Deuteronomy 33:10

among you Lit. in thee.

which chanceth him by night See Leviticus 15:16; and above on Deuteronomy 20:7.

judgements … law Heb. Mishpaṭim … Torahcp. Deuteronomy 17:9 ff. The earlier priest was a teacher and judge (Hosea 4:6; Micah 3:11); and of his functions these also come first here, and are followed by his offices in the ritual of expiation.

incense Rather smoke of sacrifice; for in the earlier Heb. literature, Isaiah 1:13; 1 Samuel 2:16; Amos 4:5; Hosea 4:13; Hosea 11:2, the noun ḳeṭôreth(here ḳeṭôrah) and the vb ḳiṭṭerrefer always to such smoke and not to incense.

Of the use of incense in Israel's worship there is no evidence before the 7th cent. b.c.; Jeremiah 6:20 appears to regard frankincense as an innovation. At Ta-anach Sellin unearthed an incense altar which he dates about 700 b.c. (Tell Ta-annek, 75 ff., 109 f.) and at Gezer Macalister found another in rubbish of 1000 600 b.c. (PEFQ, 1908, 211). See further Jerusalemi. 333, ii. 63 n. 2, 307 f., etc. The smokefrom the altar conveyed to the Deity in an ethereal form the portion of the sacrificial feast reserved for Him. This seems to have been the primitive idea of the process, and a trace of it survives here in the anthropomorphic phrase in thy nostrils (R.V. marg.), cp. Genesis 8:21; 1 Samuel 26:19, etc. But later the burnt-offering came more and more to have a piacular force; and its smokesymbolised to Israel the confession of their sin and their surrender of the lives He was pleased to accept in place of their guilty and forfeit selves. No sacrament could be more adequate than this, which proved at once the death deserved by the guilty, the blackness and bitterness of their sin, and its disappearance in the infinite purity of the skies, the unfathomable mercy of Heaven. It is this piacular meaning which is behind the LXX rendering ἐν ὀργῇ σον, -in thy wrath," for in thy nostrils.

whole burnt offering See Deuteronomy 13:16 (17).