Leviticus4chapter 4

Leviticus 4:1-2

This verse opens the formula that carries the rest of the book, and thirty-three passages of Leviticus begin with the LORD speaking to Moses from here on. The subject given is a soul that sins through ignorance, a phrase that occurs here for the first time in Scripture and falls in only eight verses of the whole King James Bible, four of them in this chapter. The burnt offering was brought of a man's own voluntary will at Leviticus 1:3, and this one is required of him the moment he learns what he did.

Leviticus 4:3-4

The chapter grades one offering by who sinned, and it begins at the top. A sin by the anointed priest is described as according to the sin of the people, which Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read as bringing guilt on the nation, since the man who carries Israel in to God cannot sin privately. He brings a young bullock, the costliest animal named anywhere in the chapter, and he lays his own hand on its head and kills it himself.

Leviticus 4:5-7

The blood of this bullock goes where the blood of the offerings before it never went. Adam Clarke counts its three destinations: sprinkled seven times before the vail with a finger, smeared on the horns of the golden altar of incense inside the tent, and the remainder poured out at the base of the altar in the court. The altar of incense is where the priest himself served day by day, so the blood is put on the furniture his own sin touched.

Leviticus 4:8-10

Verse 10 measures this offering against a different one, saying the fat is taken off as it was taken off from the bullock of the sacrifice of peace offerings. The inward fat, the two kidneys and the caul above the liver go up on the altar, and Leviticus 3:3 and 3:4 name those same three portions in the peace offering. What ascends to God off a sin offering and what ascends off the offering a worshipper eats from are the same parts of the animal.

Leviticus 4:11-12

Nothing of this animal is eaten. The whole bullock, skin and head and legs and dung, is carried out of the camp and burned on wood, and the ground it is taken to is called a clean place. Hebrews 13:11 describes this verse, that the bodies of beasts whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin are burned without the camp, and Hebrews 13:12 says Jesus suffered without the gate for that reason.

Leviticus 4:13-15

A nation can be guilty of something none of it noticed. The verse says the thing be hid from the eyes of the assembly and then says they are guilty in the same sentence, so the guilt stands before the knowledge arrives. John Gill records the reading of Rashi, the eleventh century French commentator, and of Maimonides after him, that the congregation here means the Sanhedrin of seventy one whose ruling led the people wrong, which makes this a court's error rather than a crowd's. The elders lay their hands on the bullock in the place of the whole people.

Leviticus 4:16-18

The congregation's bullock is handled exactly as the priest's was, and the text writes the whole procedure out a second time rather than saying it was done as before. The blood is sprinkled seven times before the vail, put on the horns of the altar inside the tent, and poured out at the bottom of the altar in the court. The price for a whole nation and the price for one man in the priesthood are the same animal and the same rite, which is the one place the graded scale of this chapter stops grading.

Leviticus 4:19-21

Verse 20 says the priest shall make an atonement for them, and it shall be forgiven them. The words atonement and forgiven each fall four times in this chapter, at verses 20, 26, 31 and 35, and neither word appears anywhere in the ten verses given to the anointed priest's own offering. The chapter gives no reason for that silence and does not fill it, and Hebrews 5:3 states the priest's own need plainly, that he ought as for the people so also for himself to offer for sins.

Leviticus 4:22-23

The word rendered ruler is nasi, which John Gill traces to a root meaning lifted up, and it covers the head of a tribe or of a household as well as a king. His animal steps down from a bullock to a male kid of the goats. Verse 22 is also the one place in the chapter that says the commandments of the LORD his God, where verses 2, 13 and 27 say only the LORD, so the man set over other men is the one reminded whose he is.

Leviticus 4:24-26

From the ruler down, the blood stays in the courtyard. It goes on the horns of the altar of burnt offering instead of the golden altar inside, and Leviticus 6:26 and 6:30 give the working rule, that a sin offering whose blood was carried into the tent is burned and one whose blood was not is eaten by the priest in the holy place. The two halves of this chapter are therefore two different ends for the carcase, burned outside the camp above and eaten by the priesthood below.

Leviticus 4:27-28

The chapter has come down from the high priest to any one of the common people, which the Hebrew calls the people of the land, and the provision is still open at the bottom. His animal is a female kid of the goats, the least valuable of the four the chapter names, and it buys the same word that the priest's bullock bought. Peter uses this chapter's own phrase at Acts 3:17, telling the men of Israel that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers, and Luke 23:34 has Jesus asking the Father to forgive them on that ground.

Leviticus 4:29-31

Verse 31 calls this offering a sweet savour unto the LORD. The phrase falls sixteen times in Leviticus and this is the only sin offering in the book that carries it, and it carries it over the smallest animal brought by the least of the four men named here. The same verse gives the man the whole formula, an atonement made for him and his sin forgiven.

Leviticus 4:32-35

The chapter closes by giving the common man a choice nobody above him is given. He may bring a lamb in place of the goat, and John Gill records the observation from the Babylonian Talmud, in tractates Pesachim and Keritot compiled by about the sixth century, that Scripture usually names the lamb before the goat and names it after here, which was read to mean the two stand equal. The last words of the chapter are the words that closed the two cases before it, that the priest shall make an atonement for his sin that he hath committed, and it shall be forgiven him.