Numbers 15 Summary and Study Guide

God had just sentenced a whole generation to die in the wilderness. His next words to them were instructions for worship in a land they would never see. This Numbers 15 summary and study guide walks the chapter that follows, where God gives flour, oil and wine to a condemned people, then has a man stoned for gathering sticks.

Setting the Stage

God promised Abraham that his descendants would own the land of Canaan (Genesis 15:18), and centuries later He brought that family out of slavery in Egypt and led them toward it.

At a place called Kadesh, twelve men went ahead to survey the land. Ten came back saying the people living there were too strong to fight. Israel believed the ten, wept all night, and talked about choosing a leader to take them back to Egypt.

God pardoned them when Moses asked Him to, and still ruled that every adult who had refused would die in the desert over the next forty years. Numbers 15 is what God said to them next.

Comprehensive Numbers 15 Summary

God speaks to Moses about a day Israel has not yet reached. When they are living in the land, every animal burned on the altar is to come with flour, oil and wine beside it, and the amount rises with the size of the animal.

Those three things grow in Canaan and not in a desert, so the command carries a promise inside it. The same rule covers the foreigner living among them, so that anyone who worships the LORD brings his offering the same way. When they eat bread grown in that land, the first of the dough goes to God as well.

God then turns from what they bring to what they get wrong. If the nation breaks a command without realising it, the whole congregation brings a young bullock and a goat, a priest makes atonement by covering the sin with a sacrifice, and they are forgiven. One person who sins the same way brings a young female goat, and is forgiven too.

Then God draws a line. A person who sins with a raised hand, openly and on purpose, insults the LORD Himself, and no sacrifice is offered for that. He is cut off.

A man is then found gathering sticks on the sabbath day, immediately after those words about open defiance. Moses asks what should be done with him, and God answers that he is to be stoned outside the camp.

God’s last word is a reminder. Every Israelite is to fasten tassels to the corners of his clothing with a blue cord, look at them, and remember what God has commanded. God ends by naming Himself as the One who brought them out of Egypt.

One Word Summary

• Promise: the land is spoken of as settled (Numbers 15:2).
• Distinction: straying and defiance are handled apart (Numbers 15:27, 15:30).
• Remember: the blue cord is a daily prompt (Numbers 15:39).

In One Sentence

God tells Moses how Israel is to bring offerings once they reach Canaan, provides a sacrifice for sin committed unknowingly and none for sin committed in open defiance, orders the death of a sabbath breaker who acted in open defiance, and commands blue tassels on every hem so the people will remember His commands.

Theme of Numbers 15

Numbers 15 is about a covenant that holds after the people have broken it. God’s promise to bring Israel into Canaan outlasts the generation that refused to go, shown in laws they can only keep once they are there. Two things run alongside that promise.

His holiness makes a way back for the person who sins without knowing it and refuses one to the person who sins in contempt, and His welcome puts the foreigner on the same ground as the Israelite. He closes by giving a forgetful people a blue cord on every garment to look at.

Numbers 15 Outline

• Numbers 15:1-2: God tells Moses to speak to Israel about the day when they are living in the land He is giving them.
• Numbers 15:3-12: He sets the measures of flour, oil and wine that must accompany a lamb, a ram or a bullock offered to the LORD.
• Numbers 15:13-16: The same offering law is placed on the foreigner living among Israel, with one ordinance for both.
• Numbers 15:17-21: Once Israel eats bread grown in the land, a cake from the first of the dough is lifted up to the LORD.
• Numbers 15:22-26: When the nation breaks a command without knowing it, the whole congregation brings a bullock and a goat, and the priest makes atonement so they are forgiven.
• Numbers 15:27-29: One person who sins the same way brings a young female goat, and the same law covers the Israelite and the foreigner.
• Numbers 15:30-31: God says the person who sins openly and on purpose insults Him and is cut off from his people.
• Numbers 15:32-36: A man is found gathering sticks on the sabbath, held in custody, and stoned outside the camp at God’s word.
• Numbers 15:37-41: God commands tassels with a blue cord on the corners of every garment so Israel will look at them and obey.

The Offering Amounts for Lamb, Ram, and Bullock

Verses 4 to 10 fix the amounts, and they are easier to take in side by side.

A tenth deal is a tenth of an ephah, roughly two quarts of flour. An hin is roughly a gallon, so a fourth part of it is about a quart. The King James calls the flour portion a “meat offering,” which in 1611 English meant food of any kind rather than flesh, and modern translations call it a grain offering. The amounts climb in step with the animal, and Numbers 15:12 says the same proportion holds however many are brought.

Observations from Numbers 15

God Says “When,” Not “If” (Numbers 15:2, 15:18)

God opens two of His three speeches in this chapter with the same word. “When ye be come into the land of your habitations, which I give unto you” (Numbers 15:2). He is not raising a possibility; He is naming a day. Israel had just been told that the adults listening would die where they stood, and God still speaks about their arrival as settled.

The Offerings Are Made of the Land’s Own Produce (Numbers 15:4, Numbers 13:23)

The men sent to survey Canaan cut down a single cluster of grapes and carried it back on a pole between two of them (Numbers 13:23). Flour, oil and wine are the produce of that same country, so Israel could not bring these offerings until they held that harvest. Many Bible teachers hear in that an answer to the report the ten brought back: “We be not able to go up against the people” (Numbers 13:31).

God States the Same Rule for the Foreigner Three Separate Times (Numbers 15:15, 15:16, 15:29)

God does not mention the foreigner once and move on. He states the rule at the end of the offering laws, repeats it in the next verse, and states it a third time at the end of the laws about sin: “One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you” (Numbers 15:16). The chapter’s central division is between the accidental sinner and the defiant one, and it puts the foreigner on the Israelite’s side of that line, three times over.

Difficult Verses Explained

Does Numbers 15:30 Mean God Will Never Forgive a Deliberate Sin?

The verse describes the reach of Israel’s sacrificial system. Israel had a prescribed offering for the person who broke a command unknowingly, and for the person who broke it in open contempt the altar had nothing to give. To be “cut off from among his people” is understood by Bible teachers as removal from the nation, whether by execution or by God acting directly.

God’s mercy reaches further than that system did. David’s adultery and his arranging of a man’s death were as deliberate as sin can be, and when Nathan confronted him David said “I have sinned against the LORD,” and Nathan answered, “The LORD also hath put away thy sin” (2 Samuel 12:13).

David’s own reply names what God wanted instead of the sacrifice he was in a position to bring: “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51:17). He prays about both halves of this chapter in one breath: “Cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins” (Psalm 19:12-13).

The warning in Numbers 15:30 stands at full force against contempt, and it leaves the door open to the person who repents.

Why Was a Man Put to Death in Numbers 15:35 for Gathering Sticks?

He was not executed for the sticks; he was executed for defying a command he knew. Gathering firewood is ordinary work, and on any other day of the week it would have drawn no notice. The sabbath was different for two reasons. God had already made it a capital matter (Exodus 31:14-15; Exodus 35:2), and every seventh day for years the manna had stopped falling, which put the sabbath in front of the whole camp week after week.

And God had called it the sign of the covenant between Himself and Israel (Exodus 31:17). People found him at it and brought him in, which is what separates this from a private lapse. Moses places this account straight after Numbers 15:30-31, and most Bible teachers read the man as the worked example of sinning with a high hand.

Why Did Israel Not Know What to Do With Him in Numbers 15:34, When the Law Already Said He Should Die?

Scripture leaves this one open, and Bible teachers have offered two answers. The first is that the death penalty had been given but the method had not, and God supplies the method here. The second is that Moses and the elders knew the law perfectly well and shrank from carrying it out, so they held the man and asked God to confirm it.

The same wording appears in the case of the man who blasphemed: “they put him in ward, that the mind of the LORD might be shewed them” (Leviticus 24:12). Both readings fit what is written, and the passage does not settle which one is right.

What Does “After Which Ye Use to Go a Whoring” Mean in Numbers 15:39?

It is the Bible’s regular picture for unfaithfulness to God, not a comment about sexual sin here. Israel’s covenant with God is spoken of as a marriage (Jeremiah 3:14; Hosea 2:19-20), so chasing after other gods is described as a wife going after other men. In this verse the thing being chased is named: “your own heart and your own eyes.” God is warning them against following whatever they happen to want and whatever they happen to see, instead of what He has told them.

Common Misunderstandings

• That a sin of ignorance is a sin that does not count. The chapter requires an offering for it and says atonement has to be made (Numbers 15:25). Not knowing changes how God deals with it (Numbers 15:25, 15:30); it does not remove the need for a sacrifice.
• That the tassels carried power of their own. God gives them one purpose, and He states it plainly: “that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them” (Numbers 15:39). They were something to see, not something to trust.
• That “one law for the stranger” made the foreigner an Israelite in every respect. What the chapter puts on level ground is worship. Numbers 15:15 places the sojourner, the foreigner living under Israel’s law, before the LORD on the same footing as Israel, and Numbers 15:16 puts him under the same law and the same manner of offering. The chapter speaks about how a person approaches God, and it goes no further than that.

Christ Connection

Six times in this chapter an offering is called “a sweet savour unto the LORD” (Numbers 15:3, 7, 10, 13, 14, 24). Paul takes that exact language and puts it on Jesus: “Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour” (Ephesians 5:2).

Christ gave Himself up for us, and God received that gift the way He received the offerings this chapter describes. The difference is that Israel brought theirs again and again, and Christ was offered once: “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).

The rest of the chapter points the same way:

• The sacrifice for sin done in ignorance. Israel had an offering for the person who sinned without knowing (Numbers 15:27-28). From the cross Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), and Paul, who had hunted the church, wrote, “I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13).
• The sin with no sacrifice. Numbers 15:30-31 marks out a sin the altar did not cover. Hebrews describes the same shape under the new covenant and uses this chapter’s own word: the person who has “despised Moses’ law” is set beside the one who treats the Son of God with contempt, “for if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26-29).
• Death outside the camp. The man who broke the sabbath was stoned “without the camp” (Numbers 15:36), away from the place where God dwelt among His people. Hebrews takes that picture up: “Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). One man was put outside for his own defiance; Jesus went outside for other people’s.
• One law for the foreigner. Numbers 15:15 puts the sojourner on level ground before the LORD, and that points toward what Paul says God has now done: “ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (Ephesians 2:13-14).

When, Where, and Why

• When: somewhere in the roughly thirty-eight years Israel spent wandering after Kadesh. The chapter gives no date, and Bible teachers disagree about where in that period it belongs.
• Where: “in the wilderness” (Numbers 15:32), which is all the chapter says. The laws themselves look forward to Canaan, a country of grain fields and vineyards that the camp did not yet have.
• Why: Moses places these laws between two rebellions, the refusal at Kadesh in chapter 14 and Korah’s uprising in chapter 16, and every one of them assumes Israel arriving in the land. Set there, they show that God had not withdrawn His promise, and they define the difference between the sin He forgives and the defiance He will not tolerate, which is exactly what the surrounding chapters put in question.

Key Verses

“Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land of your habitations, which I give unto you,”

Numbers 15:2

God tells Moses to speak to Israel about the time when they are living in the land He is giving them. He calls the land a gift He is giving in the present tense, to the very people who had refused to take it.

“One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance for ever in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the LORD.”

Numbers 15:15

The same rule governs the Israelite and the foreigner living among them, permanently, and the foreigner stands before God exactly as they do. Centuries before the gospel went to the nations, worship in Israel was already open on the same terms to anyone who came.

“And the priest shall make an atonement for all the congregation of the children of Israel, and it shall be forgiven them; for it is ignorance:”

Numbers 15:25

The priest covers the whole nation’s sin with a sacrifice and God forgives them, because the wrong was done without their knowing it. The verse names both why God forgives and how.

“I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.”

Numbers 15:41

God says who He is, reminds them what He did for them, and says it twice. The rescue comes before the claim, which is the order the whole chapter has been working in.

Key Lessons from Numbers 15

• God spoke about the land in the same chapter as the sentence of death in the desert, which shows His discipline is not His abandonment (Numbers 15:2).
• Sin done without knowing still needed atonement, so a clear conscience is not the same as being clean (Numbers 15:27-28).
• God treats the person who strays and the person who defies Him as two different people, and Numbers 15:30 warns the second one rather than the first.
• The sojourner brought the same offering and received the same forgiveness as anyone born in Israel, so nobody’s background made his worship second class (Numbers 15:15-16, 15:29).
• God’s answer to a forgetful people was a thread on their clothes they would see every day (Numbers 15:39).

To see how this chapter fits into the whole book, read our chapter by chapter study: The Book of Numbers Summary by Chapter (1-36).

Bible Study Questions

1. In Numbers 15:2 and 15:18, what word does God use about Israel entering the land, and why does that word matter after the sentence He had just passed?
2. What does the chapter require alongside every animal offering, and what does Numbers 15:12 say about the amounts?
3. Read Numbers 15:15-16 and 15:29. What is the same for the Israelite and the foreigner, and what does that tell you about how God receives worship?
4. What is the difference between the person described in Numbers 15:27 and the person described in Numbers 15:30?
5. Why was the man in Numbers 15:32-36 judged as a defiant sinner rather than as someone who acted in ignorance?
6. Numbers 15:39 warns Israel against following “your own heart and your own eyes.” What had Israel’s eyes reported back to them in Numbers 13:33?
7. God gives Israel something to look at rather than another command to memorise (Numbers 15:38-40). What has helped you remember God’s word when you were most likely to forget it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Numbers 15, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land of your habitations, which I give unto you,

3 And will make an offering by fire unto the LORD, a burnt offering, or a sacrifice in performing a vow, or in a freewill offering, or in your solemn feasts, to make a sweet savour unto the LORD, of the herd, or of the flock:

4 Then shall he that offereth his offering unto the LORD bring a meat offering of a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of oil.

5 And the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering shalt thou prepare with the burnt offering or sacrifice, for one lamb.

6 Or for a ram, thou shalt prepare for a meat offering two tenth deals of flour mingled with the third part of an hin of oil.

7 And for a drink offering thou shalt offer the third part of an hin of wine, for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

8 And when thou preparest a bullock for a burnt offering, or for a sacrifice in performing a vow, or peace offerings unto the LORD:

9 Then shall he bring with a bullock a meat offering of three tenth deals of flour mingled with half an hin of oil.

10 And thou shalt bring for a drink offering half an hin of wine, for an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

11 Thus shall it be done for one bullock, or for one ram, or for a lamb, or a kid.

12 According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to every one according to their number.

13 All that are born of the country shall do these things after this manner, in offering an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

14 And if a stranger sojourn with you, or whosoever be among you in your generations, and will offer an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD; as ye do, so he shall do.

15 One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance for ever in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the LORD.

16 One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you.

17 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

18 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land whither I bring you,

19 Then it shall be, that, when ye eat of the bread of the land, ye shall offer up an heave offering unto the LORD.

20 Ye shall offer up a cake of the first of your dough for an heave offering: as ye do the heave offering of the threshingfloor, so shall ye heave it.

21 Of the first of your dough ye shall give unto the LORD an heave offering in your generations.

22 And if ye have erred, and not observed all these commandments, which the LORD hath spoken unto Moses,

23 Even all that the LORD hath commanded you by the hand of Moses, from the day that the LORD commanded Moses, and henceforward among your generations;

24 Then it shall be, if ought be committed by ignorance without the knowledge of the congregation, that all the congregation shall offer one young bullock for a burnt offering, for a sweet savour unto the LORD, with his meat offering, and his drink offering, according to the manner, and one kid of the goats for a sin offering.

25 And the priest shall make an atonement for all the congregation of the children of Israel, and it shall be forgiven them; for it is ignorance: and they shall bring their offering, a sacrifice made by fire unto the LORD, and their sin offering before the LORD, for their ignorance:

26 And it shall be forgiven all the congregation of the children of Israel, and the stranger that sojourneth among them; seeing all the people were in ignorance.

27 And if any soul sin through ignorance, then he shall bring a she goat of the first year for a sin offering.

28 And the priest shall make an atonement for the soul that sinneth ignorantly, when he sinneth by ignorance before the LORD, to make an atonement for him; and it shall be forgiven him.

29 Ye shall have one law for him that sinneth through ignorance, both for him that is born among the children of Israel, and for the stranger that sojourneth among them.

30 But the soul that doeth ought presumptuously, whether he be born in the land, or a stranger, the same reproacheth the LORD; and that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

31 Because he hath despised the word of the LORD, and hath broken his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him.

32 And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.

33 And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.

34 And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.

35 And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.

36 And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

37 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

38 Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue:

39 And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring:

40 That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God.

41 I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.