Was the new moon offering two bulls and seven lambs, or one bull and six lambs?

Both are, because they are rules for two different orders of worship. Numbers 28 belongs to the law of Moses, the offerings Israel was to bring at the tabernacle and later at the temple. Ezekiel 46 belongs to Ezekiel’s vision of a new temple (chapters 40–48), seen “in the five and twentieth year of our captivity”, years after Solomon’s temple had been burned (40:1). In it God gives a new “law of the house” (43:12) for a restored people, with a new arrangement in which the prince provides the offerings “in the feasts, and in the new moons, and in the sabbaths” (45:17).

Ezekiel is not miscopying Numbers. His vision differs from the law of Moses on point after point, plainly on purpose. For the Sabbath the law prescribed two lambs (Numbers 28:9); Ezekiel has six lambs and a ram (46:4). The law required a lamb every morning and every evening (Numbers 28:3-4); Ezekiel speaks only of the morning (46:13-15), with a larger grain offering. The grain offerings for the feasts follow new measures, and Ezekiel’s new moon offering has no goat for a sin offering. Keil and Delitzsch, who set out these differences, call the rules of the vision ‘the thorah of Ezekiel’ and treat them as a new law, not a copy of the old. Gill notes that the Jewish commentator Kimchi likewise took the new moon offering as ‘a new thing to be done in future time’.

So the two passages are not two accounts of one rule. A prophet who announces a new order of worship may give it new details, and Ezekiel’s readers knew the law of Moses well enough to see the changes. What his vision means is debated (see below), but on every Christian reading of it, it is distinct from the law given in Numbers.

A picture of the messianic age

Keil and Delitzsch, with many Reformed and older commentators, read Ezekiel’s temple as a picture, drawn in the language of Israel’s worship, of God dwelling with his people in the age of the Messiah, fulfilled in Christ and his church. The changed numbers mark it as a new order.

A future temple

Many dispensationalist Christians expect a literal temple in a future kingdom, where such offerings would serve as memorials of Christ’s sacrifice or for ritual cleansing, not as a second atonement beside the cross.

A plan for the returning exiles

Others think the vision set out a pattern that the exiles returning from Babylon could have followed, but which was never carried out in full.

Christians are divided on how to read Ezekiel 40–48, and Jewish interpreters too have long discussed how its rules relate to the law of Moses.