Leviticus 4: Sin Offerings

Chapters 4 and 5 of Leviticus talk about different aspects of sin offerings. Today's chapter--chapter 4--addresses the procedures for sin offerings, while chapter 5 gives some specifics about when to bring a sin offering, and what to do if one is very poor. So let's talk about procedures. First, just to get it out the way, chapter 4 explicitly mentions peace offering procedures, and other procedures used earlier in chapter 4 (v. 10, 20, 26, 35). Thus, we probably should not think of peace offerings as incorporating procedures given in chapter 1. It seems that cross-references of this sort will be made explicitly.

There are three intriguing features of chapter 4 that I want to bring up. The first is the division of groups who are to bring sin offerings. The chapter mentions two kinds of entities that can commit a sin, and two categories within each kind. The first kind of entity mentioned is the whole congregation of Israel (a collective), and it can accrue guilt in at least two ways. First, the priest can sin thereby "bringing guilt on the people" (v. 3), and second, the congregation can sin by directly violating one of God's laws (v. 13). Interestingly, the procedure for atoning for both ways of corporate sinning is exactly the same. A bull is killed, blood is sprinkled inside the tent of meeting, it is butchered, part of it is burned on the altar of burnt offering at the entrance to the tent of meeting, and the leftovers are burned outside the camp. We do not know yet what will count as a corporate sin of the second category, but presumably there will be laws that apply not to individuals, but to Israel as a whole. Laws about conduct in war might fall into this category. We will have to wait and see.

What is more curious--and this is the second intriguing point--is that the priest sinning counts as a corporate sin even though he is only an individual. I can think of two potential reasons for this. One is that a sin committed by the priest automatically causes everyone else to become guilty as well. In this case, the congregation would become guilty independent of their own conduct. While this explanation is not obviously absurd, it strikes me as counter-intuitive. As an alternative, consider the role of the priest. His job is to mediate the relationship between God and the people. When the people (or a person) have sinned they cannot approach God directly. Rather, they need the priest, working as God's agent, to act on their behalf to restore the relationship. But if the priest is not obeying God, he cannot be working as His agent and therefore cannot do the work of a priest (which requires him to be God's agent). Thus, if the priest has sinned, the effect is that the whole congregation is cut off from the mechanism of atonement for their sins, thus making the whole congregation guilty. They are not guilty because the sin of someone else has been imputed to them, but because the mechanism for making atonement for their own sins has been broken. Of course, there could be other possibilities too, but at least between the two I have mentioned, the second strikes me as more plausible.

Returning to the explicit text of chapter 4, the second kind of entity that can sin is an individual person. Within this kind, leaders and commoners are distinguished as categories, which brings us to the third intriguing feature I want to mention--the differences and similarities between a leader's and commoner's sin offering. Starting with similarities, members of both groups are to bring a goat (not a bull) and kill it at the entrance to the tent of meeting. Unlike offerings for corporate sins, the priest does not take any blood into the tent of meeting, but instead smears a bit on the horns of the altar of burnt offering. After this, the animal is butchered and sacrificed mostly according to peace offering procedures. The only procedural differences for the two categories is that leaders must bring a male goat and commoners must bring a female goat or lamb. It is not clear to me why there are these particular differences instead of any others. One possibility is that the leader-follower distinction is being attached to gender, which certainly would not have been foreign to the culture of the time (also, I say 'leader-follower' instead of 'leader-commoner' because, presumably, the point of being a leader is that those who aren't leaders follow). Another possibility (though perhaps a more tenuous one) is that the leader-follower, male-female distinction is foreshadowing Christ and the church. Christ is often referred to as a groom and the church as a bride, and Christ was sacrificed for us leaving us to follow suit symbolically by being living sacrifices for God (see Romans 12). Of course, both of my ideas could be mistaken, or both could be correct simultaneously. Whatever the case, the distinction in category is a fascinating one.

This post is already plenty long, so without any discussion I will simply draw your attention to the progression from no mention of atonement, forgiveness, or pleasing aromas in sacrifices for corporate sin, atonement and forgiveness in sacrifices for a leader's sin, and atonement, forgiveness, and a pleasing aroma in sacrifices for a commoner's sin. Is it a commentary on social status and value? Who knows. Happy Boxing Day, and God bless!