Leviticus 4: The Sin Offering and the Sin Nobody Knew About

What changes in chapter 4 is who gets to decide. Leviticus 1:3 says the man brings his burnt offering "of his own voluntary will," and after that first chapter you get used to the idea that an offering is something a person walks up with because he wants to. Chapter 4 doesn't use the phrase. Nobody in it is in the mood to bring anything.

I'm on the cabin porch as I write this, Thursday morning with the lake flat and the kids still asleep, and I've been through the chapter twice. The blood is what everybody remembers from Leviticus 4, but both times my eye went somewhere else.

What does "come to his knowledge" actually start?

The chapter keeps saying the sin has to be found out before anything happens. The ruler's section has "Or if his sin, wherein he hath sinned, come to his knowledge" (Leviticus 4:23), the common person's has nearly the same words (Leviticus 4:28), and the congregation's says it plainer.

When the sin, which they have sinned against it, is known, then the congregation shall offer a young bullock for the sin, and bring him before the tabernacle of the congregation.
(Leviticus 4:14)

So somebody sins "through ignorance" (verse 2), it sits there, and the offering begins on the day it's known. The thing may be "hid from the eyes of the assembly" (verse 13), and the chapter tells you what the sinner brings once he finds out. How he finds out it doesn't say. A neighbor, a conscience, a priest reading the law aloud, a bad year, the text gives you nothing there.

What it does give you is a first move, and it's an odd one to find in a law book. The man has just learned something about himself he didn't know, and what he does next is go to the tabernacle with a goat, with no speech and no waiting to see whether anybody else caught it. I had always read this chapter as one about blood and bullocks. This morning it read as a chapter about the day after you find out.

The Tuesday I found my own bug

In January I changed the job that builds the nightly settlement file we send to a processing partner. I moved the daily cutoff to midnight UTC without thinking hard about it, which for a company on Mountain time meant every transaction after about five in the evening landed in the next day's file. Nothing broke. Weekly totals matched, and month-end ran down a different path and matched too, so you'd only see it by laying out the days one by one, and nobody lays out the days one by one.

I found it on a Tuesday in March around three in the afternoon, reading the job top to bottom to answer somebody else's question about something unrelated.

Ten weeks it had been live, and I was the one who wrote it.

Nobody was going to find out. The partner hadn't noticed, finance hadn't noticed and my manager Marcus certainly hadn't. If I'd closed the file and gone back to what I was doing, which I wanted to for about four minutes, the bug would have sat there until somebody rebuilt the job in two or three years and wondered about it.

The fix was twelve lines.

The message to Marcus took twenty minutes, because I wrote the first sentence four times and each version had the cutoff "misconfigured" or the file "affected," a passive-voice cloud with nobody standing in it. The one I sent said I'd written the change in January and here was what it had done. He asked how many days were touched and whether the partner needed a note.

The partner did need a note, and their reconciliation people asked for every file since January to be resent, and that ran into the following month, with one week in January we never did get to match because the old job's output had been overwritten. Marcus never brought it up again after that first reply. I took it for kindness for about a week and then wasn't sure what I was taking it for.

Why does the priest's offering cost as much as the whole congregation's?

The chapter goes in order, and the order stopped me. It starts with "the priest that is anointed," ahead of the people (verse 3), and he brings "a young bullock without blemish." Then the whole congregation of Israel gets verse 13 and following, and what they bring is a young bullock too. One man's offering matches the price of an entire people's.

Both get the long treatment, with the blood going seven times before the veil, some on the horns of the altar of incense and the rest poured at the base of the altar of burnt offering, and the whole animal carried "without the camp unto a clean place, where the ashes are poured out" (verse 12, and again in verse 21 for the congregation). The ruler's offering is a male goat and the common person's is a female goat, or a lamb if he'd rather (verses 23, 28 and 32). Neither of those sections says anything about carrying the animal out of the camp. They stop at the altar with the fat burned and "it shall be forgiven him," and what became of the rest of the animal is left out. I've read commentary that fills it in with great confidence. I'd leave it where the text does.

So the price goes down as you go down the ranks: a bullock for the priest and the whole people, a goat for the ruler, a goat or a lamb for everyone else. My reading, and the text doesn't state any of it, is that "according to the sin of the people" (verse 3) means the man who handles the offerings for everybody else can get something wrong in a way that lands on all of them, which would explain why his bullock costs what theirs does. I think of the people I know who've been the one others watch to see how it's done, a senior engineer or a dad, and the arithmetic of it seems about right to me. When they get it wrong a lot of people are standing downwind.

There's a second thing in the priest's section, and it took the second reading to see it. For the congregation the chapter says "it shall be forgiven them" (verse 20), and the ruler and the common person get the same words at verses 26, 31 and 35. The priest's own ten verses, three through twelve, never say it. Verse 20 may be doing double duty, since it tells you to treat the second bullock as the first, but it's an odd gap in a chapter that is otherwise so careful to repeat itself. Fair enough if that's only the way the chapter was put together. It's the one place in it where I'd be tempted to write a sermon, and I'd rather not.

Who actually kills the animal?

The offerer does, in every section: the man lays his hand on the head and kills it himself (verses 4, 24, 29 and 33) while the priest handles the blood and the altar. I wrote about that in Leviticus 1: What the Burnt Offering Asked of an Israelite and won't go over it again.

The congregation's version has one detail that's easy to skip. A whole people can't all lean on one bullock, so "the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands upon the head of the bullock" (verse 15), a few old men with their hands on the animal standing in for everybody else, and the chapter gives them no speech either.

The Church's teaching on these offerings says the animals had no power to cleanse anyone and that they pointed people's minds to Jesus Christ. The chapter never names him, though, so what I was holding by the end was the verb. "It shall be forgiven him."

Frequently Asked Questions

Does "through ignorance" mean the sin was only an accident?

Not quite, because the chapter covers the man who didn't know the commandment and the congregation that overlooked it (verse 13). Leviticus 5:17 goes further with "though he wist it not, yet is he guilty." I wouldn't stretch any of this into a rule for sins people commit on purpose.

Why a male goat for the ruler and a female goat for everyone else?

The chapter gives no reason. It gives the ruler a "male without blemish" (verse 23) and the common person a "female without blemish" (verse 28), and then lets the common person bring a lamb instead, also female (verse 32). I've seen explanations built on rank and on value, and none of them come from the text.

Is this chapter really about Christ?

The Church's materials say the offerings taught Israel to look toward him, and I believe that. Read cold, though, it's mostly about people and what they do when they find something out. I'd read it that way first and let the rest come second.

How long should I spend on Leviticus 4?

Longer than the first read feels like it deserves. Skim the blood on the first pass, then go back to the lines about knowing and to the openings of the four sections at verses 3, 13, 22 and 27. Fifteen minutes this morning did it for me.

Read those four openings back to back before you read anything else in the chapter, and then go back for the blood.

— D.