Kill a young bull.
Cited passages
“ ‘If the whole congregation of Israel sins, and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done any of the things which Yahweh has commanded not to be done, and are guilty; when the sin in which they have sinned is known, then the assembly shall offer a young bull for a sin offering, and bring it before the Tent of Meeting. The elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before Yahweh; and the bull shall be killed before Yahweh. The anointed priest shall bring some of the blood of the bull to the Tent of Meeting. The priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before Yahweh, before the veil. He shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar which is before Yahweh, that is in the Tent of Meeting; and the rest of the blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering, which is at the door of the Tent of Meeting. All its fat he shall take from it, and burn it on the altar. Thus shall he do with the bull; as he did with the bull of the sin offering, so shall he do with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven. He shall carry the bull outside the camp, and burn it as he burned the first bull. It is the sin offering for the assembly.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The two laws prescribe different sacrifices for the whole congregation's inadvertent sin. Leviticus 4:13-21 requires a single young bullock as a purification (sin) offering, with a detailed ritual: the elders lay their hands on its head, it is slaughtered before YHWH, the anointed priest brings its blood into the tent and sprinkles it seven times before the veil, applies it to the horns of the incense altar, pours the remainder at the base of the burnt-offering altar, burns the fat, and disposes of the carcass outside the camp. Numbers 15:22-26 requires two animals for the same situation—"one young bullock for a burnt offering" plus "one kid of the goats for a sin offering"—with their accompanying grain and drink offerings, and no laying-on of hands by elders is specified.
The apologetic case, developed by Wenham and Kaiser and partly anticipated by Milgrom, distinguishes the cases. Numbers 15:22-23 frames its scenario as inadvertent failure to keep "all these commandments"—the whole of the Torah YHWH spoke through Moses—whereas Leviticus 4 addresses inadvertent transgression of a particular prohibition ("any of the commandments... concerning things which should not be done"). On this reading the two texts legislate two different offenses: comprehensive communal apostasy in Numbers, a specific communal lapse in Leviticus, each with its appropriate rite. The distinction has textual purchase, since Numbers 15 does generalize its protasis broadly.
The difficulty is that the two passages differ not merely in scope but in ritual architecture. Leviticus 4 mandates the elders' hand-leaning, interior blood manipulation against the veil, and the carcass-burning outside the camp—features absent from Numbers 15, which instead pairs a wholly different function, an olah (burnt offering), with the hattat (sin offering). One animal versus two; one cultic function versus two; one ritual procedure versus another. These are not naturally two grades of a single ceremony but two distinct rites, and the case-distinction reading does not by itself explain why the rituals themselves diverge so thoroughly.
Source and stratum analysis offers the cleaner historical account. Israel Knohl's *The Sanctuary of Silence* argues that Numbers 15 belongs to the Holiness School (H), a later Priestly stratum that revised and supplemented the earlier Priestly Torah (P) preserved in Leviticus 4—here expanding the purification offering to include a burnt offering as an added atoning element. Milgrom disputes Knohl on the direction of dependence but agrees the passages stem from distinct Priestly layers. The final redactor incorporated both without fully coordinating them, leaving two procedures for the communal inadvertent sin.
The rabbis themselves felt the need to harmonize. The Mishnah and Talmud (m. Horayot 1-3; b. Horayot 6b) resolve the doubling by assigning Numbers 15's two-animal rite specifically to inadvertent communal idolatry and Leviticus 4's single-bullock rite to other inadvertent communal sin. That is a workable legal distinction—but it is one the biblical text does not itself state; the rabbis supplied it precisely because the plain texts were not transparently compatible.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine literary tension. The scope-distinction harmonization is partly grounded in Numbers 15's broad framing, but it cannot account for the divergent ritual structures; the rabbinic idolatry/other-sin division is a coherent post-hoc legal harmonization, while source criticism (H revising P) best explains why two different rites for the same case stand in the Torah.
Sources for this reading