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Numbers 28:11-15
Then it lists the start-of-month sacrifices, specifying animals, grain amounts, and drink measures, and adding a goat alongside the burnt offering.
Meaning in context
Then it lists the start-of-month sacrifices, specifying animals, grain amounts, and drink measures, and adding a goat alongside the burnt offering.
Section 4 of 6
Monthly new-moon offerings and measures
Then it lists the start-of-month sacrifices, specifying animals, grain amounts, and drink measures, and adding a goat alongside the burnt offering.
Movement
From Sinai toward the promised land
Artifact
Camp, journey, and census records
Biblical Timeline
Exodus & Settlement
Numbers context: 1500 BC - 1000 BC
Biblical Timeline
Exodus & Settlement
Numbers context
Exodus & Settlement / 1500 BC - 1000 BC
Numbers context is set in the exodus and settlement period, where Moses, the exodus, wilderness, covenant instruction, conquest, and judges.
Scripture Text
Thesis
Then it lists the start-of-month sacrifices, specifying animals, grain amounts, and drink measures, and adding a goat alongside the burnt offering.
Verse by Verse
The monthly burnt offering animals At the start of each month, Israel must bring a burnt offering to Yahweh. The required animals are fixed: two young bulls, one ram, and seven one-year-old male lambs. All are to be “without blemish,” indicating they must be acceptable and undamaged.
Grain offerings and differing measures by animal Alongside the animals, grain offerings are required in measured amounts of fine flour mixed with oil. The bulls receive the largest grain portion (three-tenths each), the ram a smaller portion (two-tenths), showing that the grain accompaniment scales with the size or rank of the animal.
Grain offering for each lamb and the stated effect Each lamb has its own smaller grain portion (one-tenth) mixed with oil. The whole burnt offering is described as a “sweet savor,” emphasizing that it is presented as a pleasing fire-offering to Yahweh.
Literary Context
This unit sits within a larger set of instructions that schedules Israel’s communal worship across time. In Numbers 28, the text moves from the continual daily burnt offering (earlier in the chapter) to additional offerings on special times: weekly Sabbath offerings (vv. 9–10), then monthly new-moon offerings (vv. 11–15), and then the yearly festival calendar that follows in chapter 29. The logic is cumulative: certain offerings are regular, and then extra offerings are added at set times without canceling the baseline. Numbers 28:1–2
Historical Context
The passage reflects a community ordered around a sanctuary where public offerings are scheduled by day, week, and month. The “beginnings of your months” assumes a monthly rhythm recognized by Israel, likely tied to the visible start of a new month, and it assigns a standardized public set of animals and measured products (flour, oil, wine). These instructions also presume access to herd animals and agricultural goods, either from the community’s resources or later from settled life, and they centralize worship through shared, repeated rites rather than ad hoc choices.
Theological Significance
Questions
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Drink offerings, monthly scope, and the added sin offering Measured wine is poured as drink offerings: half a hin for each bull, one-third for the ram, and one-fourth for each lamb. The text then generalizes that this is the burnt offering pattern for every month throughout the year. Finally, a male goat is required as a sin offering to Yahweh, and it is explicitly added “besides” the continual daily burnt offering and its drink offering, so the monthly rites supplement rather than replace the regular ones. hin
Numbers 28:11–15 presents a fixed, public worship schedule tied to the monthly calendar. At “the beginnings of your months,” Israel is to offer an expanded set of sacrifices to Yahweh: a large burnt offering (two bulls, one ram, seven year-old male lambs) plus measured grain and drink offerings, and also a male goat as a sin offering. The animals must be “without blemish,” and the accompanying flour, oil, and wine are given in set proportions that vary by animal size.
The passage also makes a structural point: these monthly offerings are added to the regular daily offerings rather than replacing them. Worship is portrayed as layered—daily, weekly, monthly—each with its own required elements.
Some differences come up around how the monthly “beginning” was recognized and how strictly the measurements functioned.
How the new month was identified: Some read “beginnings of your months” as a practical, observation-based start (the new month begins when the new moon is seen and announced). Others think the phrase mainly sets a calendar requirement without specifying the method, so the key issue is not the sighting but the regular monthly marking.
How to hear “sweet savor”: Some take “sweet savor” as vivid sensory imagery for smoke and smell. Others hear it more as acceptance language—an idiom meaning the offering is received favorably by God—without focusing on the physical scent.
How exact the measures were in practice: Some treat the listed tenths and fractions of a hin as strict quantities meant to standardize worship across Israel. Others allow that ancient measurement containers and local practice may have varied somewhat, while still aiming at the stated proportions.
The text gives clear requirements (animals, “without blemish,” the grain and wine amounts, and that the monthly set is “besides” the daily offering), but it does not explain the logistics: who announces the date, how measurement precision was enforced, or how the idiom “sweet savor” should be pictured. Those gaps invite different reconstructions.
Explicitly, the passage contributes a monthly rhythm of communal worship with defined costs and quantities: two bulls, one ram, seven lambs, specific flour-oil mixtures scaled to each animal, specific wine portions, and a goat as a sin offering (Numbers 28:11–15). It also clarifies the cumulative nature of Israel’s sacrificial calendar: monthly worship is not a substitute for daily worship but an added layer (v. 15). Theologically (by inference from these explicit claims), the text portrays Israel’s time (months) and resources (animals, grain, oil, wine) as ordered toward regular, shared approach to Yahweh within a structured system of offerings.
every (bə·ḥā·ḏə·šōw)