Leviticus 5:16-19
In addition, he must pay the monetary value of the sacred item with which he sinned by making personal use of it, plus a fine of 25% of its value, which now becomes one-fifth of the total payment, by giving it to the priest. The priest must then make atonement for him through the ram of the guilt-offering, and he will be forgiven. The procedures for offering up a guilt-offering will be detailed later.
Suspensive Guilt-Offerings
We will now discuss the various types of guilt-offerings. If a person realizes that he might have sinned by transgressing one of the passive commandments of God that are punishable by excision if committed intentionally, but he does not know for sure, he is nonetheless considered guilty of an offense, and he will bear the punitive consequences of his transgression unless he expiates it by offering up the following sacrifice.
He must bring an unblemished ram from the flock—i.e., a male sheep more than thirteen months but less than two years old—with the value prescribed above, as a guilt-offering, to the priest. The priest will then make atonement for his unintentional sin that he might have committed but does not know for sure, by performing the rites that will be detailed later, and he will thereby be forgiven. However, if he later discovers that he indeed sinned unintentionally, he must then bring the regular sin-offering of an individual, similar to how, as will be explained later, a decapitated calf atones for an unsolved murder until the murderer is found, in which case the murderer must be executed. In both cases, provisional atonement is provided until it becomes possible to ascertain certain guilt, in which case the preferred method of atonement can be employed.
If atonement is required for sins about which one only suspects that he might have committed, then someone who sins intentionally will certainly be punished.
Besides this guilt-offering and the one that will be presently discussed, there are three other cases when a guilt-offering is required: (a) when someone violates a betrothed bondwoman, (b) when a Nazirite becomes ritually defiled, and (c) when someone is cured of the condition known as tzara’at, which will be described later. In the first of these three case, the offering required is a guilt-offering like the one described here, in that the animal sacrificed is a ram and must be worth at least two sacred shekels. With regard to the other two cases, however, although in each the person required to bring the guilt-offering has indeed incurred guilt before God, he is required only to bring a lamb, not a ram, and it is not required to be of any minimum value.
A CLOSER LOOK
Not required to be of any minimum value. For example: it is forbidden to eat the various animal fats that are removed and offered up on the Altar in sacrificial rites (even from animals that are not sacrificed); the punishment for doing so is excision. It is permitted to eat other types of fat from kosher animals, provided that the animal was properly slaughtered, etc. If a person ate some fat and is not sure whether it was the forbidden or permitted type, he must bring a suspensive guilt-offering.
