The Calendar Is Built on the Daily Offering

Chapters 28 and 29 are the only full schedule of Israel’s public offerings in the Torah. Leviticus 23 names the feasts and their days, but it gives the congregation’s sacrifices only for some of them; this is the priests’ working calendar.

The LORD calls the offerings “my bread”, lachmi, the language of a meal set before a guest. “A sweet savour” is reach nichoach, a soothing or restful smell, first used when Noah sacrificed after the flood (Genesis 8:21). “Due season” is from the same root as mo’ed, the appointed time.

“Continual” is tamid, the word that became the name of this offering. When Daniel 8:11 says “the daily sacrifice was taken away”, the Hebrew is simply “the tamid”. Two yearling lambs a day comes to more than seven hundred a year before any feast is counted.

“At even” is literally “between the two evenings”, the same phrase that sets the time of the Passover lamb in Exodus 12:6. Elijah prayed on Carmel “at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice” (1 Kings 18:36); this is the lamb he was keeping time by.

A tenth of an ephah is an omer: Exodus 16:36 gives the measure and the daily manna ration was an omer a head. Each lamb comes with one person’s day of bread. “Beaten oil” is pressed by pounding in a mortar, the finest grade, the same kind reserved for the lampstand in Exodus 27:20.

The reference is to Exodus 29:38–42, where the daily lambs were first commanded at the foot of the mountain. The Hebrew “which was made at mount Sinai” can also mean it was actually offered there, which would make this the one practice carried unbroken from Sinai to Moab.

“Strong wine” is shekar, the word usually rendered “strong drink” and forbidden to priests entering the tent (Leviticus 10:9). What the priest may not drink before the LORD is poured out to him. The quarter hin of wine matches the quarter hin of oil in verse 5.

The evening lamb repeats verse 4’s wording almost exactly and adds “as the meat offering of the morning”: the evening is a copy of the morning, grain and wine and all. The day of offering is closed with the same measure it was opened with.

No Sabbath offering has been prescribed anywhere in the Torah before this verse. Leviticus 23:3 made the day holy but named no sacrifice. The Sabbath doubles the daily portion exactly, two lambs and two tenths of flour, as the manna of Exodus 16:22 came double on the sixth day.

The Hebrew reads “the burnt offering of sabbath in its sabbath”, meaning each Sabbath’s offering belongs to that Sabbath and cannot be saved up or made good another week. Missed, it is missed. The same idiom returns in verse 14 for the months.

“The beginnings of your months” are the new moons. Leviticus 23 never lists the new moon among the feasts, yet 10:10 already had silver trumpets blown over its offerings, and 1 Samuel 20:5 shows Saul keeping it at his table with David expected.

The grain follows the size of the animal: three tenths for a bullock, two for a ram, and, in the next verse, one for a lamb. The measures work like a sliding scale that can be applied to any combination of beasts.

“Several” in 1611 meant separate or individual, as in “severally”. “A several tenth deal” is a tenth apiece, one for each lamb. The Hebrew doubles the word, “a tenth, a tenth”, to say the same thing.

Half a hin of wine for a bullock, a third for a ram, a quarter for a lamb: the wine keeps step with the flour. “Every month throughout the months” is literally “month in its month”, the same construction as the Sabbath’s in verse 10.

Only this goat, of all the sin offerings in the calendar, is said to be offered “unto the LORD”. The Talmud (Chullin 60b) spun a legend from the phrase, that God asks atonement for himself for having made the moon the lesser light. The phrase itself says only to whom it is given.

The Passover gets one line and no offering. Its lamb was a household sacrifice, killed and eaten family by family (Exodus 12:3–11), not a congregational one, so a public calendar has nothing to prescribe for it beyond its date.

“The feast” is chag, the word for a pilgrim festival, related to the Arabic hajj. Passover is a day; the chag is a week. Its rule of unleavened bread for seven days goes back to Exodus 12:15.

“Servile work” is melekhet avodah, the work of one’s trade or labour. The Sabbath and the Day of Atonement forbid “any work” at all; festival days forbid only ordinary labour, which is why food could be prepared on them (Exodus 12:16).

The offering for each day of this feast is exactly the new moon offering of verse 11: two bullocks, one ram, seven lambs. “Without blemish” is tamim, whole or sound, the word rendered “without spot” in verse 3; the phrase “unto you” lays the soundness of the beast on the offerers.

The flour is solet, fine flour sifted from the heart of the wheat, never coarse meal. A bullock’s three tenths is enough for three people’s daily bread by the omer of Exodus 16.

Seven lambs a day for seven days makes forty nine lambs in the week, with fourteen bullocks, seven rams and seven goats. Sevens are laid on sevens, and the Feast of Weeks will count seven more sevens from this feast (Leviticus 23:15).

The new moon goat was “unto the LORD”; this one is “to make an atonement for you”. The two phrases describe the same offering from its two ends, the one who receives it and the ones it covers. Kipper, to atone, is the root of Yom Kippur.

Only the morning lamb is named because the festival offerings were brought after it, between the morning tamid and the evening one. That is an inference from the wording, and it is the order later Jewish tradition records for the temple service.

“The meat of the sacrifice” is lechem, bread, the word of verse 2: “my bread”. In 1611 “meat” meant food of any kind, as in “meat and drink”. The festival offerings are the LORD’s daily table for the week.

The seventh day of the feast is a second holy day, as Exodus 13:6 already said. Later Jewish tradition dated the crossing of the sea to this day, reckoning from the departure on the fifteenth; the Pentateuch itself gives no date for the crossing.

This is the Feast of Weeks, counted fifty days in Leviticus 23:15–16, from which comes the Greek name Pentecost, “fiftieth”. The “new meat offering” is the two leavened loaves of Leviticus 23:17, the only leavened bread offered at the altar in the year.

Leviticus 23:18 prescribes for this same day one bullock and two rams with seven lambs. Here it is two bullocks and one ram. The Talmud (Menachot 45b) resolved the difference by counting both sets, the one in Leviticus going with the loaves and this one with the day.

Added up, the grain for the day comes to fifteen tenths, an ephah and a half: six for the two bullocks, two for the ram, seven for the lambs. The same fifteen tenths belong to every new moon and every day of unleavened bread.

Unlike the Passover week, the day of firstfruits is a single day, so these seven lambs are offered once. The two spring feasts carry the same daily set of animals, so the chief difference in cost between them is their length.

The Hebrew omits the words “sin offering” here, which verses 15 and 22 had; only the purpose is given, “to make an atonement for you”. The goat belongs to every occasion in the schedule from the new moon onward.

The parenthesis is the King James marking a Hebrew aside that breaks into the list: “they shall be unto you without blemish”. The closing words name the daily lamb’s grain and drink offerings separately, so none of the accompanying gifts can lapse on a feast day.