Leviticus 10

Literally, they offered God “a strange fire.” The original Hebrew word is zar. It can mean: illegitimate, unauthorized, adulterous, foreign, imported, arrogant.

The Hebrew word, ’ēš, can mean: fire, lightning, set on fire, burning coals.

Jewish scholars in earlier centuries said the priests must have done something terribly wrong to justify this: sex sin, drunkenness, or not taking their ministry seriously enough. But some current Jewish scholars argue that it was important to follow God’s rituals to the letter. Creating new worship rituals was not only above a priest’s pay grade, it was heretical. And in this case, fatal.

This quote from God doesn’t seem to show up anywhere in the story of Israel’s travels out of slavery in Egypt. Some suggest a glimmer of the idea in Exodus 29:43, “I will meet with the people of Israel here at this worship center. This will become a holy place because I am here.”

Just as we have customary ways of expressing deep grief, people in ancient times did as well. We may wear black, while they sometimes dressed in torn and ragged clothing. Ladies today might get a hairdo for the funeral, but people in Bible times would sometimes take off their head coverings, mess up their hair, and cover themselves in a spray of ashes they throw into the air. They would cry loudly, and some would hire professional mourners as a way of expressing their respect for the dead.

Perhaps Moses was concerned that the dead priests, by dying, had ritually contaminated the area outside the tent. Just as science today teaches that matter and antimatter can’t share the same space without destroying each other, Moses seemed to believe that ritual holiness and ritual uncleanness were incompatible and harmful when they met.

Leviticus 2:3.

This sacrificial offering goes by various names: peace offering, fellowship offering, elevation offering, symbolic offering, special offering, and wave offering. The Hebrew word can mean to wave, lift, or blow. In Exodus 29, this sacrifice represented the culmination of an ordination service authorizing priests for ministry. It was the final act, which some scholars say was mainly an expression of gratitude to God for allowing these men to be assigned to lead the worship rituals for the people of Israel.

Leviticus 4 describes a sin offering as something the people of Israel brought to God after they realized they had accidentally broken one of God’s laws. Some scholars say a better translation is the opposite of “sin” because the sacrifice is intended to “un-sin” people, to purify them. So those scholars call it a “purification offering.”

Not all of the goat should have been burned. Leviticus chapters 4 and 6 give instructions for sacrificing a sin offering. Only part of the animal should have been burned on the altar. Priests were allowed to eat part of it (Leviticus 6:29). The rest of it should have been burned outside the camp (Leviticus 4:11-12, 21).

Moses was apparently referring to instructions he gave in Leviticus 6:26, 30. Moses may have been worried that the new priests were afraid of eating the meat, for fear of taking upon themselves the sins of others, and perhaps attracting the demons and bad magic they may have learned about in Egypt.