Holy Food and Acceptable Gifts

The chapter falls into three speeches, at verses 1, 17 and 26. The first continues the rules for priests from chapter 21, moving from their bodies and families to what they may eat.

Separate themselves from the holy things is an odd demand of men whose food those holy things are. It means keeping away at the times when they are unclean. The holy things, qodashim, are the people’s gifts; the priests are trustees of what others have dedicated.

Cut off from my presence, millefanay, from before my face, is a unique form of the penalty. Elsewhere it is cutting off from among the people. For a priest, whose whole work is done before the LORD, the loss is framed as banishment from that presence.

Unclean by the dead is tame’ nephesh, corpse impurity, the condition Numbers 19 treats at length. The list gathers cases from earlier chapters: the skin affliction of chapter 13, the discharge of chapter 15, and the emission of 15:16.

The creeping thing points back to 11:29–31, the eight small creatures whose dead bodies defile. A man of whom he may take uncleanness covers any unclean person, so the list ends by generalising rather than attempting to name every case.

Two conditions for eating: he must wash, and he must wait. Bathing alone does not bring the priest back to the table until evening, and evening alone does not do it without bathing.

The Mishnah begins with this verse. Its first question (Berakhot 1:1) is when the evening Shema may be recited, and its answer is from the hour the priests go in to eat their offerings, that is, when the sun is down. Because it is his food: the holy portions were the priest’s livelihood.

Ezekiel 44:31 repeats the rule for the priests of his temple vision, and Ezekiel, himself a priest, protested in 4:14 that he had never eaten what died of itself or was torn in pieces. For ordinary Israelites the same food brought only washing (17:15).

Lest they bear sin for it, and die: the threat is from God, not from a court. Eli’s sons took the sacrificial meat before its time and treated the offering of the LORD with contempt (1 Samuel 2:12–17), and both died on the same day (4:11).

Stranger here is zar, an outsider to the priestly family, which includes every non-priestly Israelite. It is the word used of Nadab and Abihu’s strange fire in 10:1. The sojourner, toshav, and the hired servant, sakhir, live with the priest but are not his household.

Bought with his money and born in his house are the same two phrases Genesis 17:12–13 uses for the slaves circumcised in Abraham’s household. In both places the bought and the house-born are counted as belonging to the family.

Married unto a stranger means to a man outside the priestly line, ’ish zar. An offering of the holy things is terumath haqqodashim, the contributions set aside for priests. By marriage she has joined another household, and its table replaces her father’s.

As in her youth: returning to her father’s house restores her to her place as a daughter. Having no child matters, because a child would tie her to her husband’s line. Tamar was sent home as a widow in the same way, remain a widow at thy father’s house (Genesis 38:11).

Unwittingly is bishgagah, by error. Adding the fifth part, twenty percent, is the same penalty as for trespass against holy things in 5:16. He pays in kind, giving the priest the equivalent of what he ate and the fifth besides.

The subject is the priests again: they must not profane the holy things of the children of Israel. The gifts belong to the people who gave them before they belong to the priests, and careless handling wrongs both the givers and God.

Suffer them to bear the iniquity of trespass means cause the people to incur guilt, by letting unauthorised persons eat. The Hebrew is compressed, and its pronouns can be read more than one way, but the sense is that priests answer for how the people’s gifts are guarded.

The second speech of the chapter turns from what priests may eat to what anyone may offer. Its subject is no longer the priestly household but the animals brought to the altar.

Vows and freewill offerings are nedarim and nedavoth, two Hebrew words that sound almost alike: one is owed, the other given freely. The strangers in Israel are included, so a foreigner living among Israel may bring a burnt offering on the same terms.

Beeves is the old plural of beef, meaning cattle. A burnt offering must be a male, as in 1:3 and 1:10. The male of the flock was the one a herdsman could most easily spare, since the females carried on the herd.

Malachi 1:8 makes this verse a charge against the priests of his day: if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? offer it now unto thy governor. A blemished gift would insult a human ruler, let alone God.

Perfect is tamim, whole or complete, the word used of Noah, perfect in his generations (Genesis 6:9), and of the charge to Abram, walk before me, and be thou perfect (17:1). The animal’s wholeness uses the word for a man’s integrity.

Blind, scurvy and scabbed repeat three of the priestly defects of 21:18–20. Maimed is charuts, cut or mutilated, and a wen, yabbeleth, is probably a running sore or wart. Offerer, priest and animal are measured by the same kind of list.

Superfluous is sarua‘, the word that barred a priest in 21:18. The same defect that keeps a priest from the altar does not keep a lamb from being a freewill offering. Lacking is qalut, stunted or shortened, found only here.

Four words, bruised, crushed, broken, cut, describe four ways of castrating an animal. Neither shall ye make any offering thereof in your land was read by the rabbis as a ban on castrating animals in the land of Israel at all, not only on offering them.

A stranger here is ben nekhar, a foreigner, not the resident ger of verse 18. Buying a blemished animal from a foreign trader does not make it acceptable. Their corruption is in them, mashchatham, their damage, a word from the verb for ruin.

The third speech gives rules of time: the earliest day an animal may be offered, the day it may not share with its mother, and the latest moment its meat may be eaten.

Seven days under the dam and the eighth day onward: the same calendar as circumcision (12:3). Exodus 22:30 gives the rule for a firstborn ox or sheep, seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it me.

The Hebrew says it and its son, ’otho we’eth beno, using the word for a son of the young animal. Deuteronomy 22:6–7 forbids taking a mother bird with her young. Leviticus gives no reason, and the rule stands on its own.

Thanksgiving is todah, the offering of 7:12, which came with loaves and cakes. Psalm 107:22 calls Israel to sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and the title of Psalm 100, a psalm of praise, uses the same word, todah.

The thanksgiving meat must be eaten the same day, stricter than the two days allowed for a vowed peace offering (19:6). The manna had a similar rule: let no man leave of it till the morning (Exodus 16:19).

Keep my commandments, and do them: mitsvoth, the word for commandments, is here joined to the two verbs of obedience. The chapter’s detailed rules are gathered into one closing sentence before the final two verses.

I will be hallowed is niqdashti, the verb of 10:3, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, spoken after Nadab and Abihu died. Later Judaism drew from this verse the terms kiddush hashem, sanctifying the name, and chillul hashem, profaning it.

To be your God, lihyoth lakhem le’lohim, is the promise first made to Abraham, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed (Genesis 17:7). The Exodus is named as the act that fulfilled it, and the chapter ends where the priestly section began, with that name.