Continual Burnt Offering

Biblical Text and Content

The term means "the burnt offering offered continually." A burnt offering is a sacrifice in which the offering is burned whole. The regulation first appears in Exodus 29:38-42. Two lambs of the first year were to be offered each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. With each lamb was offered a grain offering of one tenth of an ephah of fine flour mixed with one fourth of a hin of beaten oil, together with a drink offering of one fourth of a hin of wine. The text calls this "a continual burnt offering throughout your generations at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the LORD" (Exodus 29:42).

Numbers 28:3-8 repeats the same regulation and calls it "a continual burnt offering, which was ordained in mount Sinai" (Numbers 28:6). In the regulations that follow for the offerings of the Sabbath, the new moons (the first day of each month), and the feasts, the phrase "beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink offering" recurs repeatedly. This indicates that the continual burnt offering was the basic sacrifice, never omitted on any day, and that the festival offerings were added to it.

Background

The Hebrew word tamid means "continuance" or "continually." Leviticus 6:12-13 commands that the fire on the altar of burnt offering never be allowed to go out. The morning and evening continual burnt offerings go hand in hand with this altar whose fire never ceases.

The continual burnt offering formed the backbone of worship in the tabernacle and the Temple in Jerusalem. In the time of Ezra, the people who returned from Babylon first set up the altar and offered the morning and evening burnt offerings before rebuilding the temple (Ezra 3:2-5). In the vision of the new temple in Ezekiel 46:13-15, only a morning burnt offering is mentioned, and scholars differ in how they explain this discrepancy.

The fixed times of sacrifice also served as reference points in the day. Scripture uses expressions such as "at the evening sacrifice" (Ezra 9:5) and "about the time of the evening oblation" (Daniel 9:21). Many interpreters also understand the occasion in Luke 1:8-10, when the people prayed outside while Zacharias burned incense, as having taken place at the time of this sacrifice and the incense offering.

Significance in the Whole of Scripture

Daniel 8:11-13, 11:31, and 12:11 speak of a power that takes away "the daily sacrifice." The original text lacks the word "sacrifice" and has only "the continual" (hatamid), which is generally read as referring to the continual burnt offering.

The Epistle to the Hebrews states that although the priests offer the same sacrifices daily and repeatedly, these can never take away sins. By contrast, it says that Christ offered Himself once for all (Hebrews 7:27; 10:11-12). It also describes the Christian life as offering "the sacrifice of praise to God continually" (Hebrews 13:15-16). On the basis of these passages, Christian tradition has generally held that the continual burnt offering was fulfilled in the atonement of Christ.

Interpretation and Debates

• Many scholars connect the "taking away of the daily sacrifice" in the Book of Daniel with the suspension of temple worship by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the second century BC. Dispensationalist interpretation also reads these passages as referring to the Antichrist halting the sacrifices of a rebuilt temple in the end times.
• According to tradition, the continual burnt offering ceased around the time the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70. In Judaism, the morning and afternoon prayer services are explained as corresponding to the times of the continual burnt offering.
• Likening the continual burnt offering to the morning and evening devotional life of believers is a homiletical application; the text itself is a regulation concerning priestly sacrifice.

In the Korean Church

In Korean church preaching, early morning prayer meetings and evening prayer are sometimes likened to "the morning and evening continual burnt offering" or "the fire on the altar that never goes out," as an exhortation to unceasing daily prayer and worship.