The עֹמֶר – ghomer or
‘omer –
measure of the abundance that God gives
André H. Roosma
22 April 2014
The Hebrew word עֹמֶר – ghomer or
‘omer we encounter in a few Bible passages. One of those is
Leviticus 23: 9-21, where God instructs the Israelites to bring the first
sheaf of the newly harvested winter grain (barley or
wheat) as a sacrifice to Him, immediately after Pesach /
Matsot.
9 And YaHUaH
spoke unto Mosheh saying:
10 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say
unto them: When you enter the land which I give to you, and you gather in
its harvest, then you shall bring the sheaf [עמר] of the first portion of your harvest to
the priest.
11 And he shall wave the sheaf [עמר] before
YaHUaH, to be accepted on your behalf; on the morrow after
the shabbat the priest shall wave it.
12 On the day when you wave the sheaf [עמר], you shall also
offer a he-lamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt-offering
unto YaHUaH.
13 And the meal-offering thereof shall be two
tenths of an ’eiphah of fine
flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto YaHUaH for a
sweet savour; and the drink-offering thereof shall be of wine, one fourth
of a hin.
14 And you shall eat neither bread, nor roasted
grain, nor fresh ears, until this very day, until you have brought the
offering of your God. It is a statute for ever throughout your generations
in all the places where you live.
Leviticus 23: 9-14
Before they eat in one or other form from the new grain harvest, God
wants that they acknowledge and honor Him as the Giver of it, and also that
they respect the priests ordained by Him. This was done by waving with the
first sheaf of this new grain before God’s face in the temple, in
worship. And by relinguishing it to the priests for their consumption.
Another important passage in which we encounter the word עמר – ghomer or ‘omer
already earlier, is in God’s instructions on the gathering of the
man - the special food that He gave them during the journey through
the desert, from Egypt to the promised land.
13 And it came to pass
at even, that the quails came up, and covered the camp; and in the morning
there was a layer of dew round about the camp.
14 And when the layer of dew was gone up, behold
upon the face of the wilderness a fine, scale-like thing, fine as the
hoar-frost on the ground.
15 And when the children of Israel saw it, they
said one to another: ‘What is it?’ [or:
Abundance of seed. Hebrew: man] – for they knew not
what it was. And Mosheh said to them: ‘It is the bread which
YaHUaH hath given you to eat.
16 This is what YaHUaH has commanded:
Each person is to gather of it what he can eat; a ghomer [עמר] a head, according
to the number of your persons, you shall take it, every man for them that
are in his tent.’
17 And the children of Israel did so, and gathered
– some more, some less.
18 And when they measured it with a ghomer
[עמר], he who
gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little lacked
nothing; they gathered every man according to what he could eat.
Exodus 16: 13-18
From the context we see that the word ghomer [עמר]
is used here as a designation for some kind of bowl. A little further, in
verse 36, there is a clue on its size: one tenth of an ’eiphah
[איפה] – a
measure that we encounter throughout the entire Bible.1
These passages made me curious for the original meaning of that word עֹמֶר [H6016], read by some
as ‘omer, by others as ghomer, and sometimes translated
as sheaf of grain, used as wave offering, and in other instances as a kind of
bowl used as measure for grain or for the man – that special
food given by God in the desert to Israel.
Let us have a closer look at this word, in the early (West-)Semitic
script from the time of the patriarchs and Mosheh.2 Then it was
written as:    .
The first letter (read from right to left) we
probably have to interpret as a Semitic ghainu (or early Paleo-Hebrew ghayin). That can be derived from
the information that the Septuagint translation transliterated this word
in Greek as ΓΟΜΟΡ
- gomor; with a gamma at the beginning. This was chosen as
transliteration of the Semitic ghainu / ghayin that later
merged with the ‘ayin but can be distinguished from it by
its early Greek gamma-transliterations (compare a.o.
the geographic names Ghomorrah and
Ghazah). This ghayin,
still existing e.g. in Arabic as a separate letter ( غ ), had the
meaning of an enclosure, hull, or sheath, as e.g. the sheath of a sword.
This leads to the explanation:
embrace/container for the abundance of
God.
Both the sheaf bound together from the first grain harvest, as the bowl
full of man for everyone provided by God in the desert, represent
the riches and abundance with which God blessed His people. Also where this
word appears still elsewhere in the Bible, the above explanation is
applicable.
This explanation also sets the tone of what happened in both passages
above. It was a feast that God provided in an abundant measure for the
livelihood of His people! And that was to be celebrated!
Hallelu YaH !
Notes
| 1 |
Western theologians and other scientists have tried to
quantify its dimensions, assuming that it described a certain quantity.
However, the ’eiphah was foremost a designation of the fullness
of grain or flour used to prepare bread for God or angels (in Genesis 18: 6 Abraham asks Sarah to take three measures of flour, that
is: 1 ‘eiphah for cakes/bread when God and angels come to visit
him. A similar situation with Gideon in Judges 6: 19. Also Hanna takes 1
‘eiphah flour when she brings Samuel to the temple in 1 Samuel
1: 24. Compare also Zakhar-yahu 5 - according to the Notes in the old Dutch
States Translation it is there a full measure of God’s
punishment.). The old symbols for ‘eiphah denote: to see
the opened hand [of God?] and worship/ rejoice.
Concerning the exact quantity: this is hard to establish. According the
rabbinical Judaism 1 ‘eiphah was probaly about 22 liter.
From older sources it was probably 36 liter in the days of Moses/Mosheh.
(In Amos 8:5 and Michah 6:10 (cf. Deut.25:14-15;
Eze.45:10; Prov.20:10) God speaks against making the
‘eiphah smaller, as practised in their days. Could that gradual
shrinking over many ages perhaps be the explanation of the difference?)
The ghomer was 1/10 of that, typically the quantity man gives back
to God of what he received from God.
So, that was a bowl of 2 or about 31/2 liter; about what a man could eat in a day. |
| 2 |
More information on the old Biblical script, as
referred to here, is in the Hallelu-YaH Draft
Research Report: ‘The Written
Language of Abraham, Moses and David – A study of the pictographic
roots and basic notions in the underlying fabric of the earliest Biblical
script’  ,
a living document by André H. Roosma, 1st
English version: 18 April 2011 (1st Dutch original: January 2011). |
By the way, the measure of the / עמר [H6016] - ghomer
/ ‘omer as being a measure for the daily food of a man (from 2.2 to
3.6 liter) and the sheaf fit with each other rather well. Both can just be
handled by one person. And in 1 richly filled oar of grain are about 50 to
100 grain kernels (Mat.13:8). These weigh each on average about 40 mg. So, a
sheaf of about 700 stalks (where it is bound together it is about 35 cm in
diameter; the harvest of about 3 m2
arable land) contains 1400 to 2800 grams of grain, this has a volume of
about 1.9 to 3.7 liter grain.
Hebrew knows also a greater measure of grain, the name
of which looks a lot like it: the חֹ֖מֶר / חוֹמֶר [H2563] - chomer
(according the older symbols: a tent cover full of the abundance of God).
This is quantified as 10 ’eiphah (so 220 or 360 liter), and so
it is the 100-fold of the עמר - ghomer.
There is a strong relationship of this word with the word for donkey: חֲמ֥וֹר [H2543] - chamor. This probably comes from that this quantity was seen as the (maximum)
possible load of a donkey. In that way, in 1 Samuel 16:20 the Hebrew text has
that Jesse/Isai sent via the hand of David to Saul a gift consisting of
“a donkey (chamor) bread, a skin of wine and a young goat”,
while the Septuagint translates this with the measure of capacity gomor
as if Jesse sent a chomer or a ghomer bread (the latter would
have been insulting, so can be excluded!).
The wave offering of the first sheaf from Leviticus
23: 9-14 was a kind of foretaste of the big sacrifice that Israel would
give to God 50 days later, with the festival of Shabhuot or Pentecost
in thankfulness for His great blessing at the entire grain harvest. We read
about it in the sequel to the mentioned passage:
15 “‘You must count for yourselves seven weeks from the
day after the Shabbat, from the day you bring the wave offering sheaf [עמר]; they must be
seven complete weeks.
16 You must count fifty days – until the
day after the seventh Shabbat – and then you must present a new grain
offering to YaHUaH.
17 From the places where you live you must bring
two loaves of bread for a wave offering; they must be made from two tenths
of an ’eiphah of fine wheat flour,
baked with yeast, as first fruits to YaHUaH.
18 Along with the loaves of bread, you must also
present seven flawless lambs of one year old, one young bull, and two rams.
They are to be a burnt offering to YaHUaH along with their grain
offering and drink offerings, a gift of a soothing aroma to YaHUaH.
19 You must also offer one male goat for a sin
offering and two lambs of one year old for a peace offering sacrifice,
20 and the priest is to wave them – the
two lambs – along with the bread of the first fruits, as a wave
offering before YaHUaH; they will be holy to YaHUaH for the
priest.
Leviticus 23: 15-21
What saddens me is that in mainstream rabbinic Jewish
religion there is a lot that distracts from the essence of these things.
The essence is that in counting the fifty days we may consider with joy how
abundantly God is blessing us. The old sourdough has been put away, the new
grain harvest is taken in. This springtime is a time of joy and doing new
things.
However, in the rabbinical commandment of the counting of the
omer, the Jews have to mourn those 50 days between Pesach and Shabhu‘ot, instead of thankfully
celebrating God blessing them with and from His abundance.
The Biblical year starts just before Pesach with God’s active
and redeeming care for His people. This is the solid basis of the Spring
Festivals. The other Festivals then follow later in the year from what God
has given in sequel to that His first loving initiative.
It is a great pity, that in a large party of orthodox rabbinic Judaism all
of this has become so troubled/confused... (I find it sad that in e.g.
the 13 principles of Jewish faith, as put forward by Maimonides a word
like grace of mercy does not occur; also the notion of the replacing
sacrifice is not mentioned; there man must have a perfect faith and –
see the eleventh principle – earn God’s favor as a reward for
his own good works.)
Especially while Israel (the southern part and the northern, the
Jews and the Samaritans or Yehudah and
Efraïm) has such a special place in God’s plan of salvation,
and therefore they have a special place in my heart, it saddens me!
Previous articles: Matsot –
Fast, nourishing food for a long journey on foot and Matsot (2) – Fleeing all that
alienated us from God, in order to receive His new Life.
See also the series on Pesach: (1) God separates His own,
has them escape death, and pulls them away from Egypt, (2) God opens the way
to life, (3)
Yeshu‘ah fulfills
Pesach.
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