1. Should a person bring forward a grain offering. The early rabbis plausibly understood the grain offering as an accessible cultic vehicle for the common people, who might have been hard put to meet the expense of animal sacrifice. The term for grain offering, minḥah, is borrowed from the political realm, where its primary meaning is “tributary payment,” and thus it expresses Israel’s relationship of vassal to God.

2. a handful . . . shall be scooped. The Hebrew says literally “he shall scoop,” which could refer to a single priest. The third-person singular, however, without specified subject, is often used as an equivalent of the passive form of the verb.

its token portion. The general ancient Near Eastern practice, and perhaps the original Israelite one as well, was to burn the entire grain offering on the altar. Jacob Milgrom interestingly proposes that the limiting of the sacrificial fire to one small portion of the grain may have been a reaction to the widespread practice of burning cakes to Ishtar (denounced by Jeremiah [7:18]). The economic self-interest of the priests in preserving much of the offering for their own consumption may have also played a role in this prescription.

3. holy of holies. As elsewhere, this construction indicates a superlative: “most sacred.” The meaning in this context is: strictly reserved for the priests.

11. any leaven nor any honey. No really convincing explanation for this prohibition has been offered. Although it might seem that there is some sort of connection between the ban on leaven in the sacrifice and the ban on leaven in the Passover laws, honey—here, as elsewhere, the probable reference is to date honey—does not appear to belong to the same category.

12. but they shall not go up on the altar as a fragrant odor. Leavened stuff and honey are not intrinsically taboo substances, but they must be excluded from the kind of offering that is burned on the altar.

13. the salt of the covenant. The indispensable presence of salt may ultimately derive from the fact that the sacrifice was originally imagined as a divine meal, and that seasoning with salt was felt to be necessary in order to make food palatable (compare Job 6:6: “Is tasteless food eaten unsalted?”). But throughout the Mediterranean, salt was associated with covenants, and the phrase in Numbers 18:19, “a perpetual covenant of salt,” suggests that the link between salt and permanently binding covenants may have been reinforced by salt’s efficacy as a preservative.