Did God command the Israelites to make him burnt offerings?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Exodus and the Priestly legislation present sacrifice as divinely mandated from the founding: Moses demands animals 'for burnt offerings' before Pharaoh (Exod 10:25), the covenant code establishes the altar (Exod 20:24), and the ordination ritual prescribes detailed burnt offerings (Exod 29:16-18), with Leviticus elaborating the whole sacrificial system as Sinai revelation. Jeremiah 7:22 says the reverse: 'I did not speak to your fathers, nor command them, in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.'

The oldest harmonization, going back at least to Keil and Delitzsch and defended by Walter Kaiser and Gordon Wenham, reads the Hebrew negation ki lo comparatively rather than absolutely: 'I did not speak to them primarily/merely about sacrifices, but about obeying my voice.' The appeal is to the well-attested Semitic idiom of dialectical negation, where 'not X but Y' means 'Y rather than X,' as in Hosea 6:6 ('I desired mercy and not sacrifice') and Deuteronomy 5:3. On this reading Jeremiah is ranking covenant priorities — obedience over ritual — not denying that the sacrificial Torah was ever given. This is a genuine grammatical option, and Jer 7:23 ('Obey my voice ... and walk in all the way that I command you') supplies a plausible 'but Y' clause that supports the comparative sense.

The difficulty is that the comparative reading must override a fairly emphatic absolute construction reinforced by a precise temporal anchor — 'in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt.' That clause locates the denial at the exodus itself, exactly where the Priestly narrative places the giving of the sacrificial cult (Sinai, weeks later). The flat sense of the verse denies that cultic legislation belonged to the foundational covenant at all. William Holladay and Jack Lundbom both treat 7:22 as a deliberate rhetorical denial rather than an idiomatic understatement, noting that the verse stands in a unit (7:21-26) whose entire thrust is that obedience, not offerings, was the original demand.

The wider evidence favors reading this as more than rhetoric. Jeremiah belongs to a prophetic stream with a documented ambivalence toward sacrifice: Amos 5:21-25 (which likewise denies that Israel offered sacrifices in the wilderness), Hosea 6:6, Micah 6:6-8, and Isaiah 1:11-17 all subordinate or reject cult in favor of justice and covenant loyalty. These texts arguably reflect a tradition that either did not possess the developed Priestly legislation or regarded it as a later accretion. Wellhausen famously made Jer 7:22 (with Amos 5:25) a keystone for dating the Priestly source after the exile, on the reasoning that a prophet could not have denied a sacrificial Torah he knew to be Mosaic. Moshe Weinfeld's analysis of the Deuteronomic school shows that Jer 7's framing of the exodus emphasizes 'my voice' and covenant obedience with no reference to Sinai cultic law — precisely what one expects if the prophet's authoritative tradition resembled proto-Deuteronomy rather than the final Priestly Pentateuch. Patrick Miller and, from a more conservative angle, Moshe Greenberg ('Did Jeremiah Reject the Cult?') debate how far the denial extends, but both acknowledge a real prophetic critique of the cult. The honest conclusion: the comparative-negation reading can smooth the contradiction at the level of intent, but the simpler and better-attested explanation is that Jeremiah stands in a prophetic tradition genuinely at odds with the Priestly account of the cult's origins, and that disagreement is itself evidence of the Torah's compositional layering.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable by grammar, but the prophetic-vs-Priestly tension is real and better explains the data.