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These are the Words...
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Olah
עלה
Definition
The word olah means "offering of rising" or "offering of ascent". It is usually mis-translated "burnt offering".
It is related to the word aliyah, "to go up", used often in modern times to refer to immigrating to Israel.
The olah allowed someone to initiate a connection with God.
Meaning in Ancient Israel
The olah was one or more animal sacrifices that opened the sequence of offerings at the Tabernacle/Temple by initiating a connection with God. We can think of it as the noise fax machines make before exchanging pages.
A bull, male sheep or goat, or a pigeon was killed. Its blood was sprinkled on the altar, and the animal almost entirely burnt on the altar. Additional animals (of those appropriate types) could be used to lengthen the olah. All animals offered as an olah were completely burned up except for skin and excrement (the least clean parts) and the stomachs of the pigeons (which held food the owner had not paid for, perhaps stolen from neighbors' crops).
The olah existed long before the Exodus or Tabernacle. Noach offered an olah, and its sweet savor prompted God to declare there would never be another global flood. Avraham was ready to offer Yitzchak as an olah.
The sequence of offerings at the Tabernacle/Temple was done by households, not individuals. The person initiating an olah is referred to by adam (man) whereas for the other offerings the word nefesh (breather/soul/person) is used: the olah was done by the male head of each household.
The olah did not by itself bring atonement, but it involved a costly and bloody sacrifice, and thus put blood on the altar that for a poor household would be sufficient for use in later atonement.
Meaning in the First Century
During the first century the olah was still being used in more-or-less the same way, until the Second Temple was destroyed.
However, during the first century the Temple operated differently than as described in Torah.
First, families no longer brought offerings as a household. Instead, the women would watch from the "Women's Court" while men went to an inner court and brought the offered animal to a priest. (Women in a household without men would ask a guard at a gate of the "Women's Court" to bring their offerings to a priest.)
Second, most scholars agree that the people making the offering brought their share of the animal's meat outside the Temple complex before eating it, rather than the sequence of offerings cumulating in the family sharing a meal with the priest and God at the altar (the sh'lamim).
Third, some scholars believe the offerings were most often brought individually, not as the entire sequence of offerings. It may have been that people could come to the Temple just to offer an olah.
Meaning for Messianic Jews in Modern Times
The olah reminds us ready ourselves for the worship service by reaching up towards God, and to purposefully accept having a connection with Gid.
Within Yeshua's covenant, the olah reminds us that the first step towards receiving the Eternal Life is to establish a new kind of connection with God. Just as the olah offering was not an improvised manner of connecting with God, but involved a process explained by God, we cannot acquire the improved connection with God that is Eternal Life by any prayer or plea of our own creation. We must follow the process established by God through Yeshua's life, teaching, death, and resurrection: accepting the victory over the evil inclination available through Yeshua's sacrifice.
Within private devotions, the olah teaches us three lessons.
First, the olah was historically done Noach all by itself as a short but complete time of worship. Similarly, connecting with God to please him and expect him to acknowledge us can be a simple yet proper and sufficient method of worship.
Second, we should start our times of worship and/or prayer (if not our day) by doing something to affirm and renew our connection to God. Perhaps some people wake up experiencing the kavod Adonai, but most of us need some new reconnection to the weighty presence of God each morning, if not more often! How we connect depends upon how we best relate to God. We can use obedience to hear God, intercession to see God, or song or prayer to feel God. As with the olah offering, this part of our devotional time can be done just as well with family.
Third, the olah teaches that that connecting to God is a serious and costly business! The sequence of offering a household did at the Tabernacle/Temple needed to be repeated each time someone in the family needed forgiveness for offenses, and this sequence cost an animal its life. Appreciate how significant, costly, and bloody the process of reconnecting with God used to be, before Yeshua's covenant. When we need atonement it is still an equally significant problem, in God's eyes and in its effect on our lives, even if reconnecting is no longer costly.
Since it involved no fixed number of animals, the olah was a chance to be generously giving to God. It shows we must begin worship by establishing a connection with God, to please him. We should not pray with a disrespectful attitude that assumes God must listen to us or accept our prayers. Nor should we, after encounring the presence of God, rush to praying with thanks or confessions or requests.
Within the liturgy the olah is a comparatively new set of traditions. Historically, the original synagogue liturgy had only brief introductary prayers since each person attending would say a series of prayers in the morning before traveling to synagogue. Over time, this first section of the liturgy grew. As people lost familiarity with Hebrew and became busier, the "home prayers" were transferred to the synagogue to help ensure they were done properly, and became the Olah section of the liturgy.
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