Chapter 5 finishes up some details about the rules for sin offering. To summarize, not being aware of your sin is not a good enough excuse. Even if you don’t realize you touched something or did something or thought something that makes you unclean, you’re still unclean and need to deal with it as soon as you find out. It’s also stipulated that you’re supposed to offer a lamb for this offering, or two doves if you can’t afford a lamb or some nice flour if you can’t afford two doves. The other sacrifices have similar tiers. I can’t believe I didn’t notice yesterday, through that whole rant about regressive taxes, that the entire sacrifice system is progressive. And not only progressive, but it sounds like it’s also self-regulated. You are the one who decides what you can afford because it’s between you and God. Although I’m sure, in practice, there was a lot of brow beating done by the priests to keep people honest. After all, they’ve got a vested interest in how extravagant an offering you make. They’re the ones who get to eat the left overs.
The last type of offering is the Guilt offering which is like a Sin offering, but, and again, this is coming mostly from commentaries and websites, the Guilt offering was more appropriate for a Sin for which proper restitution could be made, where the Sin offering was more for things that couldn’t be set right. If it was a sin against someone else then you had to compensate them for it as well, for the full value times 1.2.
God gives Moses the rules to hand off to Aaron’s sons regarding how to handle these offerings and what parts they’re allowed to eat, then He says something really interesting. No Israelites are allowed to eat the fat of cattle, sheep or goats. Now the Israelites, for all their flaws, are awesome at following the letter of the law. To this day the practitioners of the Jewish faith have an astounding capacity for allowing themselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of the Law. I mean this as a compliment. I was able to visit Israel recently and we were surprised to find that you could not get cheese burgers anywhere. It turns out, the popular way to interpret the kosher laws these days is so strict that they take that passage from back in Exodus about not boiling a baby goat in it’s mother’s milk to mean that you cannot prepare or serve any meat and dairy together.
This is the first I’ve ever heard of this thing about not eating any fat though. If I were trying to avoid eating any fat, I would have to become a vegetarian because there is some amount of fat in everything. If I were trying to follow that no fat command to the same degree as the no baby goat milk command then I could never eat any meat. This one is tricky because the sacrificial system designates certain meat that the priests are supposed to eat so obviously that meat doesn’t make one unclean. Maybe what they meant to say is that you just can’t eat hunks of pure fat, like the chewy white sections of bacon. Well, maybe that’s a bad example. But then there’s no such thing really as pure fat right? I think that even the white, greasy bits have meat in them, and even the purest meat pieces have fat, so where’s the line? I guess since the sacrificial system is no longer active even within the Jewish community, the safest interpretation is just to never eat meat. That puts me on the wrong side of like 4000 years of rabbinical tradition though. They think it’s fine to eat meat.
I don’t think I like this rule.
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