Chatat (The Purification Offering)

The classes of animal offering differ far less in how the beast dies than in what is done with the blood afterwards, and the purification offering has the most elaborate blood rite of the ordinary classes. For a private individual or a chieftain, the priest puts blood on the horns of the outer altar with his finger and pours the remainder at its base. For the anointed priest, or for the whole community, the rite moves inside: blood is sprinkled seven times before the veil of the sanctuary and placed on the horns of the incense altar, and only then is the remainder poured out at the base of the outer altar.

The disposal of the flesh follows the blood. Where the blood has entered the sanctuary the carcass is not eaten at all but carried outside the camp, to a clean place, and burned on a wood fire. Where it has not, the priests eat the flesh in a holy place, and Leviticus attaches a set of handling rules to it: whatever touches it becomes holy, a garment splashed with its blood is washed inside the sanctuary, an earthenware vessel it was boiled in is broken and a bronze one scoured and rinsed.

The graded scale of victims is the other structural feature. Leviticus 4 assigns a bull to the anointed priest and to the assembly, a male goat to a chieftain and a female goat or lamb to an ordinary person, and Leviticus 5 continues the descent to two turtledoves or young pigeons and then to a tenth of an ephah of fine flour. The flour offering is stripped of the oil and frankincense that a grain offering would ordinarily carry, so that even at the bottom of the scale the class keeps its own character.

What the class is actually for is contested, and the disagreement is not a quibble about translation. On the older reading, preserved in the standard English versions, chatat is the sin offering: an individual has done wrong, brings an animal, and the wrong is forgiven. On the reading argued at length by Jacob Milgrom, the name is formed from a verb stem meaning to decontaminate rather than to sin, the offering is a purification offering, and what its blood cleanses is the sanctuary, not the offerer. On that account moral and ritual faults generate an impurity that travels to the sacred precinct and accumulates there, and the blood rite is the mechanism for removing it, which is why the gravity of the fault determines how deep into the building the blood is carried.

Several features of the text favour the second reading. The offering is required after childbirth and after a discharge, where no wrong has been done at all; the blood is applied to furniture rather than to people; and the graded penetration of the sanctuary tracks the standing of the offender in a way that a straightforward pardon would not require. Against it, the text also uses the ordinary verb of forgiveness in the same passages, and critics have argued that the sanctuary reading imports a systematic theory the Priestly writers do not state.

The atlas records the class under the purification reading because that is the dominant modern position, and records the disagreement rather than deciding it. Both camps are working from the same chapters. What separates them is whether the Priestly system is a coherent theory of contagion or a collection of provisions that later readers have tidied.