And he shall provide as a cereal offering an ephah for each bull, an ephah for each ram, and a hin of oil to each ephah: In addition to the animals, the king must give a certain amount of grain and olive oil along with each animal. These are a cereal offering (see verse 15), but God does not specify what sort of grain the king had to give. It may have been wheat or barley, or possibly flour (so New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh footnote). The amount he had to give was one ephah with each bull and one ephah with each ram (see the comments on verses 10-12 concerning how much an ephah was). The king must also give one hin of oil to each ephah. A hin was a liquid measure. It was one sixth of an ephah, so it was about 3.75 liters (1 gallon). The oil was “olive oil” (Good News Translation; see verse 14). The purpose of this oil may have been to mix with the flour so that it could be cooked into bread or cakes. Each day of the Passover Festival the king had to give 14 ephahs of grain or flour, and 14 hins of olive oil.

As discussed in the comments on verses 10-12, the ancient weights and measures are not meaningful to modern audiences. Unless appropriate equivalents are available in the language, it is probably better for translators to use general terms, for example, “bag” of grain or flour instead of ephah, and “jug” or “bottle” of olive oil instead of hin. The choice of what terms to use will depend on the size of containers; for example, it would not be good to use a term for a “bag” if the readers will think of a very large bag. The term used must give the readers a generally accurate idea of the size of an ephah and a hin, even though it does not need to be precisely accurate. A model of this verse that uses generic terms is:

• He must also give one container of grain for each bull and each goat as an offering, and also one container of olive oil for each.

If necessary, footnotes giving the exact sizes of these terms (as closely as they can be ascertained) may be included.

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .