Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Peace Offering
Leviticus 3:1-17
1 “‘If his offering is a sacrifice of peace offerings, if he offers it from the herd, whether male or female, he shall offer it without defect before Yahweh. · WEB
The third offering is the only one the worshiper eats, and the two things reserved for God are the fat and the blood.
The peace offering differs from the first two in one respect that changes its character entirely: most of it is eaten by the people who brought it.
The procedure opens the same way — the hand laid on the head, the killing at the door of the tent, the blood sprinkled on the altar Leviticus 3:2. What is burned is not the animal but specific portions: the fat covering the innards, the kidneys, and the covering of the liver Leviticus 3:3–4.
The rest goes back to the worshiper, and the later legislation says what he does with it — he eats it, with his household, in a meal that must be finished within a day or two Leviticus 7:15–16. The offering ends in a family dinner.
That is why this one may be male or female Leviticus 3:1. The burnt offering required a male; this one relaxes the specification, because its purpose is different. It is not primarily about atonement. It is about being on terms good enough to eat together.
Two reservations are made, and both are stated as permanent.
All the fat is Yahweh's Leviticus 3:16. In a subsistence economy fat is the most valuable part of an animal — the concentrated food, the thing that makes a lean year survivable. It is precisely what a hungry family would keep, and it is the part burned.
And the closing verse joins it with the other: you shall eat neither fat nor blood Leviticus 3:17.
The two prohibitions have different grounds. Blood is withheld because life is in it, and the book will explain that at length Leviticus 17:11. Fat is withheld because it is the best part, and the principle running through the offerings is that what is given is not the surplus.
So the peace offering is a meal shared with God in which he takes the richest portion and returns the rest. The worshiper does not eat alone and does not eat everything, and the arrangement is called a perpetual statute in all your dwellings — kept at home, wherever the family happens to be.
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