Leviticus 3: The Peace Offering and the Part Nobody Ate

Leviticus 1 asks for a male when the burnt offering comes from the herd. Verse 3 says "let him offer a male without blemish" and moves on. Two chapters later the peace offering from the herd opens with "whether it be a male or female" (Leviticus 3:1), and I stopped on that this morning at the counter before anyone else was up, because I'd been carrying the male rule around as if it covered every animal in the book.

A phrase like that goes by at reading speed, and the chapter helps it along, since the same sentences come around three times. The herd gets five verses, the lamb gets six and the goat gets five, and the kidneys and the caul above the liver turn up in each one in nearly the same words. By the third pass I was reading the way you read a form, and it was only on the way back up the page that I saw what verse 1 had done.

Why would the peace offering take a female?

The chapter doesn't say, and anything I offered as a reason would be a guess. I can lay it next to the chapter before it, though. In Leviticus 1 the hand goes on the animal's head "and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him" (Leviticus 1:4). I went looking for that word in chapter 3 and it isn't there.

Seventeen verses, no atonement.

The offerer still lays his hand on the head, still kills the animal at the door of the tabernacle, still watches the priests sprinkle the blood round about the altar. Everything else is the same as chapter 1, and still nobody in this one is being covered for anything. That might fit an offering that can be a cow as easily as a bull, though I wouldn't lean on it, because the text never draws the line itself.

The goat gets the shortest introduction of the three (one sentence in verse 12) and then the same procedure as the herd down to the kidneys. The lamb picks up one extra item in verse 9, "the whole rump, it shall he take off hard by the backbone," which I take to mean the broad tail of the kind of sheep they kept. Everything else is the script again.

So a man with a goat is handed the same instructions as a man with a bull, and the chapter never mentions price. I sat with that at the counter longer than I sat with most of the chapter.

Where is the meal?

This is the chapter about the offering people eat, and it hardly mentions eating. Verse 11 does say the burned fat is "the food of the offering made by fire unto the Lord," so there's a meal in it, but it's the Lord's. The only time human appetite shows up at all is verse 17, and there it's a prohibition.

For the people's side you have to go to Leviticus 7, which is where the peace offering turns out to be at least three different occasions with different clocks on them.

And the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving shall be eaten the same day that it is offered; he shall not leave any of it until the morning.

Leviticus 7:15

Leviticus 7:12 adds that a thanksgiving comes with bread, "unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil," so the flour from Leviticus 2 turns up again at this table.

A vow or a voluntary offering gets the day and the next day, and what's left on the third day "shall be burnt with fire" (Leviticus 7:17). Anyone who ate it on the third day, Leviticus 7:18 says, wouldn't have the offering accepted for him. That's the line that made the meal real to me. A steer is a lot of meat, and a clock is running on it the moment the blood hits the altar. Nobody led one to the tabernacle without having already decided who was coming to dinner.

In Leviticus 2 the leftover flour went to Aaron and his sons, "a thing most holy" (Leviticus 2:3). Here the arrangement opens up. The fat burns, the priest takes the breast and the right shoulder "by a statute for ever" (Leviticus 7:34), and Leviticus 7:19 says "all that be clean shall eat thereof." The offerer's family is at the table.

What my dad did with the smallest trout

Every August when I was a kid my dad took the three of us boys up the Mirror Lake Highway to fish, and dinner never changed. He fried the trout in bacon grease in the black skillet on a two-burner Coleman, and the plates went around in an order I didn't question until the summer I was twelve. Oldest first, then the middle one, then me, then him.

That year he'd caught most of what was in the pan, and the last fish was a brookie maybe seven inches long with a bite out of its back from something that had gotten to it before he did. He put it on his plate and ate it standing up at the edge of the fire. I told him he'd gotten the small one again. He said he liked the small ones because the skin crisped up better.

I didn't believe a word of it.

I believed him around the time Emma was ten, when I'd started doing the same thing at our own stove, and the skin on a small fish really does come out better. That wasn't the whole reason either of us did it. Neither of us ever said what the rest was.

My dad wasn't making a peace offering. A man feeding his boys isn't an altar, and I'd hate to see that comparison go any further than I've taken it.

But the order a table is served in tells you who it was set for, and Leviticus 3 has one of the plainest orders anywhere in scripture. The fat goes first and all of it. "All the fat is the Lord's," verse 16 says. The priest has his portion before the family sits down, and the people who brought the animal eat what remains. The chapter doesn't call that a loss. It reads to me as the reason they were invited.

What a family at that table looked like

The one place I can see an actual household eating one of these is 1 Samuel 1, and the text there says "sacrifice" and never "peace offering," so I'm connecting the two myself. Elkanah goes up to Shiloh every year, and "when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions" (1 Samuel 1:4). To Hannah, who had no children, he gave "a worthy portion," and the text says why: "for he loved Hannah" (1 Samuel 1:5).

I had always read that verse as a kindness and a sweet one, and reading it this week I noticed it happens at the meal while the plates are going around and that the next thing the chapter tells you is that Peninnah used the occasion to needle Hannah year after year until "she wept, and did not eat" (1 Samuel 1:7). The same table that Leviticus 3 sets so carefully for the Lord and the priests and a household was also where a woman could sit with a full plate and not be able to touch it.

Elkanah, for his part, asks her "am not I better to thee than ten sons?" (1 Samuel 1:8). He is at that table doing what the law and his own heart tell him to do. He hands her the worthy portion. It doesn't reach what she's grieving, and the chapter doesn't pretend it does.

Hannah gets up "after they had eaten in Shiloh" (1 Samuel 1:9) and goes and makes her vow. Her vow comes out of the meal and not the other way around. I don't know that I'd press that. It's the opposite of how I'd have pictured it, with the promise made first and the dinner as the payment.

Solomon is easier. After his dream at Gibeon he "offered up burnt offerings, and offered peace offerings, and made a feast to all his servants" (1 Kings 3:15). A king's peace offering was a dinner party with an altar in the middle of it.

Why the fat and the blood?

Verse 17 is the line that most people can actually quote from this chapter.

It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.

Leviticus 3:17

Leviticus 7 repeats it with more detail, and there the rule gets its edges. "Ye shall eat no manner of fat, of ox, or of sheep, or of goat" (Leviticus 7:23), and blood in any dwelling, of fowl or of beast (Leviticus 7:26). The fat of an animal that died on its own or was torn by something else "may be used in any other use" (Leviticus 7:24), just not eaten. So the fat wasn't unclean. It was spoken for.

Twice in this chapter, in verses 5 and 16, the fat burning on the altar is called a sweet savour. That's a smell. Anyone who has dropped bacon grease on a campfire knows how far it carries, and I'd guess a peace offering at the tabernacle was something the whole camp could smell and not just the family at the door. The text only says it was sweet to the Lord, so that's me, not Moses.

The richest part belongs to someone else, even when you're the one who raised the animal. That's what I'd hold onto.

I can't say what the Israelites made of it at the table, but I can see that it was a standing rule for every house and not only for the days of an offering, which is a heavier thing than a ritual you perform at the tabernacle and then walk home from.

Acts 15 puts "blood" on the short list the Jerusalem council sent to Gentile converts, "from things strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15:20). I don't know how that fits with the rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a peace offering and a burnt offering?

Most of the difference is who eats, since a burnt offering goes up whole on the altar and the text ties it to atonement. A peace offering burns the fat, gives the priest the breast and the right shoulder and leaves the rest for the family to eat, and chapter 3 never mentions atonement at all. The herd animal can also be male or female, which the burnt offering can't.

Who actually ate the meat?

The offerer and anyone clean who came to the meal, according to Leviticus 7:19, after the priests had their two cuts. I'd love to give you a number for how many people showed up to finish a steer in a day or two. The text doesn't, and I'd be inventing one.

Why does Leviticus 3 never say thanksgiving, vow or freewill?

It doesn't, because that sorting happens in Leviticus 7, which is why a lot of readers reach the end of chapter 3 thinking a peace offering was one single thing. If you're teaching this in a class, read verses 11 through 18 of chapter 7 aloud before you say anything else about chapter 3. The meal is in there.

Does the peace offering point to Christ?

Probably, and a good many people in Sunday School will say sacrament before the question is finished. I don't think they're wrong. I'd only ask them to stay in chapter 3 for five minutes first, with the cow and the kidneys and the rule about the fat, since the connection means more if you've sat through the part that sounds nothing like a church.

Is it still wrong to eat fat or blood?

That one I'd rather not settle for you, since Leviticus 3:17 and 7:23-27 call it a statute for every dwelling, and Acts 15 brings blood up again for Gentile converts. How that sits next to the way most of us eat is a separate question from what the chapter says. I don't know the answer.

That's Leviticus 3.

We leave for Bear Lake after lunch today. Before breakfast I checked the Odyssey's tires in the driveway, and the front left read 31 where the others read 35, so I dragged the compressor out of the garage and brought it up to match.

— D.