Ezekiel45chapter 45

The land grant is laid out as a rectangle: a district twenty-five thousand by twenty thousand set apart, with the sanctuary at its centre, a portion for the priests, a portion for the Levites, a strip for the city and its workers, and the prince's holding on both sides of the whole block. The text does not state whether the units are cubits or the longer reeds, and readers have divided over it for centuries; either way the shape and the priorities are the point.

The reason given for the prince's allotment is explicit and it has a famous case behind it. My princes shall no more oppress my people, but shall let the house of Israel have the land according to their tribes. Israel's land law tied every family to an inherited plot that could not simply be bought out, and the story of Ahab taking Naboth's vineyard is the standing example of what a king could do when he ignored it. The prince here is given his own estate so that he never needs to take anyone else's.

The demand for honest measures is just as concrete. Have just balances, a just dry measure and a just liquid measure; the two are to hold the same amount, a tenth of a homer. The shekel is fixed at twenty gerahs and the mina at sixty shekels. Trade ran on stone weights and standard jars, and inscribed Judean weights have been recovered by the hundred — including some that are deliberately light. Cheating the scales was the ordinary man's daily experience of injustice.

The offerings the people bring are set at fixed small fractions — a sixtieth of the wheat and barley, a hundredth of the oil, one sheep from every two hundred — and the prince is made responsible for providing the public offerings at the festivals. Duty runs upward here, not downward.

The festival calendar named includes a purification of the sanctuary at the start of the year and the Passover in the first month, kept for seven days with unleavened bread.