Leviticus 6: Laws for Priests Concerning Offerings

Leviticus 6:8-30 is addressed to the priests who will be working in the temple. We are given a little bit more detail about some of the sacrifices, but the emphasis is not on relating large amounts of new procedures. Rather, the emphasis seems to be on respecting the commands God is giving. There are four paragraphs in this portion of chapter six, and I will say a little something about each one.

The first paragraph is about burnt offerings. Here, the priests are instructed to wear their special linen garments and undergarments when cleaning the ashes off the altar of burnt offering. Next they must take off their special garments and wear normal clothes to take the ashes outside the camp. These instructions, it seems to me, emphasize the holiness and respectability of God and His offerings. Since the altar and the offerings are God's, and therefore holy, they must be treated with respect. Also, as a non-priest, seeing the priests treat the altar in this way should remind me of God's holiness. More interestingly (I think), the priests are told to keep the fire on the altar of burnt offering burning continually, day and night (which makes me wonder how ashes would be cleaned off of it). If this command is followed, there should always be a priest available since someone always needs to be around to tend to the fire. If the fire is always lit, and a priest is always accessible, one could come to make a sacrifice at literally any time of the day or night. All of the offerings so far are made on the altar of burnt offering, so whether one comes with a burnt offering, a grain offering, a peace offering, a sin offering, or a guilt offering, the altar will be ready and a priest should be there to take it. The greater significance of this seems to be that God is always ready to accept a sacrifice. I imagine what He wants, especially for peace, sin, and guilt offerings, is for the offering to be brought the moment one realizes one's guilt, which is a very heartwarming thought.

The second paragraph is about grain offerings. Here, the focus seems to be on the holiness of grain offerings, and God's ownership of them. I think I mentioned before that God wants to prevent anyone from thinking that offerings are 'service-industry' type transactions, and that idea comes across quite strongly here. After offering the memorial portion of a grain offering the priests may take the rest of the flour to bake it and eat it. However, they are not allowed to bake it with leaven, and they must eat it in a holy place--in the court of the tent of meeting. God then goes on to say, "I have given it as their portion of my food offerings. It is a thing most holy, like the sin offering and the guilt offering" (v.17). The food is a gift from God, not payment from a human. Moreover, even though the flour is going to be used for the ordinary end of sustenance, it is not ordinary itself. It is holy. As reminders of its holiness, it must be baked without leaven and eaten in a holy place. Interestingly, it seems that it must also be eaten in public (I didn't go back and look, but I assume that the court of the tent of meeting is, being a court, at least a semi-public area). This might help keep the priests accountable with respect to what they do with portions of the offerings they are supposed to eat (so they don't sell it or something like that), and might help remind non-priests that they are not just paying the priests to give offerings for them.

The third paragraph is about "the offering that Aaron and his sons shall offer on the day when he is anointed" (v.20). My guess is that this is not a one-time offering, but that it is to be given by each priest when he is anointed. But I am not entirely sure. There are a few narrative chapters coming up soon, so we may find out then. The offering is to be a grain offering of a certain kind, and in this paragraph we find out that offerings given by priests are to be completely burned. Unlike offerings given by others, the priests do not burn just a part and get the rest. One way this could be justified is on grounds of fairness. Since no one else gets part of their offering returned, neither do the priests. But this raises a question: why doesn't everyone get some part of their offering back? Is this a demonstration of divine stinginess? If my analysis from two posts ago is correct God is certainly not stingy, so what is going on? My first thought is that, by getting nothing material in return for giving an offering, one is prevented from having certain ulterior motives for bringing sacrifices. For example, I have heard in sermons on 1 Corinthians that people would sacrifice animals in the Greek temples mainly because it was a cheap (or free, I can't recall) way to have them butchered and cooked. A system that allows for this kind of behavior is obviously antithetical to the goal of bringing people to repentance and relationship with God, and certainly does not encourage respect for the holiness of God, the tabernacle, or the sacrifices. Thus, no one gets anything material in return for offering a sacrifice to God.

The fourth paragraph is about sin offerings. As you may recall, sin offering procedures were divided by group and subgroup. The groups were corporate offenders, which were priests and Israel as a whole, and individual offenders, which were leaders and commoners. Here, we are only concerned with corporate offenders. The particular instruction of Leviticus 6 is that if blood from a sin offering is brought into the tent of meeting (which covers exactly the two cases of corporate sin offerings), none of the offering is to be eaten by the priests. Instead, the whole animal must be burned. Given the command that an offering from a priest must be burned entirely it makes sense that priests' sin offerings must be burned entirely. But why must offerings for the other kind of corporate sin also be burned entirely? Two thoughts come to mind. One is that a prohibition on eating these offerings might be intended as a reminder of the seriousness of the offense for which they are offered. Intuitively, it is a big deal if all of Israel sins, so it would make sense if special procedures apply. The other thought is that, since the priests will be the experts in the law, they will probably be well situated to notice and then announce corporate sin. But if they get delicious steaks whenever they make a convincing argument for corporate sin they will have a motive for making up sins where they don't exist. Since this would obviously be no good, the priests must burn the entire sin offering for corporate sins. (The idea is also that people will have a better grasp of whether or not they have sinned individually making them far less vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.)

The section on sin offerings in chapter 6 also gives us a little foreshadowing of the cleanliness laws. When any blood from a sin offering gets on clothes, those clothes must be washed in a holy place. Then, if the washing took place in an earthenware vessel, it must be broken, but if it took place in a bronze one, it must be scrubbed and rinsed. Presumably, the bit about breaking and rinsing is aimed at least partly at health concerns, but there will be more about this soon.

I guess this is enough for one day, so go in peace, and God bless!