Numbers 15:27-37

27 “If one individual commits an unintentional sin, the guilty person must bring a one-year-old female goat for a sin offering.

28 The priest will sacrifice it to purify the guilty person before the LORD, and that person will be forgiven.

29 These same instructions apply both to native-born Israelites and to the foreigners living among you.

30 “But those who brazenly violate the LORD ’s will, whether native-born Israelites or foreigners, have blasphemed the LORD, and they must be cut off from the community.

31 Since they have treated the LORD ’s word with contempt and deliberately disobeyed his command, they must be completely cut off and suffer the punishment for their guilt.”

32 One day while the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they discovered a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day.

33 The people who found him doing this took him before Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the community.

34 They held him in custody because they did not know what to do with him.

35 Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man must be put to death! The whole community must stone him outside the camp.”

36 So the whole community took the man outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as the LORD had commanded Moses.

37 Then the LORD said to Moses,

Numbers 15:27-37 Meaning and Commentary

INTRODUCTION TO NUMBERS 15

In this chapter the children of Israel are instructed about the meat offerings and drink offerings, and the quantities of them, which were always to go along with their burnt offerings and peace offerings they should offer when they came into the land of Canaan, Nu 15:1-12; and they are told that the same laws and ordinances would be binding equally on them that were of the country, and on the strangers in it, Nu 15:13-16; and an order is given them to offer a cake of the first dough for an heave offering, Nu 15:17-21; and they are directed what sacrifices to offer for sins of ignorance, both of the congregation and particular persons, Nu 14:22-29; but as for presumptuous sinners, they were to be cut off, Nu 14:30,31; and an instance is recorded of stoning a sabbath breaker, Nu 14:32-36; and the chapter is concluded with a law for wearing fringes on the borders of their garments, the use of which is expressed, Nu 14:35-41.

Footnotes

• [a]. Or to make atonement for.