1Thus said the Master, the LORD: “The gate of the inner court facing eastward shall be closed during the six workdays, and on the sabbath day it shall be open and on the day of the new moon it shall be open. 2And the prince shall come through the gate hall from outside and stand by the lintel of the gate, and the priest shall do his burnt offerings and his well-being sacrifices, and he shall bow down on the threshold of the gate and go out, and the gate shall not be closed until evening. 3And the people of the land shall bow down before the LORD at the entrance of that gate on sabbaths and on new moons. 4And the burnt offering that the prince shall offer to the LORD on the sabbath day shall be six unblemished sheep and an unblemished ram. 5And a grain offering, an ephah for each ram, and for the sheep, a grain offering, the gift of his hand, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 6And on the day of the new moon, an unblemished bull from the herd and six sheep and a ram. Unblemished shall they be. 7And an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram he shall do as a grain offering, and for the sheep, as his hand may attain, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 8And when the prince enters, through the gate hall he shall enter and by way of it he shall go out. 9And when the people of the land enter before the LORD on the appointed times, who enters through the northern gate to bow down shall go out through the southern gate, and who enters through the southern gate shall go out through the northern gate, and he shall not go back through the gate by which he entered, but straight ahead of him he shall go out. 10As for the prince, in their midst when they enter he shall enter, and where they go out he shall go out. 11And on the festivals and on the appointed times the grain offering shall be an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram and for the sheep the gift of his hand, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 12And should the prince do a freewill offering, whether burnt offering or well-being sacrifices, a freewill offering to the LORD, he shall open the gate facing eastward and do his burnt offering and his well-being sacrifices as he does on the sabbath day, and he shall go out and close the gate after he has gone out. 13And a yearling unblemished sheep he shall do on the sabbath day, a burnt offering to the LORD for the day, each morning you shall do it. 14And a grain offering you shall do together with it, each morning, the sixth of an ephah, and oil, the third of a hin, to sprinkle on the fine flour, a grain offering to the LORD, an everlasting perpetual statute. 15And they shall do the sheep and the grain offering and the oil every morning, a perpetual burnt offering. 16Thus said the Master, the LORD: Should the prince give a gift to one of his sons, it shall be his estate, to his sons shall their holding be, it comes in estate. 17And should he give a gift from his estate to one of his servants, it shall be his till the year of release and shall go back to the prince. His estate must surely belong to his sons. 18And the prince shall not take from the estate of the people to cheat them of their holding. From his own holding he shall bequeath to his sons, so that My people be not scattered each man from his holding.”
19And he brought me into the entrance that is on the side of the gate to the sacred chambers for the priests that face northward, and, look, there was a place in the far corner to the west. 20And he said to me, “This is the place in which the priests prepare the guilt offering and the offense offering, where they bake the grain offering so as not to bring it out to the outer court to consecrate the people.” 21And He took me out to the outer court and made me pass by the four corners of the court, and, look, there was an enclosure in each corner of the court. 22In the four corners of the court there were enclosures without roofs, forty cubits long and thirty cubits wide the measure of each of the four corners. 23And there was a row of bricks within all around for the four of them, and cooking utensils fashioned beneath the rows all around. 24And He said to me, “These are the kitchens where the ministrants of the house cook the sacrifices of the people.”
CHAPTER 46 NOTES
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1. on the sabbath day it shall be open and on the day of the new moon it shall be open. The obvious reason for opening the gate, as becomes clear in the next verse, is so that the prince can enter through it.
2. and he shall bow down. As is usually the case in ritual contexts, this verb carries both its literal sense and, through a kind of synecdoche, designates the act of worship.
7. as his hand may attain. This idiom, taken from the sacrificial laws of the Torah, indicates a category of offering in which the number or quantity is not fixed but determined by the economic capacity of the person who brings it to the Temple.
9. who enters through the northern . . . shall go out through the southern gate. It is not clear whether this instruction has some ritual or symbolic justification or is simply a means of regulating foot traffic within the Temple.
13. each morning you shall do it. The switch from “he” (the prince) to “you” (singular) is slightly disorienting, but it may reflect the fluidity with which biblical Hebrew switches grammatical person, rather than being the result of a scribal error.
14. oil, the third of a hin, to sprinkle on the fine flour. The reason for this instruction is culinary rather than strictly ritual: the grain offering is to be baked, and so the flour needs to be suffused with oil to make it into dough.
16. it shall be his estate. That is, the gift shall become the inheritance of the son to whom it has been given.
17. one of his servants. In royal contexts, “servants” usually means “courtiers.” A royal gift to a courtier for exemplary service rendered would be fairly common.
the year of release. This might be the jubilee year. In any case, it is a set year in which slaves are freed and property that has been assigned to others reverts to its original owners. Thus the king’s gift to his courtiers, unlike the gift to his sons, is not permanent.
18. so that My people be not scattered each man from his holding. As in earlier biblical literature, Ezekiel envisages an agrarian society in which stability and prosperity are contingent on possessing arable land. It is for this reason that the king is sternly prohibited from expropriating land from his subjects.
20. so as not to bring it out . . . to consecrate the people. As before, consecration is conceived as a kind of contagious condition. The consecrated grain offering must be prepared by the priests within their chambers and should not come in contact with the people.
21. an enclosure. This is the same Hebrew word that is rendered as “court” at the beginning of this verse, but it has a secondary sense of “enclosure.”
22. each of the four corners. The Masoretic Text reads “in each of the four of them mehuqatsʿot.” This last word is not intelligible and in fact is marked by the Masoretes with dots over it, a way of indicating that a word is textually suspect. This translation adopts the emendation proposed by Rimon Kasher, leʾarbaʿat hamiqtsqaʿot.
23. a row of bricks. The Hebrew merely says “row,” but what is indicated is a low inner wall of bricks or perhaps of stones.