The terms impure and unclean do not refer to dirtiness but to a ritual state caused by bodily discharges, a skin condition translated (misleadingly) as “leprosy,” and contact with human corpses and certain animal carcasses. Impurity was thought to have a physical quality that spreads and contaminates whatever it touches. If allowed to accumulate in the sanctuary, God would abandon the sanctuary.

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Sacrifice

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 7

Notes

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Sacrifice

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 7

Notes

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