Ezekiel 46: 1-15 The Sabbath and New Moon
1Thus says the Lord GOD: The gate of the inner court that faces east shall remain closed on the six working days; but on the sabbath day it shall be opened and on the day of the new moon it shall be opened. 2The prince shall enter by the vestibule of the gate from outside, and shall take his stand by the post of the gate. The priests shall offer his burnt offering and his offerings of well-being, and he shall bow down at the threshold of the gate. Then he shall go out, but the gate shall not be closed until evening. 3The people of the land shall bow down at the entrance of that gate before the LORD on the sabbaths and on the new moons. 4The burnt offering that the prince offers to the LORD on the sabbath day shall be six lambs without blemish and a ram without blemish; 5and the grain offering with the ram shall be an ephah, and the grain offering with the lambs shall be as much as he wishes to give, together with a hin of oil to each ephah. 6On the day of the new moon he shall offer a young bull without blemish, and six lambs and a ram, which shall be without blemish; 7as a grain offering he shall provide an ephah with the bull and an ephah with the ram, and with the lambs as much as he wishes, together with a hin of oil to each ephah. 8When the prince enters, he shall come in by the vestibule of the gate, and he shall go out by the same way.
9When the people of the land come before the LORD at the appointed festivals, whoever enters by the north gate to worship shall go out by the south gate; and whoever enters by the south gate shall go out by the north gate: they shall not return by way of the gate by which they entered, but shall go out straight ahead. 10When they come in, the prince shall come in with them; and when they go out, he shall go out.
11At the festivals and the appointed seasons the grain offering with a young bull shall be an ephah, and with a ram an ephah, and with the lambs as much as one wishes to give, together with a hin of oil to an ephah. 12When the prince provides a freewill offering, either a burnt offering or offerings of well-being as a freewill offering to the LORD, the gate facing east shall be opened for him; and he shall offer his burnt offering or his offerings of well-being as he does on the sabbath day. Then he shall go out, and after he has gone out the gate shall be closed.
13He shall provide a lamb, a yearling, without blemish, for a burnt offering to the LORD daily; morning by morning he shall provide it. 14And he shall provide a grain offering with it morning by morning regularly, one-sixth of an ephah, and one-third of a hin of oil to moisten the choice flour, as a grain offering to the LORD; this is the ordinance for all time. 15Thus the lamb and the grain offering and the oil shall be provided, morning by morning, as a regular burnt offering.
The reestablishment of the temple enables a resumption of the weekly and monthly offerings to the LORD. One of the first things that a careful reader of the Hebrew Scriptures will notice is the differences between the offerings in Ezekiel and in the Mosaic torah (Numbers 28:9-15). The quantity of sacrificial animals and the type of additional items offered with the sacrifice has changed between Numbers and Ezekiel. Although the sense of order is very important for the prophet, it is also possible that he does not have access to the torah scrolls. When the temple is reestablished under Nehemiah and Ezra, they explicitly indicate they are utilizing the Mosaic torah and may be unaware of this portion of Ezekiel. Yet to understand the prophet Ezekiel’s ordered world these sacrifices weekly and monthly are important.
The Mosaic torah on the sabbath dictates two lambs, 2/10 ephah of flour mixed with oil and the drink offering compared to Ezekiel’s ram and six lambs, with an ephah of flour with a hin of oil for the ram and ‘the gift of his hand’[1] for the grain offering with the lambs. The drink offering of wine is omitted by Ezekiel, and this may be intentional to prevent the priests from becoming intoxicated while performing their duty.[2] In Ezekiel’s vision everything occurs in an orderly manner. These sabbath offerings are provided by the prince on behalf of the people and the prince enters with the people and oversees the offerings he has provided on their behalf. The eastern door of the inner court is opened on the sabbath, and new moon festivals and it is at this door (at the post of the gate) he watches the offerings. The prince prostrates himself before the offerings which is the appropriate position for a mortal in the presence of the holy, yet even the prince does not enter this holy space. He remains in the outer courtyard looking through the gate at the inner courtyard. He arrives with the people and when the ceremony is over, he departs with the people.
The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and so the ‘new moon’ festival is a monthly commemoration and not associated with the worship of the moon. The offering for this festival is reduced from the two bulls, one ram, and seven lambs in Numbers 28:11-15 to one bull, one ram, and six lambs here, but the amount of grain offering increases. For both sabbath and the festivals the eastern gate to the inner court is opened for the sacrifice and then closed when the people and prince depart and remains closed throughout the non-sabbath, non-celebration days. Perhaps this is to prevent the people from being observed by the LORD at their work when they are not physically clean from working in the fields, but it also is likely an additional barrier between the holiness of God and the lack of holiness among the people.
For the daily offering the pronoun shifts from third person to second person (not reflected in the NRSV) and this may indicate that now the prophet is being addressed. The prince would not be present at the temple on the non-sabbath days and so the prophet or priest would be responsible for the conduct of the morning offerings, yet the prince likely was the patron who provided the animals. For Ezekiel a perfectly ordered world has a role for the priests every day but delineates ceremonially the sabbath and monthly festivals. Yet, as Tova Ganzel notes:
The book of Numbers enumerates the sacrifices to be brought at other times: Shavuot, Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, and Shemini Atzeret. Ezekiel mentions none of these. Each of these holidays lasts for a single day, and perhaps the book of Ezekiel does not mention any of them because Ezekiel’s prophecy makes no change in any of them. However, this may be a deliberate omission – implying no future commemoration of these holidays. (Ganzel, 2020, p. 391)
For both Jewish and Christian scholars the differences between the calendar and offerings of Numbers and Ezekiel are perplexing. Ezekiel’s world is a highly ordered world, yet it seems disconnected from the ordering of the world laid out in Torah. As mentioned above Ezekiel may not have had access to the torah when he recorded his vision, but the differences between the Mosaic torah and Ezekiel’s visions continue to cause interpreters to puzzle over which takes precedence in which circumstance. Ezra utilized the Mosaic torah in the reconstruction of the temple, but without the temple these discussions may be academic to concrete action. Yet, they remain important to understanding this prophet’s view of the world.
Ezekiel 46:16-18 The Prince, Inheritance and Land Protection
16Thus says the Lord GOD: If the prince makes a gift to any of his sons out of his inheritance, it shall belong to his sons, it is their holding by inheritance. 17But if he makes a gift out of his inheritance to one of his servants, it shall be his to the year of liberty; then it shall revert to the prince; only his sons may keep a gift from his inheritance. 18The prince shall not take any of the inheritance of the people, thrusting them out of their holding; he shall give his sons their inheritance out of his own holding, so that none of my people shall be dispossessed of their holding.
A central conviction of both the Mosaic torah and the prophet Ezekiel is that the land is a gift from God, and that God is the owner of the land. In the torah and in Joshua the intent is for inheritance to remain in families and now this ideal for all Israel is concentrated on the prince’s family. The prince may hand down an inheritance to his sons, but anything granted to a servant must be returned in the year of liberty (or Jubilee) every fifty years. The land granted to the prince in 45:1-8 is to remain in the prince’s family so that the prince can continue to be a patron for the temple and not need to take advantage of the people of Israel. The princes and nobles of Israel preying on the best land and best resources of the people has been a fear from Samuel’s initial warning in 1 Samuel 8: 10-18. The prophets have continually protested the actions by kings, princes, and nobles to exercise power over the people and deprive them of their inheritance. Here the protection of the royal lands is linked with the princes honoring the lands of the people.
Ezekiel 46:19-24 Set Aside Kitchens for Holy People
19Then he brought me through the entrance, which was at the side of the gate, to the north row of the holy chambers for the priests; and there I saw a place at the extreme western end of them. 20He said to me, “This is the place where the priests shall boil the guilt offering and the sin offering, and where they shall bake the grain offering, in order not to bring them out into the outer court and so communicate holiness to the people.”
21Then he brought me out to the outer court, and led me past the four corners of the court; and in each corner of the court there was a court — 22in the four corners of the court were small courts, forty cubits long and thirty wide; the four were of the same size. 23On the inside, around each of the four courts was a row of masonry, with hearths made at the bottom of the rows all around. 24Then he said to me, “These are the kitchens where those who serve at the temple shall boil the sacrifices of the people.”
Ezekiel’s ordered world separates into different gradients of holiness. The priest who are engaged in the holiest of work and occupy the holiest space have a place inside the holy chambers to prepare a meal. There is one kitchen inside this space for the priests to eat as they perform their work, so they do not communicate holiness to the people. Similarly, there are four kitchen-like structures in the outer court where the Levites likely prepare the food that the people will eat during the sacrifices. Within the temple there is a place for the priests, a place for the Levites, and a place for the people. Sacrifices were times of gathering to worship but also eat, and the portion of the priests must be separated from the portions of the people. The holiness of God is too dangerous for the majority of the population to approach.
[1] This is a literal rendering of the idiom translated ‘as much as he wishes to give’ by the NRSV. Block renders this as ‘Whatever he can afford.’ (Block, 1998, p. 668)
Sign of the Rose 