1And when you cast lots for the land as estate, you shall give a donation to the LORD, sacred from the land, twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide. It is to be sacred through all its boundary all around. 2From this, for the sanctuary, shall be five hundred cubits square all around, and fifty cubits for an open space all around it. 3And by this measure you shall measure it: twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide, and within it shall be the sanctuary, the holy of holies. 4It shall be sacred from the land for the priests who minister in the sanctuary, who draw near to minister to the LORD, and it shall be for them a place for houses and a consecration for the sanctuary. 5And twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide shall be for the Levites who minister in the house. Theirs it shall be as a holding, twenty chambers. 6And the city’s holding you shall give—five thousand cubits wide and twenty-five thousand cubits long corresponding to the sacred donation. It shall be for the whole house of Israel. 7And for the prince on both sides of the sacred donation and to the city’s holding facing the sacred donation and facing the city’s holding from the western side westward and from the eastern side eastward and the length corresponding to one of the sections from the western border to the eastern border for the land. 8It shall be a holding in Israel for him, and My princes shall no longer cheat My people, and the land they shall give to the house of Israel by their tribes.
9Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Enough for you, princes of Israel. Put aside outrage and plunder and do justice and righteousness. Take away your banishments from My people, said the Master, the LORD. 10Just scales and a just ephah and a just bat shall you have. 11The ephah and the bat shall have a single measure, the bat to contain a tenth of a homer, the ephah a tenth of the homer shall its measure be. 12And the shekel shall be twenty gerahs. Twenty shekels, twenty-five shekels, fifteen shekels shall the minah be for you. 13This is the donation that you shall make: a sixth of an ephah from each homer of wheat and a sixth of an ephah from each homer of barley. 14And the regulations for oil, the oil by the bat, a tenth of a bat for each kor, ten bats are a homer, [for ten bats are a homer]. 15And one sheep from the flock from every two hundred from Israel’s well-watered pastures as a grain offering and as a burnt offering and as well-being sacrifice to atone for them, said the Master, the LORD. 16All the people of the land shall be with the prince of Israel for this donation. 17And upon the prince shall be the burnt offerings and the grain offerings and the libation on the festivals and on the new moons and on the sabbaths. On all the appointed times of the house of Israel he shall do the offense offering and the grain offering and the burnt offering and the well-being sacrifice to atone for the house of Israel.”
18Thus said the Master, the LORD: “In the first month, on the first of the month, you shall take an unblemished bull from the herd and purify the sanctuary. 19And the priest shall take from the blood of the offense offering and put it on the lintel of the house and on the four corners of the level space on the altar and on the lintel of the gate of the inner court. 20And thus shall you do on the seventh of the month for the errant man and for the unwitting, and you shall purge the house. 21In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, you shall have the Passover, a festival of seven days. Flatbread shall be eaten. 22And the prince shall do for himself and for all the people of the land an offense-offering bull. 23And the seven days of the festival he shall do a burnt offering to the LORD, seven unblemished bulls and seven unblemished rams each day of the seven days and an offense offering of a he-goat each day. 24And a grain offering, an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram he shall do, and oil, a hin for each ephah. 25In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, on the festival he shall do like these for seven days, the offense offering and the burnt offering and the grain offering and the oil alike.”
CHAPTER 45 NOTES
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1. cast lots for the land. The idiom used here harks back to Joshua, where a system of casting lots is used in order to divide up the tribal territories.
a donation to the LORD. The area designated is to be set aside for the Temple, the Levites, and the priests.
4. It shall be sacred from the land. That is, it shall be set off from the rest of the land as consecrated ground.
5. twenty chambers. This is the reading of the Masoretic Text, ʿesrim leshakhot, but it is puzzling what chambers are doing out in this open area. Perhaps one should adopt the Septuagint’s reading, which is ʿarim lashavet, “towns in which to dwell.”
7. And for the prince. Throughout, “the prince” is the king.
8. My princes shall no longer cheat My people. With these clear demarcations of what area belongs to the crown, what to the priests and Levites, and what to the people, royal expropriation of lands belonging to the people will cease.
9. outrage and plunder. This could be construed as a hendiadys, having the sense “outrageous plunder.”
Take away your banishments. The grammatical form of the noun that derives from the verbal stem meaning “to banish” is peculiar, but, given the context of royal exploitation of the people, the probable sense is eviction of people from lands that have been expropriated by the crown.
10. a just ephah and a just bat. The ephah is a dry measure, the bat a liquid measure. The ḥomer, as is spelled out at the end of the next verse, is a dry measure ten times the size of an ephah.
12. shekel. This word means “weight”—its cognate is used in several other Semitic languages—and it is not, as in later usage, a coin. Although equivalents in modern measurements are often proposed by scholars for all these terms of weight and volume, there appears to have been some fluctuation of their values in different times and regions.
14. [for ten bats are a homer]. This clause is bracketed because it appears to be an inadvertent duplication of the immediately preceding clause.
15. well-watered pastures. The Hebrew mashqeh usually means “offering drink,” so the translation is a surmise based on context.
17. And upon the prince shall be the burnt offerings. Since it is the duty of the priests, not of the king, to perform the actual rite of sacrifice, this must mean that it is the prince’s obligation to oversee the arrangements for the sacrifices and to make sure they are done in the appropriate ways at the appropriate times.
18. the first month. This is Nissan, approximately corresponding to April.
purify the sanctuary. This was done by sprinkling the blood of the slaughtered bull on the altar. The blood, as Jacob Milgrom puts it, was thought of as a kind of detergent.
19. on the lintel of the gate of the inner court. In Leviticus, the rite of purification was restricted to the altar. Ezekiel, preoccupied as he is with purity, extends it here to the inner court.
20. for the errant man and for the unwitting. These would be people who without intending to do so have brought ritual uncleanness into the sacred zone of the Temple. The impurity has to be purged.
25. In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month. This is the month of Tishrei, corresponding to September–October. The festival in question is the fall holiday of Succoth. Between the two festivals mentioned here, Passover is the holiday that affirms belonging to the community of Israel, whereas Succoth, which takes place at the completion of the work of harvesting, is the holiday for which the greatest number of pilgrims came to Jerusalem.