Thread by @JoelBaden

#Leviticus 4:3-35

The “sin” offering. But we’re not calling it that.

We know the malady: unintentional sin. Now we get the treatment. It comes in four flavors, but the underlying procedure and concept is the same. And it’s absolutely crucial to understanding P’s system.

I’m going to start with flavor 4: the normal person who commits an unintentional sin. Since, after all, most of us are normal people. And so were most of the Israelites, too. (Kingdom of priests my ass.)

First things first, you have to know you screwed up. Did you unwittingly violate the sabbath? The moment that you realize what day it is, you’re obligated. Or the moment someone yells out the window “Dude, it’s Saturday!” That’s when you’re on the hook.

So first, bring a female goat. That’s the assigned animal for this offering. Gotta lay the hands, because this animal needs to get credited to you. Then the animal gets killed, and no one cares by whom, because, as I’ve said, it ain’t the killing that matters. It’s the blood.

Some of the blood gets daubed on the horns of the altar by the priest; the rest gets poured out. The fat gets burned on the altar - all fat is YHWH’s remember - but all the rest of the animal gets burned outside the camp. No one gets to eat any part of it. (Except YHWH.)

But it’s the blood that’s the important part here. Burning the fat makes a nice smell for YHWH; burning the rest of the animal is just disposal. The blood does the real work. Which is purification of the altar and, by extension, the rest of the sanctuary.

This is why many of us insist on calling the sin offering a purification offering (or similar term). It may be occasioned by unintentional sin, but its function is to purify. It removes sin from the sacred space that the sin has contaminated.

More importantly, as we’ll see, it’s an offering brought for purification of the sacred space even when no sin has been committed (as after birth, for instance).

But why, you ask, does the sacred space need purifying after I’ve committed unintentional sin? Don’t I need it?

No - a thousand times no. This isn’t Christianity, it’s ancient Israelite priestly animal sacrificial ritual.

When you sin - so sayeth P - what is contaminated by the sin isn’t you or your soul (🤮) or your body. It’s the sanctuary. You’ve created ritual dirt.

Sins - like impurities, which we’ll come to later on - make the sanctuary unclean, and, for the deity that lives there, increasingly uncomfortable to live in. Your sin dirties up YHWH’s home. And since you made the mess - even by accident - you have to clean up the mess.

So you bring this purification offering, and the blood - the ritual detergent - removes the sin from the altar and sanctuary to which it is clinging. You’re not in trouble. You just need to take responsibility for your actions, and make things right in YHWH’s house.

And what about you yourself? Don’t you need the sin to be taken from you? No - you never had any sin attached to you. That’s not how sin works. What you had attached to you was responsibility for having caused a mess.

So when the priest applies the blood, it purifies the sacred space *on your behalf* - you’ve now done the reparative work necessary - and you, the text tells us, are forgiven. Not because sin has been removed from you - because you removed the sin you caused from the sanctuary.

It’s just what happens with a kid. My daughter leaves her glass of milk on the counter. The cat knocks it over. It was an accident, but it’s her responsibility to clean it up. She’s not in trouble, or dirty. So as soon as she gets to it, it’s all good again.

But what if she decides not to clean it up, because, you know, it’s just one of those days with her? Then she’s not forgiven. And the smell and stain from the spill will just get worse and worse. That’s a bad thing for all of us, but especially me. (I’m YHWH in this scenario.)

And what if the milk gets spilled under the fridge or something, and no one ever realizes that it happened? It’ll still get worse and worse, but she’ll never know that she needs to clean it up!

There is a system in place for such situations. We just haven’t gotten there yet.

Recognizing how this ritual works is key to understanding almost all of the priestly cultic system. It’s all about YHWH’s home, and keeping it clean from sins (and impurities - wait for it). It is emphatically not about you, the individual. I’ll say more about this as we go.

Last things. The type of animal offered, and the placement of the blood, varies depending on who has committed the unintentional sin. For the normal person, it’s a female goat or sheep, and the blood goes on the horns of the sacrificial altar.

But if it’s the high priest, or the entire community, everything gets amped up. It’s a bull, and the blood goes not on the outer altar, but gets sprinkled on the curtain enclosing the innermost chamber, and put on the horns of the incense altar inside the Tabernacle.

The more important the sinner, the more the sin penetrates the sanctuary, and thus the more dangerous it is, and thus the more valuable the sacrifice, and the more sacred the space that requires direct purification. Hierarchy - it’s just what priests do.

Many of the concepts here will come back repeatedly in the chapters to follow. But this is the whole deal: contamination and purification. Making messes and cleaning them up. Individual responsibility for divine comfort and thus corporate well-being. It’s a system!

*A couple of important addenda/corrections:

1. The only purification offerings that are disposed of outside the camp are the extra special ones, from the high priest and the community. Because the priests can’t benefit from their own messes. Thanks, @lianemfeldman.

2. The key word for understanding the purpose of this offering comes at the end of the ritual: the priest purifies (כפר) the sacred space on behalf of the offeror. Translations often make that into “expiate” or “atone,” which has a moral connotation rather than a janitorial one.

The atoning here, if there’s any, is in the reparative act of bringing the offering in the first place. The sacrifice itself doesn’t atone - it purifies. This is no small thing. It’s the major misunderstanding of the whole system for the past 2000 years.