Exodus 23:15 closes its Unleavened Bread command with an obligation: "No one may appear before Me empty-handed" (רֵיקָם, reqam). Ezekiel 45:21-24 is in effect an answer to that clause. The feast is the same — a חַג (chag) of seven days with מַצּוֹת (matstsot) — but the hands that fill are the prince's. On the first day the נָשִׂיא (nasi', "prince") provides a bull as a חַטָּאת (chatta't, "sin offering") "for himself and for all the people of the land" (45:22); on each of the seven days he provides seven bulls and seven rams תָּמִים (tamim, "without blemish") as burnt offering, a male goat (שָׂעִיר, sa'ir) as sin offering, and the grain and oil that go with them (45:23-24). Two features have no precedent in the Torah's Passover legislation. One is the sin offering: Exodus 23, Leviticus 23, and Deuteronomy 16 attach no חַטָּאת to Passover at all. In Ezekiel, atonement (כָּפַר, kaphar) is the calendar's keynote (45:17, 20), and even the feast of deliverance is wrapped inside it. The other is the concentration of responsibility. Where Exodus addresses "you," Ezekiel addresses the prince, who bears the cost for a nation that brings nothing. Ezekiel has already named him: "My servant David will be a prince among them" (34:24), "their prince forever" (37:25). A Davidic ruler who pays for his people's atonement out of his own herds is not yet the cross, but it is the same grammar. When the true Prince keeps the feast He does not provide the bull — He is the offering (Hebrews 10:10), and His people appear before God with hands that were never full and never needed to be.
