Episode 157: What is an Olah Offering?

To better understand the Akeida in Genesis 22, we need to have some background on the olah offering—also translated as the whole burnt offering or ascending offering. What was it? How was it different from other sacrifices? Why did they believe that God needed smoke in order to smell it? This lesson is going to give us a lot of ancient Near Eastern context!



If you want to view this on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Today we are going to talk about something completely different. There are different words for different types of sins in the Bible—everything from an “oopsie, I didn’t mean to do that,” or “oops, I had no idea that was wrong,” to “I am spitting in the face of God and I just don’t even care.” Well, there are also a lot of different kinds of offerings that they made at the Tabernacle and the Temple and just all over the ancient Near Eastern world that Israel shared with the nations around it. There are peace offerings, and guilt offerings, and thanksgiving offerings, and the offerings that were given on the festivals by the priests and the chagigah offerings and all of that. Some offerings were animals or birds and others were just wheat flour. But the most common offering in the Temple was performed by the priests two times every single day, and that offering is called the olah. The olah is translated into English as the whole burnt offering even though that isn’t what olah means. We haven’t seen this word since the story of Noah in chapter eight when he took one of every clean animal and offered them up to God and when God smelled the roasting animals on the altar, it made God happy. I also love the smell of roasting meat, how about you? Most folks love a good barbeque! And that’s how we get the actual meaning of olah, which doesn’t mean whole burnt offering but something more interesting. Olah means “ascending.”

What does ascending mean, though? It means ‘going up’ or ‘rising up.’ You know, like the smell of the meat goes up to God and He smells it and He thinks it smells great because His people were remembering Him and doing something nice for Him. Now, with a lot of other offerings, people would eat some of it too but not this one. A whole burnt offering goes totally to God, which is why the word olah is translated that way. That’s what Noah did as soon as he got off the ark. He made an altar and took one of each of those clean animals and gave them to God, just like a barbeque where God is the only one who gets invited and He is the guest of honor and gets all the steaks. The Bible tells us that whenever God would smell that offering, He would remember His people. Of course, we have talked about remembering before and it doesn’t mean He has forgotten them. It just means that He was actively thinking about them and what they need and stuff. Does God have a nose? Nope. But when God explains things this way to us, and to the children of Israel, it helps us to understand. All the gods of the nations had noses because they weren’t anything like our God—they were made up by people who needed to explain God’s good creation and it made them feel better to have something to look at and to bribe with the food they believed their gods needed to eat. But our God tells us that He has no body and so He has no need to eat anything. That’s why offerings to God were totally burnt to a crisp, to ashes, so that no one would think He was eating the meat like the pagan gods, who actually had trays of food and wine brought to them every day—and the priests got to eat the leftovers. I mean, if God did need to eat, He wouldn’t need us to go gather and hunt food and cook it for Him. We’ve talked about this before, the gods of the other nations were really pathetic and needed to be taken care of. Otherwise, they would starve and the sun would stop coming up and no one would have any babies and there wouldn’t be any food. They really weren’t very impressive as far as gods go, right? Our God is so awesome that He made the universe so that it can pretty much run itself, which is way harder than making something that needs to be poked and prodded and tweaked all the time. When God does decide to poke, prod or tweak what’s going on, we call it a miracle.

Now, about the smell of that meat. How did they believe that smell went up to where they thought God was? You know, in the smoke, and what does smoke do? It goes up. It ascends. It rises up into the sky. Does that seem a bit silly? I don’t want you to think that the people back then weren’t smart. There is a difference between being smart and just knowing stuff. You and I know stuff because the people who lived before us figured it out so that we didn’t have to. And we have books and the internet and so many ways to learn what other people have figured out. And we go on to figure out new things. You are going to know things when you are my age that I don’t. I know things that my parents and grandparents didn’t know. Not because I am smarter but because we figure out more and more every year and even every day. God made us curious and clever. I mean look at the ancient Egyptians—there was a time, long ago, when they didn’t know how to make pyramids yet. Honestly, I think He really enjoys watching us figure things out but figuring things out also means being wrong about a lot of stuff first. Have you ever heard of spontaneous generation? It’s a belief they had until about two hundred years ago that life just happens without anything to cause it. So, when they saw maggots, which are baby flies, on meat they figured that it wasn’t eggs laid on the meat but that wherever there was meat or whatever lying around, flies would just spring to life out of the meat like magic. And especially with the sorts of critters where their eggs are so small they can’t be seen without a microscope. And some very smart people thought it was true. Now, we know that God is the only one who can make something out of nothing, right? Well, they were trying to figure things out and they got it very wrong, not because they weren’t smart but because they just didn’t understand yet. I could tell you all day and all night about different things like that, where people were wrong for a long time before someone finally figured out what was actually going on. Flies would come along when no one was looking and would lay eggs and those eggs would hatch and then the babies would seem like they came out of nowhere. That made sense to them until they proved it was wrong.

So, why did Noah believe that God could smell the critters he burnt up? Why did he believe that God is somewhere above, that the smoke had to get to God so that He would know what was going on? Now that’s an interesting story for sure, and it’s a story that tells us how kind and patient God is about us not knowing everything. You see, God can only explain things to us by relating what is new to what we already know. If He uses the word snurfengoogle to teach us about how to create a ladybug out of nothing but we don’t know what snurfengoogle means and we wouldn’t understand it even if we did know what it means, then it would be a waste of God’s time and we would be really frustrated and even angry. And who could blame us? God knows absolutely everything about everything and we are like little ants looking at a brick wall and wondering what the heck it even is. So, God allowed them to believe what they believed about the world so that He could use that to teach them what is true about Him—because that’s what is important. Science is great and all, but knowing God is what we need.

You kids who are in like kindergarten through like fourth grade or so, at least I am guessing, have been told that zero is as low as numbers go. That you can’t have less than zero of anything. And it is mostly true, but you older kids know about negative numbers, right? That if you have negative five apples, it means you need five more apples. So, are the teachers lying when they say that zero is the smallest number? No. It isn’t lying. It’s helping their students understand things one step at a time so they won’t get confused. When I was in college, during my second year of physics, I took Quantum Mechanics but before that, I needed a lot of math, physics, and stuff to even begin to understand it. Quantum mechanics is real but I couldn’t ever teach it to you unless you knew a lot of other stuff first, so I wouldn’t even try to do it at all. I would just be showing off and talking what would seem like total nonsense. Like, you know, if someone was trying to teach me about computer programming and my head would just start spinning. But, you can live your whole life without needing quantum mechanics so I would rather teach you about what is important—God. I can teach you ways of thinking about God by comparing Him to things you know about, but what I can’t do is teach you about the science of God or about how He actually is and how He can even exist without someone creating Him because I don’t have any way to understand it myself. I don’t even have anything close to knowing a way to understand God. But I can see what He does and doesn’t do, and I can compare Him to a father, a mother, a mother bird, a husband, and everything else the Bible uses to try to explain Him to us.

So, why did they believe that God needed smoke to take the smell of the barbequed critters up to Him? Well, that’s a really interesting story that will help you to understand a lot of stuff you will see in the Bible. It all goes back to what everyone believed about the way the world was set up. And when I say everyone, I mean the Egyptians, Canaanites, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and really everyone until the Greeks. So, for a very long time the people just looked at the world around them and came up with an idea that made perfect sense to them. It wasn’t until shortly before the life of Jesus here on earth that the Greeks figured out the world can’t be that way because of how the sun moves in the sky throughout the year. But before the Greeks charted the movement of the skies and did the math, everyone believed that the earth was flat and floating on water with a solid dome over it holding back even more water. And above that dome, the children of Israel agreed, was where the gods were. So, whatever had to be done for God had to go up so that He would notice—and God was perfectly happy to let them believe it because He had no way of explaining anything to them and why would He? It wasn’t the least bit important to their lives. Knowing scientific stuff about the shape of the world was absolutely a waste of brain space and wouldn’t tell them anything they needed to know. God is kind and lets us believe what we believe about the world so that we can save brain space for learning about Him and His plans. It’s like quantum mechanics—do you need it? Nope. Not one little bit. Only chemists and physicists and engineers need that sort of thing, and even most of them don’t end up using it for anything. I know it hasn’t come in handy in anything that ever ended up being important in my life, at all, except for graduating from college and that was it. Same with the shape of the earth and where they thought God was living. It just wasn’t important enough to correct because God only spends time correcting how we treat Him and others, period. Because that is what really matters. Oh, and if you have ever heard that Christopher Columbus proved that the world wasn’t flat, it isn’t true. People already knew for a very long time.

Long, long after the time of Abraham, like hundreds of years later, Moses and the children of Israel would obey God’s instructions and build the Tabernacle so that His presence could be with them as they traveled through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land. By the way, we call the Land of Canaan the Promised Land because it was the land God promised to Abraham—the land that the Canaanites were living in. God wanted to be with them, close to them, but He needed there to be a separation because He is holy and perfect and they were totally messed up and doing things that were just plain messed up and He didn’t want them to die from being too close to Him. God said He didn’t even want to travel with them at all but Moses begged Him to go with them so He finally gave in. They could see God, but only as a cloud of smoke and a pillar of fire. Whatever God looks like, when He isn’t disguising Himself, is evidently way too much for us to handle. That’s why He would appear as the angel of the Lord and why, when Jesus came to us, it was as a human being in a real body that had to eat and sleep and everything else that we need to do. I hope this isn’t too confusing, but they believed that there was an overlap between heaven, where God was above that dome, and earth, and so He could have His feet on earth, even though He has no feet, while being in heaven above the dome that kept the rainwater from falling down all at once. But only in certain special places. That’s what made sense to them. God is so totally different from us that we just do our best to even try to understand even a bit of Him, but someday I hope we will understand totally. So, His feet could be on earth while His sniffer was way up high and so anything He could smell needed to come up to where His sniffer was. It’s sweet that He puts up with what we don’t know, just like parents do with their kids. It would be so mean if He didn’t! I bet the grownups in your life can think of ways that they don’t tell you the entire truth yet but only the amount that you will understand. They know that helps you to learn more in the long run by not overwhelming your brains now.

So, twice every single day, the priests who served at the Tabernacle and Temple would perform this sacrifice, the olah. This is the one we are going to see mentioned six whole times in chapter 22 after only seeing it one other time in chapter eight with Noah. They would do this in the morning and in the evening—around nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. And I say “about” because they had no clocks or hours or minutes and went by where the sun was in the sky. The priests would take a very perfect lamb and they would hold it until it was absolutely calm and then they would kill it so quickly that it never felt anything. One priest held the animal while another one caught the blood in a bowl. Then the blood was taken to the altar and splashed on the sides. The animal was cut into pieces and the guts were washed out so there wasn’t any more poop, and they were all put onto the fire on the altar. And it would burn all day and all night so there was always that smell of roasted meat getting up to God. And God knew that His people were thinking about Him and it made Him happy.

In the next chapter, God is going to ask Abraham for an olah offering but it will be a very strange and confusing one, so I wanted you to know about the regular one. An olah goes totally to God without anything left over but the ashes, because it is only for God. No one eats any of it. Let’s read the MTV version about the olah offering so you can see where it comes from in the Bible.

Then the Lord called Moses over to Him, and spoke to him from the tent where they always met with each other: “Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When any of you brings an offering to Me from any of their livestock, it can be a bull or a sheep or a goat…if his offering for an olah (a whole burnt offering) is from the flock, from sheep or goats, it has to be a male with nothing wrong with it. He needs to kill it on the north side of the altar before the Lord. Aaron’s sons the priests will splatter its blood against the altar on all four sides. He will cut the animal into pieces including its head and its fat, and the priest will arrange them on top of the burning wood on the altar. But he has to wash the intestines and legs with water (which will remove the poop). The priest will then take all of the animal and even the skin and guts it and burn it on the altar; it is an olah, a burnt offering, a food offering, a pleasing aroma (which means it smells good) to the Lord. (Lev 1:1-2, 10-13)

Now, this wasn’t a strange thing to ask for in those days. This was the normal way of coming near God, by giving Him your best gift. And even though it says a food offering, they knew God wasn’t eating it. It was food for them, but they were giving it to God instead. They could have eaten that critter but they gave it to God to honor Him and show Him their love. This didn’t have anything to do with sin or being forgiven or any of that. This was a gift for God just to give Him a gift. It would be like taking money and burning it. Now, don’t do that, okay? I don’t want angry emails from your family blaming me that you burned all the money in the house. God wouldn’t be happy about that and it wouldn’t count as a whole burnt offering! I am just telling you what that looked like to the children of Israel and to Abraham. Critters were valuable. A male lamb wasn’t as valuable as a female because he can’t have any babies but you could still use him for wool for clothes or for meat. Giving him to God instead was a really expensive present. And that’s what really made God happy—not the smell and not because He needed lunch.

In the days of Abraham, there was no Tabernacle or Temple and so they just made altars wherever and God was cool with it. But once the Tabernacle was built, that was the only place they were allowed to do the olah offerings. The Tabernacle moved around but that was the only reason their sacrifices could move from place to place. Once Jerusalem was chosen and a permanent altar was placed up on Mt Zion, no one was allowed to sacrifice anywhere else, for any reason and God had told them that if they sacrificed anywhere else, it would be just like they were offering up animals to goat demons and no one wants to do that, right? So, we can’t do that either. We can’t go into our backyards and build an altar and splash the blood of a critter on the side and burn it up. God wouldn’t be amused, at all, and we would be breaking quite a few of His commandments if we did. He says we can eat meat and all that whenever we want, but it can’t be a sacrifice. Besides, God hears our prayers without any animals needing to die. What God has always wanted is just people who will obey Him and love Him with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength and who will love their neighbors as themselves, like we talked about last week. There was a great Bible teacher who told Jesus that doing all of that is better than all the sacrifices in the world.

There is one more thing I want to talk to you about before we start the next chapter of Genesis, and that’s how Paul uses this sort of language in his letters. Paul talks about us being just like olah offerings to God, but I don’t want you making the mistake of thinking He really wants us to be offered up on an altar and burned to a crisp. No way. When Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, he said this“Be kind and understanding to each another, and make sure to forgive each other as God forgives you because of Jesus. So, imitate God and do what He does, because you are the children He loves, and walk in love, just like Jesus the King loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering (a pleasing smell) to God” (Eph 4:32-5:2). Paul is telling the people that what Jesus did made God happy, like when the Israelites would give Him an animal just because they loved Him. And we are supposed to be the same way. When God sees what we are doing and how we are learning to be more and more like Jesus, it’s like smelling that sacrifice on the altar, only like a thousand times better. Just think about it this way, instead of one whole burnt offering of an animal at a time on the altar in Jerusalem, God would rather have billions of people being like Jesus. And although He can’t smell people acting like Jesus, He can sure see it and be happy about it. That’s what He has wanted since the Garden. It’s what He wanted from the man and the woman. And when we are living like Jesus, it means that there are a lot of things that we shouldn’t and can’t do anymore. And maybe some of those things are things we enjoy doing. We can’t be bullies. We can’t lie about people or spread rumors about them. We have to be kind and fair and even generous.

Remember when God destroyed Sodom? The prophet Ezekiel said it was because they were cruel and evil and mistreated the poor and foreigners. People were crying out and God could hear how scared and angry and hurt everyone was. The people of Sodom were stinky, and God couldn’t stand it anymore. He destroyed them because they were more evil than we can even probably imagine with the ways they came up with to hurt people. God wants us to smell sweet—not because we take baths fourteen times a day but because our lives look like the life of Jesus, our King, who did everything God asked Him to do even when it was scary and painful. What Jesus did didn’t smell like a roasting animal—it smelled like love. What the people of Sodom were doing smelled like violence and blood and sounded like screaming.

I love you. I am praying for you. Sometimes it can be hard to stop doing the things God wants us to stop but when we do, just think about how good it smells to God.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Facebook YouTube