Numbers 15:20, commentary and pictures

The verse stands in instructions about meal offerings, drink offerings, and offerings for sins of ignorance. It requires Israel to set apart the first of the dough from household bread as a heave offering to the Lord, by the same practice used for grain from the threshing floor. That first dough was made from the new grain during the grain-gathering period before Pentecost, and expressed giving the first of the increase to God. This first-fruit offering was a voluntary thank offering acknowledging God's provision, in which the first and best of one's increase was set apart for God before personal needs were met.

The verse gives instruction about acceptable offering in a chapter that shows Sabbath breaking is a sin abhorrent to God. The same chapter includes the stoning of the man who in defiance gathered sticks on the Sabbath, a special and flagrant case of presumptuous sin belonging to temporary sanitary or police regulations adapted to that people, time, and surroundings, easily distinguishable from the Decalogue as the eternal constitution of God's government epitomized in the Ten Commandments. The verse shows that one ordinance stood for both the congregation and the stranger who sojourned with Israel, so that as the Hebrew was so the stranger was before the Lord. Circumcised servants bought with money became part of the household during their service and were made naturalized citizens of the state, members of the congregation, and partakers of all the rites and privileges common to the people. Strangers were thus recognized as citizens equal with Hebrew servants, equally answerable to the laws and equally protected by them, and to be loved as oneself.

If a part of the dough has been offered to the Lord the rest may also be used, which Paul uses in Romans 11 to teach that the unbelieving Jews are fit to be saved. The converted Jews are the firstfruit of the new covenant offered to God, so the rest of the Jewish lump can also be used and saved. The Gentiles stand related to this firstfruit only as a wild olive tree grafted in, because the new covenant was promised to be made with Judah and Israel and then the Gentiles were to be grafted in. Setting apart the dough was work done by the Jewish mother in the home while small children clinging to her watched, and by it children were molded in the national discipline, for Jewish education began with the mother. It stands with the Sabbath meal and the kindling of the Sabbath lamp and the writing of the name of the Most High on the doorpost as first things to catch a child's attention.