Shelamim (The Offering of Well Being)

In the burnt offering the whole animal goes to the altar. In the purification and reparation offerings the priests eat what the altar does not take. The offering of well being is the only class where the person who brought the animal eats it, and that single fact governs everything else about the rite.

The division is in three parts. The altar receives the fat covering the entrails, the fat on them, the two kidneys with the fat on the loins, and the appendage of the liver, which are burned on top of the burnt offering already lying there. The priests receive the breast, which is elevated, and the right thigh, which is set aside as a due; Leviticus assigns these as a perpetual portion for the priests from the offerings of the people. Everything remaining goes back to the offerer, who takes it away and eats it with family and guests in a state of ritual purity, which means the meal is conditional on the state of everyone at it.

Because meat is eaten there is a clock on it. Thanksgiving flesh must be finished the day it is offered; the flesh of a vow or a freewill offering may be eaten on the second day as well, and anything left on the third is neither eaten nor kept. A person who eats it anyway does not merely waste it; the text says the offering will not be credited to the one who brought it. The class also carries the general prohibitions of the system in their sharpest form, since this is the offering ordinary households handled: no fat and no blood, ever, and no one in a state of impurity may eat any of it.

The class has three sub-types and they are distinguished by what prompted the offering rather than by anything visible in the rite. The thanksgiving offering answers a deliverance that has already happened. The vow offering discharges a promise made in advance, typically under duress. The freewill offering answers nothing at all: it is brought because the offerer chose to bring it, and the tradition treats that as a category in its own right rather than as an unmotivated version of the others.

The thanksgiving offering alone comes with bread, four kinds of it, unleavened cakes mixed with oil, unleavened wafers spread with oil, cakes of soaked flour, and, uniquely on this occasion, leavened loaves, which are not burned on the altar but given with the animal. One of each kind goes to the priest who dashes the blood. That the one class of offering associated with public acknowledgement of rescue is also the one that comes with leavened bread and a same-day deadline says something about the kind of occasion it was: a household with a great deal of meat and bread that had to be eaten before nightfall, and therefore a great many guests.

The freewill offering carries one relaxation the others do not. An animal with a limb too long or too short may be accepted for it, though not for a vow, which is the only place the system bends its requirement of an unblemished victim. Prophetic and narrative texts mention this class more than any other, because it is the one that ordinary people brought and ate, and the one that made a pilgrimage festival a festival rather than a duty.