The Sin Offering (Chattat)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. "Purification offering" is the better translation - deals with sin as defilement needing cleansing, not only debt needing payment. Diagnostic feature = where the blood goes.

Graded by the Status of the Sinner

• The grading is not about proportional guilt.

not, however, as though the guilt of the sin were proportionate to the station of the sinner, but because the more highly-placed member of the theocracy involves more individuals in his sinning.

• Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology

• The high priest's sin damages the nation. That's why it costs a bull.
• Graded downward too (5:7-13). Can't afford a flock animal > two doves or pigeons, one purification + one burnt. Can't afford birds > a tenth of an ephah of fine flour.
  • Only non-animal purification offering in the Torah. It's a gracious provision for the poor - "The Lord wanted to make sure that all his people, rich or poor, could worship him equally."
  • Grain version had no oil, no frankincense. That's how you knew it wasn't a minchah.
• Mary and Joseph bring the two-bird option at the presentation of Jesus (Luke 2:24). The Messiah is born into a household that couldn't afford a lamb.

The Rite - Blood Is the Diagnostic

• Not thrown against the altar sides like the burnt offering. Applied with the finger, placed on horns.
• Priest + congregation > blood sprinkled 7x before the veil, daubed on the incense altar horns inside the Holy Place.
• Leader + common Israelite > horns of the burnt offering altar in the courtyard only.
• The first pair were admitted to the sanctuary (the congregation represented symbolically in the priest); the second pair could go no further than the altar.
• Gane's three-tier classification is the cleanest map of the whole system (via Morales): Outer Altar purification offerings / Outer Sanctum purification offerings / Inner Sanctum purification offerings of the Day of Atonement.
  • Principle: the more significant the sin in relation to the transgressor's status, the more deeply sin's pollution must be purged from the sanctuary.
• Fat > altar. Meat > priests, eaten in a holy place (6:26).
• Exception… When blood was carried inside the tent, the carcass could not be eaten. Hide, flesh, offal taken outside the camp to a clean place and burned (4:11-12; 16:27).
  • Sklar's rationale: when a sacrifice was made for the priests' own sin, neither priest nor people could profit by eating it.

Sin as Defilement, Not Only Debt

• Scripture itself uses the impurity metaphor. Ps 51:2 - "Wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin." Sin makes people feel dirty.
• But the defilement doesn't stay with the sinner:

To the Israelites, sin's defiling effects made an impact not only on the sinner, but also on those associated with the sinner. In this way, sin was like dishonour… Israelites who committed certain wrongs brought a defiling dishonour on themselves, their nation (their covenant family) and especially on their covenant Lord. This dishonour clung to the Lord's 'home', the tent of meeting, just as the dishonour of a child's wrong can cling to the parent's home. It was like an unholy dust that arose from their act and settled on the Lord's sanctuary.

• Jay Sklar, Leviticus (TOTC)

• That's why the blood goes on the furniture rather than the person. The sinner is forgiven, but the building is what gets cleaned.

What "Unintentional" Actually Covers

• Hebrew šĕgāgâ, root šgg. Ashley: "inadvertence," i.e. the act was intentional but not known to be sinful.
• Osborne says the same - "in error" more than "unintentional," so applicable to conscious sins.
• Wider than English "accidental." Covers the person who knew the law and broke it without noticing, and the person who didn't know the law at all.
• Lev 5:1-13 then extends the offering to sins that aren't unintentional at all: failing to testify under oath (5:1), forgetting a rash oath (5:4).
  • Sklar's middle category - intentional but not high-handed. Matters because Num 15:30-31 excludes the high-handed sinner from sacrificial atonement altogether.

Confession, and an Honest Loose End

• Lev 5:5-6 requires confession before the offering. Biblical confession goes beyond acknowledging the wrong to correcting it where possible (Exod 22:1; Num 5:7).
• Scholarly debate on 'šm, traditionally "become guilty":
  • Milgrom: feelings of guilt that prompt the process - effectively the priestly version of repentance.
  • Kiuchi: the realisation of guilt, or the consequences of guilt.
  • Boda: the first step is recognition of guilt, whether arrived at independently ('šm) or through communal disclosure (yd').
• Boda leaves it open:

Confession does appear to be part of the priestly vision of forgiveness, although it is not clear why it was demanded in certain cases and not in others.

• Mark J. Boda, 'Return to Me': A Biblical Theology of Repentance

Forgiveness Is God's Act, Not the Priest's

• Refrain closing each case: "the priest shall make atonement for him, and he shall be forgiven" (4:20, 26, 31, 35).
• Passive form is theologically loaded. Milgrom: the priest effects purgation by performing the ritual, but has no authority to forgive - the verb slḥ never has a human subject.
• The process is priestly but the forgiveness is not.

Also Handles Impurity, Not Only Sin

• Required after childbirth (12:6), skin disease cleansing (14:19), bodily discharges (15:15), corpse contamination via the red heifer's ashes - Num 19:9 explicitly calls that a purification offering.
• Why sacrificial atonement for major impurity? Sklar (with Milgrom): a person carrying it defiles the sanctuary and its contents without ever touching them, and defiling holy things is a serious sin even when unintentional.
• See The Cleansing Offerings, The Red Heifer.

New Testament Fulfilment

Christ as peri hamartias

• LXX's standing term for the purification offering. Paul uses it as a technical term in Rom 8:3 - "and for sin" = peri hamartias. Most commentators take it as a deliberate cultic allusion: God sent His Son as a purification offering.
• 2 Cor 5:21 pushes further - double imputation, the substance of Penal Substitution. Some read "sin" there as "sin offering," which the Hebrew chattat permits since the same word means both.

Outside the OT

• Heb 13:11-13. The writer has noticed that the purification offerings whose blood went furthest in had their bodies taken furthest out - and that Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem's wall.
• Morales extends it across both Day of Atonement goats: Jesus is led outside the gates 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.
• Then Hebrews turns the detail into a command. "Let us go to him outside the camp." The place of shame is where the church now lives.

What the Offering Couldn't Do

Leviticus and Numbers provide measures to deal with effects, not root causes (as with ritual impurity). This is why sacrifices continued: people kept sinning.

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

• Harper's reading of Heb 9:14 and 10:14: being made perfect and having the conscience cleansed signifies not the removal of guilty feelings, but overcoming propensity to sin.
• Blood on the horns of the altar cleaned the sanctuary. The blood of Christ cleans the worshipper.

The Reversal

• Levitical purification offering worked outward: from the defiled building to a forgiven person.
• The gospel works the other way. The people are the temple now (1 Cor 3:16; Eph 2:21-22), so cleansing the sanctuary and cleansing the worshipper have become the same act.
• See Ephesians 2v13-22 The Church as God's New Temple.