The Sin Offering

The First Offering You Cannot Refuse

The three offerings that open Leviticus are gifts. The burnt offering ascends whole to God, the grain offering is shared between God and his priests, and the peace offering seats the worshiper at a meal in God's presence — and all three are brought freely, as the heart moves (the companion studies The Burnt Offering, The Grain Offering, and The Peace Offering trace each in turn). With Leviticus 4 the mood changes. A fresh divine speech opens the chapter — va-yedabber YHWH el Moshe lemor, "and the LORD spoke to Moses, saying" (Leviticus 4:1, MT) — marking a clean seam between the freewill offerings behind it and the required offerings ahead. Here begins the first of the mandatory offerings, the offering a person does not choose to bring but must bring once a certain thing has happened. The trigger is sin: "If a person sins unintentionally in any of the LORD's commandments about things not to be done, and does any one of them" (Leviticus 4:2, MT).

Three features set this offering apart from the three that precede it, and they organize everything that follows. First, it answers a specific act of sin done unwittingly — bishgagah (בִּשְׁגָגָה, H7684). Second, its ritual is graded — calibrated to who has sinned, so that the sins bound up with the sanctuary's own mediation carry blood deeper into it than the sins of an individual. Third, for the first time in the offering sequence, blood is taken past the courtyard altar and into the tent itself. And the chapter's own vocabulary — its verb for purging, its verb for sprinkling, its idiom for "concerning sin" — becomes, once carried into Greek, the raw material the New Testament reaches for when it describes the blood of Christ. What follows is recurrence and reinterpretation of a fixed pattern, not prediction.

A Word That Carries Two Senses

The name of the offering is a single Hebrew word, and it is a slippery one. Chatat (חַטָּאת, H2403) is the standard noun behind "sin offering," and it is common — 295 occurrences across 271 verses, with its largest concentration in Leviticus (66 verses) and its second in Ezekiel (24 verses). But that raw total cannot be read as "the sin offering appears 295 times," because the word carries two senses at once, and the chapter's opening case proves it. In Leviticus 4:3 the same lexeme appears twice with two different meanings: the priest brings an offering al chattato asher chata ("for his sin which he sinned" — the abstract wrong) and presents a bull le-chatat ("for a sin offering" — the animal). One word, one verse, two senses. Any count of chatat blends the sin with the sacrifice for it.

The prophets could even play on the ambiguity. Hosea indicts the priesthood with a bitter double meaning: chattat ammi yochelu, "they feed on the sin of my people" (Hosea 4:8, MT) — the priests literally eat the chatat, the animal given for the people's chatat, and grow fat on the very sin they are appointed to purge. The single word holds both the wrong and its remedy inside one accusation.

That double sense sits at the center of a genuine, unresolved question: is the chatat a "sin offering" or a "purification offering"? Both readings answer to real grammar and real verses.

The traditional reading, "sin offering," rests on what triggers the rite and what it accomplishes. The trigger is the sinner's own act (Leviticus 4:2, 22, 27), and the outcome is the sinner's forgiveness — the refrain that closes all four cases (Leviticus 4:20, 26, 31, 35). The offering is about sin, brought because of sin, and it ends in pardon.

The alternative reading, argued at length by Jacob Milgrom and followed by many since, calls it a "purification offering" and rests on the blood's destination. In this chapter the blood is never applied to the sinner's body — it is put only on holy objects: the horns of the altar and the space before the veil (Leviticus 4:6, 17, 25, 30, 34). What the blood decontaminates is the sanctuary, not the person. And the same three-letter root, in its intensive stem, means precisely "to purge" or "de-sin" an object — a sense verified across three genres. Ezekiel uses it of the altar: ve-chitteta oto ve-chipparta-hu, "you shall purge it and make atonement for it" (Ezekiel 43:20, MT). Numbers uses it of persons: the Levites "purified themselves" (va-yitchatte'u, an intensive reflexive form, Numbers 8:21, MT), and the one defiled by a corpse is "de-sinned" (ve-chitte'o, Numbers 19:19, MT). And the fifty-first psalm turns it on the penitent himself: techatte'eni be-ezov ve-ethar, "purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean" (Psalm 51:7, MT). Closer still, within the Torah itself, the same intensive verb purges the altar at the priesthood's founding: at the consecration Moses is commanded ve-chitteta al ha-mizbeach, "you shall purify the altar" (Exodus 29:36, MT), and he does it — vaychatte et ha-mizbeach, "he purified the altar," putting blood on its horns (Leviticus 8:15, MT). The object purged is a thing, not a person, and the sense is unmistakably "de-sin, decontaminate." The purgation sense is not a translator's guess; it is how the root behaves in the Piel and its reflexive Hitpael counterpart (the form at Numbers 8:21).

This is a genuine, live division in the textual evidence, not a manufactured balance. The trigger and the forgiveness both belong to the sinner, which favors “sin offering”; but the blood itself never touches the sinner — it decontaminates the sanctuary's holy objects, which favors “purification offering.” Both readings answer to real grammar and real verses; neither should be presented as the settled verdict.

The safest description holds both, and the two readings are less at odds than they first appear. Sin, in this system, is not only a private guilt to be pardoned; it is a contaminating force that reaches inward, toward the very place where God has chosen to dwell. That is why the remedy is applied where it is — to the horns of the altar and the space before the veil, the points nearest the presence — and not to the sinner's skin. The sinner is forgiven (the "sin offering" reading), and he is forgiven precisely because the defilement his sin left on the holy place has been purged away (the "purification offering" reading). The two are one motion: sin dealt with by cleansing the sanctuary sin defiles.

And the same vocabulary is still at work in Ezekiel's vision of a future temple. There a bull is brought "for a sin offering" (Ezekiel 43:19), its blood placed on the altar's four horns, and the priest is told to "purge it and make atonement for it" (Ezekiel 43:20) — the chatat procedure and the purge-verb together, carried forward into a coming prophetic ordinance. This is pattern recurrence, not fulfillment: a later text reusing an earlier law's language for its own liturgy.

Sin Done Unwittingly — and the Line the Offering Will Not Cross

Every one of the four cases in Leviticus 4 turns on a single qualifying word: shegagah (שְׁגָגָה, H7684), a sin of error or inadvertence. It is not a common word — 19 occurrences across 18 verses in the whole Hebrew Bible — but all four Leviticus 4 cases use it (Leviticus 4:2, 13, 22, 27). The offering is for sin committed in error or without full awareness — a wrong done in ignorance of the fact or the command, discovered only later — as opposed to defiant, high-handed rebellion. The act need not have been a physical accident; it is the lack of knowing intent that qualifies it. The congregational case makes the sense explicit — a matter "hidden from the eyes of the assembly" (ve-ne'lam davar me-einei ha-qahal, Leviticus 4:13, MT), a wrong done and only later discovered.

The Greek translators heard it the same way, and sharpened it toward ignorance. Where the Hebrew says "unintentionally," the Septuagint of Leviticus 4:2 writes akousiōs ("involuntarily"), and 4:13 uses agnoēsē ("should be ignorant") — the vocabulary of not-knowing. That framing later becomes live penitential language, as we will see.

The offering's reach has a hard limit, and the parallel legislation in Numbers draws it in the sharpest possible terms. Numbers 15:22–29 repeats the same shegagah-plus-forgiveness formula almost verbatim — and then, at 15:30–31, the law turns and refuses to go any further. The one who sins "with a high hand" (be-yad ramah, Numbers 15:30, MT) — deliberately, defiantly, "reviling the LORD" — receives no sacrifice at all. "That person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity is on him" (hikkaret tikkaret, the doubled verb of the karet penalty, Numbers 15:31, MT).

Leviticus 4 covers only the first category — a matter done in error, “hidden from the eyes of the assembly” (Leviticus 4:13). Numbers 15:30–31, in the very next paragraph of the parallel legislation, draws the line: high-handed, defiant sin against a known command has no sacrificial remedy at all. The sin offering exists precisely because it does not cover that.

The contrast is structural, not typological — it marks the boundary of the whole sacrificial system, not a pattern that recurs. The sin offering of Leviticus 4 exists for the sin of weakness, error, and ignorance. This is not to say every deliberate act was beyond remedy: the guilt offering (asham) that follows makes provision for certain intentional wrongs — a man who deceives his neighbor over a deposit, robs or extorts him, keeps lost property, or swears falsely still brings a sacrifice, makes restitution, and is forgiven (ve-nislach lo, "and he shall be forgiven," Leviticus 6:1–7, MT [Hebrew 5:20–26]). What has no sacrificial remedy is the sin of the raised fist — the be-yad ramah that defiantly repudiates a known command, and the capital crime that carries its own death penalty. That silence is not a gap in the law; it is the law drawing its own edge.

The most famous test of that edge is David. His sin against Uriah and Bathsheba was no oversight — it was adultery and arranged murder (2 Samuel 11–12), deliberate, defiant, and capital, the very kind of sin the altar cannot reach. No chatat could touch it, and the psalm of his repentance knows it. Having already begged God to "purge me with hyssop" (Psalm 51:7, the purge-verb of this chapter), David reaches the place where the sacrificial law has run out: "For you will not delight in sacrifice (zevach), or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering" (Psalm 51:16, MT). What he offers instead is the one thing the altar cannot supply — "the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (zivchei Elohim ruach nishbarah, Psalm 51:17, MT). Where the sin offering cannot reach, the sinner throws himself directly on the mercy of the God who alone forgives.

The Crown: Blood Graded by Rank, Carried into the Tent

Here the chapter reveals its architecture. Leviticus 4 is not one rite repeated four times with different animals; it is a single rite graded — calibrated to who has sinned, so that the cases bound up with the sanctuary's own mediation carry blood deeper toward the presence of God than the rest.

The first two cases share everything. When the anointed priest sins (ha-kohen ha-mashiach, H4899, Leviticus 4:3–12) and when the whole congregation sins (Leviticus 4:13–21), the offering is the same — a young bull — and the blood-rite is the same. The priest dips his finger in the blood and sprinkles it seven times "before the veil" (et penei ha-paroket, the curtain screening the Most Holy Place; paroket, H6532, Leviticus 4:6, 17), then puts blood "on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense" (qarnot mizbach qetoret ha-sammim; qeren, H7161, Leviticus 4:7, 18) — the golden altar that stands inside the tent. This is new. In the burnt and peace offerings the blood went no farther than the bronze altar in the courtyard; here, for the first time, blood is carried through the door and into the Holy Place itself.

The number is not incidental. The blood is sprinkled seven times (sheva), the recurring figure of completeness in the sacrificial law, and it is sprinkled "before the LORD" — toward the veil behind which the ark stands. This is the fullest, most deliberate blood-application the offering system has yet described, and it is reserved for the two sins that reach the sanctuary's own mediation.

And the disposal is total. The bull's hide, flesh, and offal are carried "outside the camp" (el michutz la-machaneh) to a clean place and burned entirely (Leviticus 4:11–12, 21). The phrase is worth pausing on, because it returns at the summit of the whole sacrificial calendar. The Hebrew of Leviticus 4:12 — el michutz la-machaneh — is verbatim identical to Leviticus 16:27, where the bodies of the Day of Atonement bull and goat, "whose blood was brought in to make atonement in the Holy Place," are carried "outside the camp" and burned. The same disposal marks the sin offering whose blood enters the sanctuary.

The last two cases drop a full grade. When a ruler sins (nasi, Leviticus 4:22–26) and when a commoner sins (achat me-am ha-aretz, "one of the people of the land," Leviticus 4:27–35), the animal is smaller — a male goat for the ruler, a female goat or lamb for the commoner — and the blood never enters the tent. It is placed only "on the horns of the altar of burnt offering" (qarnot mizbach ha-olah, the bronze altar in the courtyard, Leviticus 4:25, 30, 34), with the rest poured out at its base. No sprinkling before the veil, no incense-altar horns, no burning outside the camp; the flesh instead returns to the priests (compare Leviticus 6:26).

The structure suggests a principle — though the text states it nowhere outright: the deeper a sin's reach into the sanctuary's mediation, the deeper the blood must go to purge it. And the grading is really twofold, not a simple ladder of rank. The whole congregation holds no "office," yet its bull receives exactly the same inner rite as the anointed priest's; the ruler and the commoner differ only in their animal, not in where the blood goes. What sets the two inner cases apart is that the sin of the anointed priest, or of the whole congregation, implicates the sanctuary's own mediating function, so their blood alone crosses into the Holy Place. And the grading does not stop at Leviticus 4. On the Day of Atonement the blood goes one rank deeper still — not merely before the veil but behind it, sprinkled on the mercy seat itself (Leviticus 16:14–15). Leviticus 4 climbs from the courtyard to the veil; Leviticus 16 passes through it.

One detail in the blood-rite carries more weight than its size suggests, because it resurfaces in the New Testament. The verb for the priest's action before the veil is nazah (נָזָה, H5137) — to sprinkle, specifically the fine finger-flick of blood (Leviticus 4:6, 17). It is deliberately not the verb used for the other offerings. The burnt and peace offerings dash their blood against the sides of the altar with the verb zaraq (זָרַק, H2236) — a thrown splash, not a sprinkle (Leviticus 1:5). The Greek translators preserved the distinction exactly: nazah becomes prosranei (from the rhainō family, "sprinkle," Leviticus 4:6, LXX), while zaraq becomes proscheousin ("pour around," an unrelated verb, Leviticus 1:5, LXX). The sin offering's signature blood-act is a sprinkling, and the Greek keeps it distinct — a distinction the New Testament will build on.

A word on the manuscript witnesses. The pre-Christ Hebrew witnesses in view here — chiefly the Qumran Leviticus scroll 4Q25, alongside the consolidated Dead Sea text — cover Leviticus 4 only in part: they preserve the text at 4:1, 4:6, 4:12, and 4:27, but are not extant among these witnesses at 4:20, 4:22, 4:31, and 4:35. Where they can be checked, they confirm rather than contest — the Dead Sea reading of 4:12, ve-hotzi et kol ha-par el michutz la-machaneh, matches the consonantal Masoretic Text without a substantive variant. This is a coverage note, not a variant-reading study: no theologically significant difference surfaces where the older witnesses are extant.

The Priest Atones, God Forgives

Each of the four cases ends with the same two-clause formula, and the grammar of that formula holds a distinction the whole sacrificial system depends on. Leviticus 4:20 sets the pattern: ve-chipper alehem ha-kohen ve-nislach lahem — "and the priest shall make atonement for them, and it shall be forgiven them" (Leviticus 4:20, MT; the same close recurs at 4:26, 31, 35). Two verbs, two agents.

The first verb is kaphar (כָּפַר, H3722), "to make atonement, to cover, to purge" — a common priestly word (102 occurrences across 94 verses). It names what the priest does: he performs the rite, applies the blood, effects the covering. In Leviticus 4 the priest is the ritual agent of this verb throughout — though the law can elsewhere make the blood itself its subject: ki ha-dam hu ba-nefesh yekapper, "for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life" (Leviticus 17:11, MT).

The second verb is salach (סָלַח, H5545), "to forgive" (46 occurrences across 45 verses), and it does something the first verb never does: it changes its subject. Across all 46 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, the subject of salach — whether stated outright or implied by the passive, as here — is always God. No human being ever forgives with this verb. Not a priest, not a king, not a wronged party. Forgiveness in this specific sense belongs to God alone.

So the closing formula distributes the work precisely. The priest atones; God forgives. The passive ve-nislach ("and it shall be forgiven") names an action without naming the actor, because the actor is understood: the priest can carry the blood to the horns of the altar and sprinkle it before the veil, but he cannot pronounce the pardon. That verb was never given to him.

The two words are as close as two words can be without merging. Statistically, they are each other's strongest companions in the sacrificial vocabulary — where kaphar appears, salach is the most likely word to stand beside it. Yet the text never collapses them into one. Atonement is the rite; forgiveness is the verdict. The blood is handled by human hands; the pardon comes down from God's.

The atonement verb did not stay locked inside the sanctuary. Wisdom could turn it toward character: be-chesed ve-emet yekuppar avon, "by steadfast love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for" (Proverbs 16:6, MT) — the same root kaphar, now in the passive, naming not a rite but a life lived in covenant loyalty. The priestly word had an ethical afterlife.

Three Bridges to the New Testament, Each Weighed Separately

The vocabulary of Leviticus 4 does not merely describe an ancient rite; carried into Greek, it becomes the language the New Testament uses for the death of Christ. But the connections are not all of equal strength, and the discipline here is to weigh each one on its own terms rather than flattening them into a single claim that "the New Testament fulfills the sin offering." There are three real bridges, and one looser echo often mistaken for a fourth.

The first bridge is the strongest, because the New Testament draws it itself. The letter to the Hebrews takes the outside-the-camp disposal — most directly that of the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:27), and shared by the sin-offering bulls of Leviticus 4:12, 21 — and reads it onto the crucifixion: "For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as an offering for sin (peri hamartias) are burned outside the camp (exō tēs parembolēs). So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Hebrews 13:11–12, TAGNT). The plural "animals" and "the high priest" point first to the Day of Atonement bull and goat, whose blood is carried into the Most Holy Place and whose bodies are burned outside (Leviticus 16:27); but the same rule already governs the sin-offering bulls of Leviticus 4, and the Greek phrase exō tēs parembolēs is exactly the Septuagint's rendering of michutz la-machaneh — the disposal the priest's and the congregation's bulls received in Leviticus 4:12, 21. Hebrews names the mechanism and applies it: the sin offering whose blood goes inside is the body that goes outside, and Jesus is both. "Let us then go to him outside the camp" (Hebrews 13:13, TAGNT).

The second bridge is the sprinkling verb. Leviticus 4's signature blood-act is nazah, rendered in Greek with the rhainō family — and that same word-family carries the New Testament's language for the blood of Jesus. Peter writes of those chosen "for obedience and for sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ" (rhantismon haimatos, G4473, 1 Peter 1:2, TAGNT). Hebrews speaks of "the sprinkled blood" that "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (haimati rhantismou, Hebrews 12:24, TAGNT), and calls believers those who draw near "with hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience" (rherantismenoi tas kardias, Hebrews 10:22, TAGNT). This is the sprinkling verb of the purification rites — the finger-sprinkle before the veil, shared with the cleansing of the leper, the Day of Atonement, and the red-heifer water (Leviticus 14; 16; Numbers 19), and kept distinct from the zaraq dashing of the burnt and peace offerings — carried into the description of what Christ's blood does, not a generic image of blood.

The third bridge is the "concerning sin" idiom, and here the calibration matters most. Twice in Leviticus 4:3 alone the Septuagint writes peri tēs hamartias — "concerning sin" — as its standing technical phrase for a sin offering. Paul reaches for the same idiom in Romans 8:3: God sent his own Son "and, concerning sin (peri hamartias), condemned sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3, TAGNT) — the same preposition and the same noun in the same order, which is why many read the phrase there as "as a sin offering." The match is at the level of the fixed idiom, not the letter: Leviticus 4:3 carries the article (peri tēs hamartias), Paul drops it (peri hamartias).

That the phrase is a fixed idiom rather than a Pauline coinage shows most clearly where the New Testament quotes it from the Psalter. Psalm 40 lists the offerings God "did not desire" — olah va-chataah, "burnt offering and sin offering" (Psalm 40:6, MT) — and Hebrews quotes the Greek of that verse verbatim: holokautōmata kai peri hamartias ouk eudokēsas, "in burnt offerings and offerings concerning sin you took no pleasure" (Hebrews 10:6, TAGNT), applying it to Christ's once-for-all self-offering (Hebrews 10:5–10). The sin-offering idiom of Leviticus 4:3 reaches the New Testament already carried on the lips of the Psalms.

It is precisely here that a common fourth claim overreaches. Second Corinthians 5:21 says God "made him to be sin (hamartian) who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21, TAGNT). The word is the same — hamartia (G266), the Septuagint's word for the sin offering — and the thought is close. But the construction is different: here hamartia stands as the direct object of "made" (hamartian epoiēsen), governed by "for our sake" (hyper hēmōn), not inside the prepositional idiom peri hamartias. It is a genuine lexical link, and it may well intend the sin-offering sense — but it is not the identical technical formula of Romans 8:3, and it should not be presented as though it were. Same word; different grammar.

Behind all three bridges stands the argument of Hebrews 9, which makes the whole logic explicit. If the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the defiled, sanctified the flesh, "how much more will the blood of Christ ... purify our conscience" (Hebrews 9:13–14, TAGNT). The sprinkling that purged the sanctuary in Leviticus 4 becomes, in Hebrews, the blood that purges the conscience — the "purification" reading of the chatat carried to its furthest reach.

The Second Temple Echo

Between the Testaments, Greek-speaking Jews kept using the sin offering's vocabulary — and stretched it in directions Leviticus 4 never authorized. These are historical witnesses to how the offering was understood, not authorities on the level of Scripture; the deuterocanonical books that preserve them were valued in the Second Temple period but are not canonically binding.

The most striking extension appears in 2 Maccabees. After a battle, Judas Maccabeus collects money and sends it to Jerusalem "to offer a sin offering" — prosagagein peri hamartias thysian, the exact Septuagint idiom — but he offers it for the dead, that fallen soldiers "might be delivered from their sin" (2 Maccabees 12:43–45, deuterocanonical). Leviticus 4 gives no warrant for this: its chatat is always for a living sinner who has sinned and can be forgiven (Leviticus 4:2). The vocabulary is borrowed; the application — a sacrifice for the dead — is a Second Temple development the Torah's law does not contemplate, and doctrinally distinct from anything in Leviticus.

Sirach moves in a different direction, ethicizing the atonement verb. The Septuagint's own priestly word for "make atonement" — exilaskomai — Sirach applies not to sacrifice but to conduct: "Whoever honors his father atones for sins" (Sirach 3:3, deuterocanonical), and "as water extinguishes a blazing fire, so almsgiving atones for sins" (Sirach 3:30). The same book insists that ritual alone is worthless from the wrong hands: the Most High "is not pleased with the offerings of the ungodly," and their multiplied sacrifices do not atone (Sirach 34:19).

Finally, the Septuagint's framing of shegagah as ignorance took root as penitential language. Sirach prays that his "sins of ignorance" (agnoēmata) not be multiplied (Sirach 23:2–3), and Tobit confesses his sins "and those of ignorance" (agnoēmata, Tobit 3:3) — the same not-knowing vocabulary of Leviticus 4:13, turned into personal prayer. Alongside these, the Prayer of Manasseh seeks forgiveness through confession and repentance without any sacrifice at all — the channel left open when the temple was not available, a background contrast to Leviticus 4's cultic mediation rather than a replacement for it. Baruch, by contrast, does the opposite: the exiles send silver to Jerusalem to "buy burnt offerings and sin offerings" — holokautōmata kai peri hamartias, the very idiom of Leviticus 4:3 — with incense, to offer on the altar (Baruch 1:10, deuterocanonical). Confession and sacrifice stand side by side there, not as rivals.

Conclusion: What the Blood Reaches

Leviticus 4 turns the offering system from gift to necessity. The three offerings before it were brought as the heart moved; the sin offering is brought because sin has happened and must be dealt with. Its logic is exact and its architecture deliberate: a sin of ignorance or weakness (shegagah), a rite graded to the rank of the sinner, and blood carried — for the first time — past the courtyard altar and into the tent, sprinkled before the veil and set on the incense-altar horns. The higher the office, the deeper the blood reaches, because the higher the office, the deeper the defilement runs. And every case ends the same way: the priest atones, and God forgives.

Whether the offering is best called a "sin offering" or a "purification offering," it does one thing — it deals with sin by cleansing the holy place that sin defiles, so that a holy God may go on dwelling among an unholy people. That is why the New Testament reached for its very words. The blood carried inside and the body burned outside, the sprinkling before the veil, the idiom "concerning sin" — these were the fixed pattern the apostles used to say what the cross accomplished: not a prediction fulfilled and discarded, but a pattern filled to its depth. Even the prophets saw the two senses running together toward a final cleansing. Zechariah promises a day when "a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem" — le-chattat u-le-niddah, "for sin and for impurity" (Zechariah 13:1, MT) — the sin-word and the impurity-word set side by side, the wrong and the defilement washed away in one stream. What Leviticus 4 did with blood dabbed on the horns of an altar, Zechariah sees done at last in an open fountain, and opened for the very house of David that could find no sacrifice for its greatest sin.

The blood of bulls and goats could reach the sanctuary; it could never quite reach the conscience (Hebrews 9:14). Leviticus 4 shows how deep the blood must go. The New Testament claims to show how much deeper it went.