The Drink Offering (Nesek)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. A wine libation, never offered alone. There's not much mentioned about this - meaning was obvious to Israelites, isn't to us.

Requirements

• Fixed as a proportion of the animal (Num 15:1-16):

• Flour increases 1:2:3, liquids more slowly at roughly 1:1.3:2. Hin ≈ 4 litres, so a lamb's libation ≈ 1 litre of wine.
• Accompanied burnt + fellowship offerings only. Purification and reparation offerings are excluded, as are burnt/peace offerings not from cattle or flock.
  • Makes sense: the libation belongs to the meal sacrifices, not the atoning ones.
• Part of the fixed calendar too. Tāmîd carried a quarter-hin libation morning and evening (Num 28:7); festival calendar of Num 28-29 specifies them throughout.
• Interesting that Num 28:7 uses šēkār, "strong drink," where the other passages say yayin, wine. Two options for this: an Akkadian loan for libations used in Babylonian ceremonies, or a generic term for any fruit/grain intoxicant. Deut 14:26 says both, which may mean they were distinct and both offered.

Procedure - We Don't Know

• No procedure is given anywhere in the Pentateuch. Two possibilities:
  1. Wine poured over the sacrifice on the altar - Greek analogy, plus v.10 calls it "a food offering, with a pleasing aroma."
  2. That clause describes the whole procedure rather than the libation. Wine poured at the foot of the altar - attested much later in Sirach 50:15.
• Ashley: "the evidence is insufficient to make a decision on this point."
• The altar-base reading has slightly more plausibility, on the Sirach evidence and because Paul's usage implies a visible pouring out rather than a hiss of steam.
• Methodological note from Ashley: this tariff explains neither the meal offering nor the drink offering, but assumes their meaning is already known to the Israelites.
  • There's silence here because it was written to people who'd watched it done since childhood.

Significance

• Completing the meal. Osborne: burnt offering supplies meat, grain offering bread, drink offering drink - together a balanced meal for Yahweh. Vos says the same in reverse: "A wine-offering forms its complement."
  • Not as crude as it sounds.The Lord doesn't need food; the bread of the Presence was for display, not consumption. What the meal communicates is hospitality and honour - how you set a table for a king who's come to your house.
• The gift of the land. Num 15 purposefully sits immediately after the rebellion of chapters 13-14.
  • Ashley reads the chapter as "a word of hope to the new generation" - opens with "when you come into the land you are to inhabit" (15:2).
  • The generation under sentence of death is being given legislation that presumes their children will arrive.
  • Wine requires vineyards, vineyards require years of settled peace. The drink offering is a promise disguised as a quantity.

New Testament Fulfilment - Paul Applies It to Himself

There is no explicit typological link between the drink offering and the death of Christ. What the NT does instead is that Paul takes the offering and applies it to his own death, twice. Verb both times is spendomai, the standard term for pouring a libation.

• Phil 2:17 - "Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all."
• 2 Tim 4:6 - "For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come."

Three Things in Paul's Metaphor

• 1. Paul's death is not the main sacrifice.

[The libation] does not refer to sacrificial death, but the metaphor with its allusion to wine may well intend to evoke the imagery of Paul's blood (i.e., his life) being poured out. And the language clearly places Paul's upcoming death into the sacrificial context as an offering… that accompanies another, perhaps more fundamental offering.

• Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT)

• The drink offering was not the sacrifice, it went on top of one. Towner: "He does not equate the importance of his death with that of Jesus Christ."
• In Philippians the more fundamental offering is named - the Philippians' own faith, described as thysia and leitourgia. Paul's martyrdom is the wine poured over the church's living sacrifice.
• 2. The passive voice significance.

The present tense here stresses that the process has begun, and the passive voice that God, not Rome, is still in control, despite appearances.

• William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles (WBC)

• Paul is not being executed. He is being poured. Verb is always passive in early Christian literature.
• 3. Death as departure, not defeat. Mounce on analysis: used of soldiers breaking camp and sailors loosing a ship. Spicq's analogy - ancient sailors poured a libation before setting sail. "The libation is offered, and Paul's ship is setting sail for heaven."

The Philippians Setting

• "Celebrate" in Paul's world meant festivals, processions, games - and above all sacrifice, culminating in animals offered with all the trimmings including wine libations poured on top.

Paul sees the active faith of the Philippian Christians as being like that. There is a celebration going on… and at the heart of it their Jesus-shaped pistis is both the sacrifice (thysia) and service (leitourgia)… If he, Paul, is called to face martyrdom right now, his death will be like the drink-offering poured out on top of it all, and that should simply increase the level of celebration.

• N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God

• So, Phil 2:18 commands them to rejoice with him - this only makes sense if the whole scene is a festival rather than a funeral.