Numbers 28-29

At the age of five, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his first musical composition, artist Iris Grace created exquisite paintings that sold for up to £800, and Japanese thespian Mana Ashida proved that she could out-act 99% of the other actors out there. When I was five, my most illustrious accomplishment was being able to run up the slide on the playground without falling down. When I wasn't face-planting in the sandbox or tanbark, my nose was almost always behind a book. One of many favorites was The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base, a mystery in which every lavish illustration holds multiple puzzles to be solved, secrets to uncover, and codes to break. As a kindergartener, I appreciated the story and pretty pictures but was too dense to figure out the answer to the central mystery. I did end up solving it a few years later, but I cheated and opened the sealed portion in the back to look at how to solve all the side puzzles.

The offerings and ceremonies in Numbers 28 and 29 involve cryptic sets of numbers that make me wonder whether God is using some kind of Eleventh Hour-style code. The vast majority of the offerings require two bulls, one ram, and seven lambs. In turn, each animal requires accompanying offerings of flour and oil: three-tenths of en ephah per bull, two-tenths of an ephah per ram, and one-tenth of an ephah per lamb. At first, I thought the hierarchal order was bulls at the top followed by rams and then lambs, but then why do the sacrifices require two bulls, one ram, and so many lambs?

Complicating matters further, the Festival of Trumpets and Day of Atonement require one ram and seven lambs as before (though the lambs now must be male), but only one bull--and a young bull at that (29:2, 29:8). The Festival of Tabernacles is even more convoluted; for the first seven days, the offering consists of two rams and a whopping fourteen lambs per day. The amount of young bulls required starts at thirteen the first day, and then decreases by one each day until it reaches the ubiquitous number seven on the seventh day. The eight and final day goes back to one bull, one ram, and seven lambs.

Oh, and then there's the male goat for the sin offering.

I could speculate that the Festival of Trumpets and Day of Atonement require fewer bulls because both days take place in the seventh month, as does the eight-day Festival of Tabernacles. Quite a busy month--I suppose the closest American equivalent would be from Thanksgiving to New Year's. I know God specified these specific numbers for a reason, but they seem awfully arbitrary from a mere human perspective. In that sense, God is a grandmaster of puzzles beyond Mr. Base; plenty of people have figured out The Eleventh Hour's riddles without cheating like I did, yet as far as I know, no one's figured out the real significance of the numbers here or in Leviticus.

However, with all those animals needed for sacrifices, the Israelites' camp must have been one noisome place.