And he said to me: Now the angelic guide explains to Ezekiel what the place at the western end of the priests’ rooms will be used for.

This is the place where the priests shall boil the guilt offering and the sin offering, and where they shall bake the cereal offering: It is a kitchen where the priests must cook the sacrifices. The sacrifices mentioned here are those that the priests eat, not those that are burned completely on the altar. For guilt offering and sin offering, see 40.39; for cereal offering, see 42.13. The priests must boil, not roast, the meat of the animals that are killed and bake the flour mixed with olive oil, possibly in an oven like people bake bread, or perhaps on a frying pan like a tortilla or pancake. Translators may render this part of the verse as “This is where the priests will boil the meat of the animals that are sacrificed [or, that they sacrifice] as sin or repayment offerings and where they will bake the offerings of flour.”

In order not to bring them out into the outer court, and so communicate holiness to the people: Although the priests are allowed to eat them, these sacrifices are holy because they have been offered to God. Therefore they have to remain in the inner courtyard of the Temple compound. Although we might expect that the reason these sacrifices have to remain in the inner courtyard is to avoid their being contaminated and becoming ritually unclean, the real reason is that, if they are taken out into the outer courtyard, they might communicate holiness to the people, that is, ordinary people might come into contact with these holy things by accidentally touching them. If that happens, the holiness of the sacred offerings will move to the ordinary people, so that they become “unfit for ordinary activity” (New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh footnote), and because great power is somehow mixed with the holiness, these sacrifices might “harm the people” (Good News Translation; similarly Contemporary English Version, New Century Version) in some way (compare the comments on 44.19). To avoid this happening, the priests must not take the holy sacrifices out of the inner courtyard, even to be cooked. A model for this last half of the verse is “They will do this at this place so that they won’t need to bring anything that is holy [or, anything that has been offered to God] into the outer courtyard and risk harming the people if they touch something that belongs to God.”

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 .