The Seventh Month Gathers the Offerings Together

“Blowing” is teru’ah, a shout or a sounding blast, the signal the silver trumpets gave for breaking camp in 10:5–6. The Torah never calls this day a New Year; the name Rosh Hashanah came later, when the seventh month began the civil year.

“Burnt offering” is olah, “that which goes up”, the offering burned whole so that nothing returns to the worshipper or the priest. Every set of animals in these two chapters is built on it; the other offerings are added to an olah, never the other way round.

The flour follows the same sliding scale as the new moon in 28:12, three tenths and two tenths. The seventh month keeps the measures fixed while it multiplies the occasions for using them.

“Throughout the seven lambs” insists that no lamb goes without its tenth of flour. In the seventh month, seven lambs are offered on the first day, again on the tenth, twice seven daily at the feast, and seven on the eighth day.

The goat’s role is stated as its purpose, “to make an atonement for you”, ten days before the Day of Atonement itself. Atonement is not kept for one day of the year; it is already part of the month’s first morning.

Added together, the first day of the seventh month requires three bullocks, two rams, sixteen lambs and two goats: the new moon’s set, the day’s own set and the two daily lambs. “According unto their manner” is mishpat, the prescribed rule for each.

To “afflict your souls” is understood throughout the Bible as fasting: “I humbled my soul with fasting” (Psalm 35:13), and Isaiah 58:3 sets “fasted” and “afflicted our soul” side by side. This tenth day is the only fast the Torah commands.

This is the day on which the jubilee trumpet is sounded every fiftieth year, “in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land” (Leviticus 25:9). The offering set is the same as the trumpet day’s, one bullock, one ram, seven lambs.

Leviticus 16:32 gives the atoning service of this day to the anointed priest, and later practice had the high priest perform even the ordinary offerings on it. The day’s flour is the same fifteen tenths of fine flour as on the first of the month.

The fast falls five days before the largest feast of the year begins on the fifteenth. The calendar puts the day of humbling first and the week of rejoicing after it.

“The sin offering of atonement” is the goat of Leviticus 16:9, whose blood the high priest carried into the most holy place. So the day has two goats slain as sin offerings, this one and that one, besides the goat sent away alive into the wilderness.

Both of Israel’s week long feasts begin on the fifteenth of a month, the full moon of the first month and the full moon of the seventh, six months apart. Exodus 23:16 calls this one “the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year”.

Thirteen bullocks, two rams, fourteen lambs and a goat make thirty animals on the first day, before the daily lambs. It falls when the threshing floors and winepresses have been emptied into the storehouses, which is when a household could spare them.

The flour is counted out bullock by bullock, “every bullock of the thirteen bullocks”, and ram by ram. The first day’s grain comes to fifty seven tenths of an ephah, nearly six ephahs of fine flour.

Fourteen lambs a day is twice the number at every other feast, and over the week it amounts to ninety eight lambs. Only the rams and the lambs are doubled; the goat stays single.

The sin offering goat receives no flour and no wine. Grain and drink go only with burnt offerings and peace offerings (15:1–12), because the sin offering was not a gift of food but an offering for cleansing.

Twelve on the second day. The King James says “without spot” here and “without blemish” in most other verses, but the Hebrew word is the same, tamim, whole or sound. The translators said in their preface that they had not tied themselves to one English word for one Hebrew word.

“After the manner” is kamishpat, “according to the rule”, and the rule is the table of 15:4–10: so much flour, oil and wine for a lamb, more for a ram, most for a bullock. The chapter can say “according to their number” because that table has already done the arithmetic.

The Hebrew here says “their drink offerings”, plural, where every other day has “his drink offering”, and the plural carries an extra letter mem. The Talmud (Taanit 2b) found in the extra letters of three of these verses a hint of the water libation poured at this feast.

From the third day on, the Hebrew drops the word “young” from the bullocks, and the King James drops it with them: “eleven bullocks”, where the first two days had “young bullocks”. The same animal is meant; only the wording shortens.

The Mishnah (Sukkah 5:6) says that on the first day of this feast the thirteen bullocks, two rams and one goat were shared out among the priestly courses, and as the bullocks fell day by day the courses took their turns in order.

Here the goat is simply “one goat”, se’ir, while on the first, second and fourth days it is “one kid of the goats”, se’ir izzim. The King James follows the Hebrew’s variation faithfully, though nothing about the animal changes.

The fourth day is the middle of the seven, and its ten bullocks are the average of the week: three days with more before it, three with fewer after it, seventy in all.

Ezra 3:4 describes the returned exiles keeping this feast and offering “the daily burnt offerings by number, according to the custom”, which is this verse’s phrase, “according to their number, after the manner”. The returned community followed this chapter day by day.

The pairing of a burnt offering herd with one kid of the goats for sin is the same as in 15:24, where the whole congregation atones for a sin committed unawares. At the feast, as there, the congregation offers as one body.

Nine bullocks on the fifth day. From here to the end of the week the bullocks number fewer than ten, and the lambs, at fourteen, outnumber them by a widening margin each day.

The wine falls with the bullocks: at half a hin each, the bullocks’ share drops by half a hin a day, from six and a half hins on the first day to three and a half on the seventh, while the rams’ and lambs’ wine stays level.

The goat’s flesh, as a sin offering whose blood was not taken into the sanctuary, was eaten by the priests in the court (Leviticus 6:26). Over the week the priests ate seven goats while the bullocks, rams and lambs went up whole.

Eight bullocks on the sixth day. The grain has been falling by three tenths a day with them, from fifty seven on the first day to forty two now, and it will reach thirty nine on the seventh.

These verses are still read aloud in synagogues day by day through the feast, each day’s paragraph on its own day. A passage that looks like a ledger has been kept as a reading for the calendar it describes.

The Hebrew for “his drink offering” here is spelled unusually, u-nesakheha, with an extra yod. It is the second of the three letters from which the Talmud drew its hint of the water pouring, after the mem of verse 19.

Seven bullocks on the seventh day, the only day of the feast on which the count matches the day. In later Jewish practice this seventh day became Hoshana Rabbah, with its circuits of the altar.

“After the manner” is here kemishpatam, “after their manner”, with a final mem not found in the same phrase on the other days. With the mem of verse 19 and the yod of verse 31 it spells mayim, water: the Talmud’s hint, a play on the letters, not a command in the text.

The week is complete: seventy bullocks, fourteen rams, ninety eight lambs and seven goats, a hundred and eighty nine animals, besides the fourteen daily lambs. No other week of the year comes near it.

“Solemn assembly” is atseret, from a verb meaning to hold back or close, a concluding gathering. Solomon kept it after the dedication of the temple (2 Chronicles 7:9), and Nehemiah 8:18 records it “according unto the manner” after the reading of the law.

One bullock, one ram and seven lambs is the set already given for the first and the tenth days of this month. The seventh month opens, turns and closes with the same modest offering, with the great week in between.

The wording turns singular, “for the bullock, for the ram”, because after seventy bullocks there is now only one. The formula, repeated seven times through the chapter, has to change its number to fit.

This is the last goat of the year’s calendar. Counted from the new moons through the eighth day, the two chapters require thirty kids of the goats for sin offerings, besides those of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16.

Peace offerings are named here for the first time in chapters 28 and 29. The public calendar of these two chapters has none; every offering in it is burnt whole or eaten by priests. The meals that worshippers shared belonged to the vows and freewill gifts of individual households.

In the Hebrew Bible this verse is 30:1, the first line of the next chapter. The English division attaches it to the calendar it closes; the Hebrew uses it to introduce the law of vows that follows.