The Holy Portion and the Honest Measure

“Oblation” is terumah, the word for a portion lifted off and given to God, used of the heave offering. Here a strip of the land itself is lifted off. The Hebrew gives no unit; the King James supplies “reeds”. The Greek reads twenty thousand, not ten, for the breadth.

The sanctuary square of five hundred matches 42:20. “Suburbs” is migrash, the open pasture ring around Levitical cities in Numbers 35:2–5. In 1611 “suburbs” meant simply the land lying just outside a place, not housing. A fifty-cubit empty belt keeps anything from pressing against the wall.

Within the priests’ strip sits the sanctuary, and in the middle of it the “most holy place”. The measuring moves inward from a region to a square to a room, the reverse of the order of chapters 40 to 42, which went from the gates to the house.

Under Joshua 21 the priests lived in towns scattered across the tribes; Jeremiah came from one of them, Anathoth (Jeremiah 1:1). In the new arrangement their houses stand in the holy strip itself, around the sanctuary.

“For twenty chambers” is odd in Hebrew, and the Greek reads “cities to dwell in”. The two phrases are close in Hebrew letters, ‘esrim leshakhot against ‘arim lashavet, and many translations follow the Greek. The Levites receive a strip of equal size to the priests’.

Jerusalem had been a Jebusite town taken by David and called “the city of David” (2 Samuel 5:9), the king’s own holding. The new city belongs to no tribe and no dynasty: it is “for the whole house of Israel”.

The prince’s land flanks the central square on both sides, running east toward the Jordan and west toward the sea. It is long and generous, but bounded by the tribal portions north and south; chapter 48:21–22 repeats the arrangement.

“My princes” is plural, recalling the kings of the past. The verb “oppress” is the one used in 22:29 of those who “vexed the poor and needy”. 1 Kings 21 records the classic case: Ahab and Jezebel had Naboth killed to take his vineyard. A king with his own land has no pretext for taking another’s.

“Exactions” is gerushot, literally “drivings out”, evictions, from the verb garash, to expel. The complaint is not only about taxes but about princes forcing families off their land. “Let it suffice you” is the same cry of “enough” addressed to Israel in 44:6.

Leviticus 19:36 commanded “just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin”. Amos 8:5 accused the merchants of “making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances”. The ephah measured dry goods and the bath liquids.

Both the ephah and the bath are fixed at a tenth of a homer. “Homer” is related to chamor, a donkey: roughly a donkey’s load. Modern estimates of the actual volumes vary widely, but the relationship between them is what the verse fixes.

“The shekel shall be twenty gerahs” repeats Exodus 30:13. Twenty, twenty-five and fifteen make sixty, which matches the Babylonian mina of sixty shekels, whereas older Israelite reckoning seems to have used fifty. The exiles were living with Babylonian weights daily.

A sixth of an ephah from each homer is a sixtieth of the harvest, less than two per cent, a light levy beside the tithe of ten. Wheat and barley, the two main grain crops, are both included at the same rate.

Oil is taken at a tenth of a bath from each cor: one part in a hundred. The verse explains its own units twice, the cor being “an homer of ten baths; for ten baths are an homer”, as if to leave no room for a merchant’s dispute.

One lamb in two hundred is half of one per cent of the flock. “Fat pastures” is mashqeh, well-watered land, from the verb to give drink. “To make reconciliation” is kipper, to make atonement: the levy exists to fund atonement, not to enrich anyone.

“The people of the land” was, before the exile, the name for the landed citizens of Judah, the group that put Josiah on the throne in 2 Kings 21:24. Here all of them give to the prince, and the prince gives to the altar.

2 Chronicles 31:3 says Hezekiah gave “the king’s portion of his substance for the burnt offerings... for the sabbaths, and for the new moons, and for the set feasts”, almost the same list. The prince takes over a role the good kings had played.

No first-day cleansing of the sanctuary appears in the Levitical calendar, and Ezekiel’s calendar has no Day of Atonement. The Babylonian new year festival in the month of Nisan included a rite of purifying the temple, a practice the exiles could have seen at first hand.

The blood goes on the “posts”, mezuzot, of the house: the word used for the doorposts marked with lamb’s blood in Exodus 12:7. The house of God is marked on its doorposts two weeks before Passover, as Israel’s houses were marked on the night of the exodus.

The Greek reads “in the seventh month, on the first day of the month”, giving two cleansings, one in each half of the year. “Erreth” is shogeh, sin committed unintentionally (Leviticus 4:2; Numbers 15:22–29), and “simple” is peti, one too naive to know better.

Of the three great pilgrim feasts, Ezekiel names Passover and the feast of the seventh month; the feast of Weeks, Pentecost, is missing from his calendar. Unleavened bread for seven days follows Exodus 12:18.

In Leviticus 4 a bullock was the sin offering for the anointed priest or the whole congregation (4:3, 14), while a ruler brought a male goat (4:23). The prince here brings the bullock for himself and the people together, in the place of the congregation’s representative.

Seven bullocks and seven rams daily for seven days make forty-nine of each. Numbers 28:19 prescribed two bullocks, one ram and seven lambs a day for Passover week. Ezekiel’s scale is far larger, and the lambs are gone.

An ephah of grain with each bullock and each ram, and a hin of oil with each ephah. Numbers 28:12 had three tenths of an ephah for a bullock and two tenths for a ram. Everything in Ezekiel’s provision is more generous than the older rule.

The fifteenth of the seventh month is the feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:34), though it is not named. Numbers 29:12–34 prescribed a descending series of bullocks, thirteen down to seven, seventy in all. Ezekiel makes the autumn feast identical to the spring one.