Exodus 29:14

29:14 But the meat of the bull, its skin, and its dung you are to burn up ¹  outside the camp. ²  It is the purification offering. ³ 

Exodus 29:36

29:36 Every day you are to prepare a bull for a purification offering ⁴  for atonement. ⁵  You are to purge ⁶  the altar by making atonement ⁷  for it, and you are to anoint it to set it apart as holy.

Exodus 30:10

30:10 Aaron is to make atonement on its horns once in the year with some of the blood of the sin offering for atonement; ⁸  once in the year ⁹  he is to make atonement on it throughout your generations. It is most holy to the Lord.” ¹⁰ 

[29:14]  ¹ tn Heb “burn with fire.”

[29:14]  ² sn This is to be done because there is no priesthood yet. Once they are installed, then the sin/purification offering is to be eaten by the officiating priests as a sign that the offering was received. But priests could not consume their own sin offering.

[29:14]  ³ sn There were two kinds of “purification offering,” those made with confession for sin and those made without. The title needs to cover both of them, and if it is called in the traditional way “the sin offering,” that will convey that when people offered it for skin diseases, menstruation, or having babies, they had sinned. That was not the case. Moreover, it is usual to translate the names of the sacrifices by what they do more than what they cover – so peace offering, reparation offering, and purification offering.

[29:36]  ⁴ tn The construction uses a genitive: “a bull of the sin offering,” which means, a bull that is designated for a sin (or better, purification) offering.

[29:36]  ⁵ sn It is difficult to understand how this verse is to be harmonized with the other passages. The ceremony in the earlier passages deals with atonement made for the priests, for people. But here it is the altar that is being sanctified. The “sin [purification] offering” seems to be for purification of the sanctuary and altar to receive people in their worship.

[29:36]  ⁶ tn The verb is וְחִטֵּאתָ (vÿhitte’ta), a Piel perfect of the word usually translated “to sin.” Here it may be interpreted as a privative Piel (as in Ps 51:7 [9]), with the sense of “un-sin” or “remove sin.” It could also be interpreted as related to the word for “sin offering,” and so be a denominative verb. It means “to purify, cleanse.” The Hebrews understood that sin and contamination could corrupt and pollute even things, and so they had to be purged.

[29:36]  ⁷ tn The construction is a Piel infinitive construct in an adverbial clause. The preposition bet (ב) that begins the clause could be taken as a temporal preposition, but in this context it seems to express the means by which the altar was purged of contamination – “in your making atonement” is “by [your] making atonement.”

[30:10]  ⁷ tn The word “atonements” (plural in Hebrew) is a genitive showing the result or product of the sacrifice made.

[30:10]  ⁸ sn This ruling presupposes that the instruction for the Day of Atonement has been given, or at the very least, is to be given shortly. That is the one day of the year that all sin and all ritual impurity would be removed.

[30:10]  ⁹ sn The phrase “most holy to the Lord” means that the altar cannot be used for any other purpose than what is stated here.