Leviticus 6: Restitution Comes Before the Ram

My brother Jonathan called last week to tell me he'd quit. He'd taken up the one-chapter-a-day habit I keep talking about, got through the first five chapters of Leviticus on willpower, and hit chapter 6 on a Tuesday. "It's a maintenance manual for a fire," he said. "I kept waiting for the part where it's about God."

Fair enough. After the opening verses the chapter changes subject four times in thirty verses, and the last of them is about the pots a sin offering gets cooked in.

I told him the first seven verses had God in them plenty and that the other twenty-three might too, but I'd have to think about the pot. This is me thinking about it.

What does Leviticus 6 say about wronging a neighbor?

The chapter opens with a list, and it's a more specific list than I remembered. A man lies to his neighbor about something "delivered him to keep" (a deposit, in modern terms), or about something held "in fellowship" (the King James word is vague and I won't pretend to know exactly which arrangement it covers), or he takes something by violence, or he deceives. Then verse 3 adds one I think about more than the others: he finds something that was lost and lies about it and swears falsely.

That last one is a quiet crime. Nobody saw the wallet get picked up. The owner might not even know it's gone for good, which puts it close to the sin offering and the sin nobody knew about from chapter 4, except that here the man knows and keeps quiet.

Then the instructions. Verse 5 is the one I'd put on an index card:

he shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth, in the day of his trespass offering.

Do the arithmetic once, because I think it's meant to be done. A hundred dollars of someone's money becomes a hundred and twenty back in their hand. The extra twenty doesn't go to the temple and it doesn't go to the priest. It goes "unto him to whom it appertaineth", which is the old way of saying the person it belonged to. So the one who was wronged ends up slightly ahead of where he started, and the one who did the wrong pays more than he took.

Verse 6 doesn't have him bring the ram until verse 5 is finished. "And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord, a ram without blemish out of the flock", and only then, in verse 7, does the priest "make an atonement for him before the Lord." That's a sequence. Pay the neighbor and then go to the altar, both "in the day of his trespass offering." Nothing in these verses lets him take the ram first and sort out the neighbor later.

The whole list opens with "If a soul sin, and commit a trespass against the Lord, and lie unto his neighbour." The injury is to the neighbor and the trespass is against the Lord, in one sentence, with an "and" between them.

The baseball and Mrs. Dalton's window

Early in June Caleb hit a ball off the tee in the backyard and put it through the basement window of the house next door. It was a Tuesday, we'd just got home from practice, and dinner was on the table. He came in white in the face and said he'd go tell her tomorrow, after he'd figured out what to say.

I'd like to report that I knew the chapter well enough to answer him. I didn't think about it at all. I told him to put the ball down and go now, and that I was coming too, and he looked at me like I'd asked him to eat the dinner cold in the street. We walked over. Mrs. Dalton is seventy-something and keeps a very neat yard, and she answered the door with a dish towel. Caleb said it in one breath and held the ball out as though it were evidence.

She asked if anybody was hurt. Then she asked if he'd eaten.

Afterward I went over the order in my head. The window was a hundred and eighty dollars. Caleb paid sixty out of the jar in his room and I covered the rest, and he mowed her lawn twice that month, which she hadn't asked for and tried to talk him out of. None of that is in Leviticus. What stayed with me was the order we'd done it in. Nobody had the money yet and nobody knew what the glass would cost, and the first thing was still to walk next door and say so, ball in hand, before dinner went cold and before the story had a chance to get smaller in the telling.

Why the fire never goes out in verses 8 to 13

After seven verses about money the chapter turns to the burnt offering and goes from a lawsuit to a shift schedule.

The priest puts on his linen garment and linen breeches, takes up the ashes and puts them "beside the altar." Then, in verse 11, "he shall put off his garments, and put on other garments, and carry forth the ashes without the camp unto a clean place." Different clothes for hauling out the ash. I like that detail more than I can defend.

Then verse 12: "the priest shall burn wood on it every morning." And verse 13 says "The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar" and then, after the semicolon, "it shall never go out." The verses give the order he does things in: ashes, change, carry, wood, then the offering laid "in order upon it." Nobody in this passage is told to do anything remarkable. Somebody shows up in the morning with wood.

Verse 12 ends with "the fat of the peace offerings" going onto that same fire. I wrote about the peace offering and the part nobody ate a while back, and this is where that fat ends up.

Verse 9 says the burning goes on "all night unto the morning." Neither it nor verse 13 stops to say what the fire stands for, and people have said plenty about that.

The meat offering and the broken pot

Verses 14 through 18 are about the "meat offering," which is the word I stumbled on first as a teenager. It's flour, not flesh. In the King James English "meat" meant food, and this is the grain offering, with oil and frankincense. A handful gets burned as "the memorial of it" and "the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat", unleavened, in the court of the tabernacle. So the part that isn't burned is lunch for the priests. Verse 17 calls it "their portion", and you can see how a family with no farmland ate.

Verses 19 through 23 are the priest's own flour offering, half in the morning and half at night, and it's "wholly burnt." Verse 23: "it shall not be eaten." The contrast with verse 16, where the remainder is eaten, makes it look like a rule about priests not feeding themselves on their own offerings. The text doesn't say why.

The part I keep going back to is the end of the chapter. The sin offering is "most holy" (v. 25) and the priest who offers it eats it. Then this, in verse 28:

But the earthen vessel wherein it is sodden shall be broken: and if it be sodden in a brasen pot, it shall be both scoured, and rinsed in water.

Clay breaks and brass gets scrubbed. The text gives no reason, and my guess is only a guess: unglazed clay is porous and brass isn't, so a pot that has held something most holy can't be scoured clean once it has soaked in. Anybody who has stained a wooden spoon with tomato knows the idea. What I find odd is where the chapter stops. After a priest taking ashes out and a neighbor getting paid back, its last real detail is about the cookware.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the fifth part apply to accidental wrongs or only deliberate ones?

In this chapter the examples are deliberate, since lying about a deposit or swearing falsely about a found wallet is something a person knows he's doing. Verse 4 even says "because he hath sinned, and is guilty." Chapter 5 deals with other cases, so read that before you decide anything about accidents.

Why is the restitution done before the offering?

Verse 5 says it's given to the owner "in the day of his trespass offering," and verse 6 doesn't bring in the ram until after. The Lord is named as the one trespassed against in verse 2 and the neighbor is the one robbed, and the chapter makes you deal with the neighbor before you walk up to the altar.

Does "meat offering" mean meat?

No. It's flour, oil and frankincense, as verse 15 lists them. The King James translators used "meat" for food in general. If you're reading it aloud to a kid, that's the first thing to fix.

Do I need to do anything about the fire in verse 13 today?

No altar here to keep lit. What I took from it was the morning routine, wood every morning and ashes carried out, because most of what I'm responsible for in a given week looks more like that than like anything dramatic.

One more verse

Go back to verse 7, because I skipped past how it ends. "And the priest shall make an atonement for him before the Lord: and it shall be forgiven him for any thing of all that he hath done in trespassing therein." After the fifth part, after the ram, after everything it cost, the forgiveness covers "any thing of all that he hath done." The list in verses 2 and 3 was long and ugly, and the sentence that closes it has no exceptions in it.

— D.