Leviticus 3:-7 LOTS of sacrifices. Wow! The priests were busy! There are an awful lot of sacrifices that were to be made. Although, they often pertain to different classes of people, so it may not have been that many to remember. Most though do focus on unintentional sins. Only one is for an unintentional sin – lying or stealing. That one involves restoring what was taken plus extra, and then the person also had to make a sin offering. Another thing is that if a person is unclean and they participate in or consume any of the sacrifice they would be cut off from Israel – exiled. They wouldn’t be able to offer sacrifices, and that meant they wouldn’t be forgiven and they wouldn’t have that special relationship with God. No wonder they tried so hard to keep from being defiled or made unclean! Same thing if a person ate the fat from an offering or at blood. What the heck is a wave offering? And a heave offering? Other than those two weird things, there was a grain offering, a burnt offering, a sin offering, a trespass offering, the consecrations, and the peace offering. That’s a lot! But I suppose that if you’d grown up with that as part of your life it wouldn’t be nearly as complex sounding as it is today when it’s archaic. Thankfully, we don’t have a Temple anymore, and because of that and because of Jesus, we no longer have to offer sacrifices like this. The Hebrews always put the most important things at the beginning (they didn’t much care about chronology, like we do today). So, since the sacrifices are the first thing in this book (which was also the first book the children read and learned to write from), they must have been critical. They established and enabled the relationship between YHWH and His people. They didn’t want to do anything to mess that us, so they put it first. It was the first thing you learned because that relationship was the most important thing in their lives. Is it the most important thing in my life? Do I put that relationship first?