The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Theological centre of Leviticus, the one required fast, the only day the high priest entered the Most Holy Place. The most developed typology in the NT - Hebrews 9-10 reads the whole thing as a description of Christ.

Requirements

• Tishri 10. Total work prohibition, like the Sabbath and unlike the other festivals, plus the requirement to "afflict yourselves" ('ānâ nepeš) - universally understood as fasting (Lev 23:27-32).
  • Emphatic even by Levitical standards. Sklar counts it: Lev 23 repeats the punishment for non-observance 2x, the affliction command 3x, the work prohibition 3x.
• Special garments. Aaron sets aside his ordinary vestments, bathes, puts on plain linen (16:4). Returns to the ordinary garments after the special rites (16:23-24).
• The animals: bull (purification) + ram (burnt) for Aaron and his household; two male goats (purification) + ram (burnt) for the people (16:3, 5).
• Lots cast over the two goats - one "for the LORD," one "for 'ăzā'zēl" (16:8).
• Incense carried in first, creating a cloud over the mercy seat. Sklar: shielded Aaron from exposure to the glory, or served as an atonement gesture as he approached the throne, "or both."

The Three Rites

Sklar notes that performing an action three times in Leviticus underscores it - "the atonement accomplished on this day would be full and complete."

• 1. Purification offerings (16:11-19). Bull's blood behind the veil, sprinkled on the mercy seat and 7x before it. Repeated with the goat's blood for the people. Then the tent of meeting, then the burnt offering altar - working outward.
  • Why the mercy seat in particular? Sklar: "The priests' sins were rebellion against the Lord's kingly rule, and their impurities were incompatible with his holy rule. It would make sense that these sins and impurities were thought to defile the very object that represented that rule, namely, the atonement cover over which the Lord sat enthroned as King."
• 2. The 'ăzā'zēl goat (16:20-22). Confession, hand-leaning, expulsion.
• 3. Burnt offerings (16:23-24). Aaron bathes, changes back into ordinary vestments, offers the two rams.
• Afterwards (16:25-28): purification offering fat burned; the man who released the goat bathes before re-entering; carcasses burned outside the camp; the man who burns them washes too.

Why This Day and Not the Others

• Williamson: "While structurally Leviticus 16 is the conclusion of the first major section of the book, it also functions as the book's theological centre, binding the two halves together."
• Lev 16:1 is not incidental. Dates the instructions "after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before the LORD and died."

It is a conspicuous allusion to a previous, failed attempt to draw near to God, in which the improper conduct of Nadab and Abihu provoked God's wrath, and with which the instructions for the correct conduct of the Day of Atonement are contrasted. It thereby highlights the fact that God's wrath must be overcome in order to draw near to him.

• Jeffery, Ovey & Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions

The Wrath Question

• Goldingay's objection: "the question of propitiating God's wrath has little place in Leviticus itself. The word anger hardly appears."
• The reply:

What he fails to appreciate is that God's wrath would be seen far more often if it were not for the successful operation of the sacrifices set forth by God to deal with it. It is precisely because sacrifice does relate directly to anger that we see anger so rarely! When the sacrificial system is abused, as in the case of Nadab and Abihu, God's wrath is seen plainly.

• Jeffery, Ovey & Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions

• Analogy: drinking water. Safe most of the time precisely because the treatment plant is working - and the people who break into the plant discover exactly how unsafe it would otherwise be.
• The frequency of a phenomenon is not a measure of the danger it manages.

This Day Covered What Nothing Else Could

• Lev 16:16 says the atonement is for "uncleannesses," "transgressions" and "sins." The middle term, peša', is the strong word for rebellion against a superior - maps onto the high-handed sin of Num 15:30-31 for which no sacrifice was available.
• Sklar draws out the pastoral implications:
  • At the least - the day assured Israel that one person's defiance wouldn't condemn the nation.
  • At the most - it assured the repentant rebel that the sin had been atoned for, and "the sin itself no longer hung over the sinner's head."
• Boda: The language of "forgiveness" (slḥ) is absent from Lev 16, which focuses on ritual cleansing (thr) of the sanctuary.
  • This should temper any account that reads Lev 16 as an annual mass absolution.
  • But what the day cleanses primarily is the house, and since the house had been polluted by the year's accumulated sin and impurity, cleansing it isn't a separate matter from dealing with the people.

The Two Goats Are One Offering

• Lev 16:5 refers to both goats together as a single purification offering: "He will take from the congregation of the sons of Israel male goats as a purification offering."
• Text presents them as a set - taken together, presented together, lots cast for both. Two rams are also used that day and are not paired this way.

there is historical precedent for understanding these goats to be identical in appearance, and chosen expressly because of this likeness, as if it were one goat accomplishing two different aspects of atonement - purification and expiation, cleansing from sin's pollution and the removal of sin's guilt.

• L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?

• Williamson lays out the options for the relationship without forcing a choice. Does the purification offering deal with impurities and the scapegoat with sins? Does the scapegoat complete what the purification offerings couldn't? Or do both accomplish the same thing from different angles?
  • "However the details are to be understood, the main point is clear: in some way this movement (of the two goats) restores harmony between God and Israel."

The Geography of the Two Goats

Morales positions the rite within the tabernacle's Eden symbolism. The two goats travel in opposite directions along an east-west axis.

the holy of holies represents his Presence as the fountain of life, while the wilderness represents the furthest remove from his face and is thus the place of darkness and death. Now it is of peculiar interest that the two goats of the Day of Atonement proceed in opposite directions, one journeying into the garden of Eden via its lifeblood and the other away from YHWH, to the wilderness loaded with Israel's sins… the sacrificed goat conveying Israel favourably into the inner sanctum vicariously, the led-away goat conveying Israel's sins away from the face of God.

• L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?

• Israel goes in, and Israel's sin goes out - and both are true of the same people on the same day.
• Morales: the separation of the two goats "could be readily perceived as portraying a final separation, a day of judgment in the ultimate sense."

The Scapegoat Bears Punishment, Not Only Guilt

• 'Ăzā'zēl has no agreed conclusion. Four main proposals: a demon, a place (rocky precipice or wilderness), "utter destruction," or "the goat that is sent away." Morales declines to define on the ground that the significance of the rite is clear whatever the etymology.
• The demon proposal "seems rather unlikely given that offerings to 'goat demons' are explicitly forbidden in the very next chapter (Lev. 17:7)." Between the other options "it is hard to decide… but for the purpose of our discussion it matters little. A terrible fate is in view in either case."
• The main question is punishment vs guilt. Sklar and Pierced disagree on three things:
  1. Sins "put on the goat's head" (v. 21) > the goat is now responsible for them, as someone with bloodguilt on his head was responsible for it (2 Sam 1:15-16).
  2. "Bear sin" (nāśā' 'awōn) is used elsewhere of bearing sin and its penalty. Garry Williams's work (via Pierced) shows the phrase and its cognates refer unambiguously to bearing punishment in Gen 4:13; Lev 5:17; 24:14-16; Num 5:31; 14:34; Lam 5:7. And the subject here is an animal, which is decisive: "the judicial fate of the Israelites is transferred to the animal in such a way that they do not bear it themselves."
  3. Sklar translates "a land cut off," and the root (gĕzērâ) is used of people cut off from temple worship (2 Chr 26:21), from life (Lam 3:54), from the Lord Himself (Ps 88:5). To be "cut off" throughout Leviticus is to experience God's punishment for sin.

when a person lives who otherwise would have died, and an animal dies that would otherwise have lived, substitution is necessarily entailed.

• Jeffery, Ovey & Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions

• Sklar: "Unlike the rites within the Most Holy Place, this rite was performed in full view of all the Israelites, who could watch the goat, laden with their sin, disappear into the wilderness, never to return (cf. Ps. 103:12)."
  • Most of what happened on Yom Kippur happened behind a curtain where nobody could see it. This one thing you could watch - and what you watched was your sin walking over a hill and not coming back.

Isaiah Saw It

Sklar notes Isa 53 uses the language of this chapter - the servant who "bore the sin of many" (v. 12) and was "cut off" from the land of the living (v. 8). See The Guilt Offering (Asham) for the asham connection in Isa 53:10.

New Testament Fulfilment

Broad argument is in Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament. Points specific to Yom Kippur:

• A better sanctuary. Guthrie on why the heavenly things needed purification (Heb 9:23): the earthly tabernacle needed cleansing because of "its association with a sinful people," and "the 'heavenly things' are purified in conjunction with the purification of God's people."
• A priest who doesn't go first for himself. Aaron began with a bull for his own sin (16:11). Guthrie: "That his appearance before God was 'for us' marks his act as distinct from the earthly high priest, who also had to offer a sacrifice for himself (5:1-3; 7:27-28)."
• Once, not annually. Guthrie: "If Christ's sacrifice of himself was an annual event, as was the Day of Atonement sacrifice under the first covenant, he would have had to suffer over and over again since the time of creation." Heb 9:27-28 grounds the singularity in the singularity of human death.
  • Bavinck's correction - Christ didn't carry blood into heaven but entered through His blood.
• Both goats fulfilled in one person. Morales: "Jesus is led outside the gates of Jerusalem to suffer the wrath of God for his people's sins. It is as the resurrected righteous one that he afterwards enters the heavenly holy of holies. In this manner Jesus fulfils the pattern of both goats on the Day of Atonement."
  • One direction on Friday, the other on the third day.
• The veil is now a body. Harper's reading of Heb 10:19-22 against the Yom Kippur background:

since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body… The effectiveness of Christ's ritual agency, which secures inner ('hearts') and outer ('body') purification, grants every believer entry to the heavenly most holy place.

• Geoffrey D. Harper, 'You Shall Be Clean'

• The contrast: One man, one day a year, behind a curtain, in a cloud of incense, in borrowed linen, after washing twice. That was the arrangement. And Hebrews addresses a congregation of ordinary Christians and tells all of them to walk straight in.
• Harper is careful the access doesn't produce passivity: entering sacred space has consequences, which is why Hebrews follows it with the warning passages and the call to offer sacrifices of praise and good works (12:28; 13:15-16).
  • "Our God is a consuming fire" (12:29) is the same God Nadab and Abihu met, and Hebrews knows it.