Tamid (The Daily Offering)

Two lambs of the first year, without blemish, one offered in the morning and one between the evenings: that is the whole of the daily offering, and it is the smallest and most consequential fixture in the sanctuary calendar. Each lamb goes up as a burnt offering and is consumed whole, and each is accompanied by a grain offering of fine flour mixed with beaten oil and a libation of wine poured out at the altar. Exodus gives the instruction at the consecration of the priesthood. Numbers repeats it at the head of the calendar of public offerings, before the sabbath, the new moon and the festivals, every one of which is described as an addition to it rather than as an item beside it.

The word tamid means continual or perpetual, and what it describes is not an offering made without pause but one that never lapses. Its practical effect was to bracket the day. The morning lamb was the first thing on the altar and nothing preceded it; the evening lamb was the last and nothing followed it. Every other offering brought by anybody, public or private, obligatory or freely given, was therefore laid on a fire already burning between the two, and the additional offerings of a great festival, however many bulls and rams they ran to, were still additions inside that frame.

The rest of the daily service was organised around the two lambs. The clearing of ashes from the altar, the arrangement of the wood, the trimming of the lamps, the incense on the golden altar, the priestly blessing and the psalm sung by the Levites all had their fixed position relative to them. A visitor to the Temple on an ordinary day, with no festival and no private offering in sight, would have seen the entire apparatus of the place turning on two sheep.

The Mishnah gives the daily service a tractate of its own, and it is unusual among them. Instead of arguing law it narrates a procedure, from the moment the priests rise in the chamber where the night watch slept to the moment the offering is complete. The lots by which the duties were assigned, the priest sent out to see whether the light had reached the point at which slaughter could begin, the doors whose opening could be heard at a distance, the order in which the limbs were carried up the ramp: it reads like an eyewitness account and it was not written by an eyewitness. The tractate was redacted long after the last lamb was offered, and how much of the detail is memory and how much is reconstruction is a real question rather than a rhetorical one. This is the general problem of the whole subject in its sharpest form, because here the source is at its most circumstantial and therefore at its most persuasive.

The cessation of the daily offering is remembered as a calamity in its own right, separately from the destruction of the building that housed it. Rabbinic tradition places it among the events of the seventeenth of Tammuz, three weeks before the ninth of Av, which is why the fast of Tammuz opens the sequence it does.

One confusion is worth clearing away. The atlas also holds Ner Tamid, the perpetual lamp that burns before the ark in a synagogue. It shares the adjective and nothing else. The lamp is a fitting of a later building; the offering is a rite of a demolished one. The two are commonly run together because the word tamid does similar work in both names, and the link between the two rows here is marked as a conflation rather than as a connection.