What animals must you sacrifice each day?

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: Leans toward 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 29:36-39 describes the daily offering as a bullock for a sin offering ('every day,' la-yom) for atonement, plus two yearling lambs morning and evening as a continual burnt offering. Numbers 28:1-4 prescribes the perpetual daily tamid as two lambs alone, morning and evening, with no bullock. The two passages give different daily requirements.

The strongest harmonization, defended by Keil and by Eugene Merrill, distinguishes ordination liturgy from standing cult law. Exodus 29 stands inside the seven-day consecration of Aaron and his sons (29:35, 'thus shall you do to Aaron ... seven days'), and the daily bullock in 29:36-37 is tied specifically to making atonement for and consecrating the altar. Numbers 28, by contrast, legislates the permanent tamid binding on all generations. On this reading the bullock was a one-time, seven-day feature of the inauguration, not a perpetual daily duty, so there is no conflict between the inaugural rite and the standing ordinance. The seven-day limiter in 29:35 gives this real textual support, and the rabbis reached the same conclusion: b. Menachot 49b-50a explicitly rules that the Exodus 29 bullock applied only during the days of consecration.

The difficulty is that Exodus 29 does not cleanly partition the bullock from the perpetual offering. Verse 36 uses la-yom, 'for/each day' — the same construction governing the continual tamid in 29:42 ('a continual burnt offering throughout your generations') and in Numbers 28:3. Verse 38 then pivots: 'Now this is what you shall offer upon the altar: two lambs ... day by day continually,' which reads as introducing the standing daily rite rather than merely concluding the ordination. Read on its own terms, Exodus 29 plausibly prescribes a richer daily ritual — bullock plus two lambs — than Numbers 28, and the rabbinic ruling functions as a halakhic resolution imposed on an ambiguous text rather than its plain sense. Thomas Dozeman and William Propp both note the seam here between consecration material and perpetual-offering material.

The broader picture from Priestly source criticism is that the tamid legislation was not fixed in a single revelation. Milgrom and Knohl trace multiple Priestly strata behind the daily-offering rules, progressively coordinated. Crucially, Ezekiel 46:13-15 preserves yet a third version: a single lamb daily, not two, with an accompanying grain offering — a Second-Temple-adjacent prophetic blueprint that diverges from both Exodus and Numbers. Baruch Levine and Gordon Wenham conclude that these inconsistencies are best explained as different cultic traditions crystallized at different phases of temple practice (plausibly First- vs. Second-Temple usage) rather than as a seamless Mosaic code. The honest assessment: the ordination-vs-perpetual distinction is a viable and ancient harmonization that resolves the surface arithmetic, but it depends on a categorization the Exodus text does not clearly make, and it cannot account for the Ezekiel variant.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable by distinguishing inaugural from standing rites, but the differences more likely reflect layered Priestly cultic traditions.