Two bullocks, one ram, seven lambs, and a goat.
Cited passages
“ ‘In the beginnings of your months, you shall offer a burnt offering to Yahweh: two young bulls, one ram, seven male lambs a year old without defect, and three tenths of an ephah of fine flour for a meal offering mixed with oil, for each bull; and two tenth parts of fine flour for a meal offering mixed with oil, for the one ram; and one tenth part of fine flour mixed with oil for a meal offering to every lamb, as a burnt offering of a pleasant aroma, an offering made by fire to Yahweh. Their drink offerings shall be half a hin of wine for a bull, the third part of a hin for the ram, and the fourth part of a hin for a lamb. This is the burnt offering of every month throughout the months of the year. Also, one male goat for a sin offering to Yahweh shall be offered in addition to the continual burnt offering and its drink offering.
Examining the tension
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.
The monthly new-moon (rosh hodesh) burnt offering is prescribed twice with different quantities. Numbers 28:11-15 (Priestly law) requires two young bulls, one ram, seven yearling lambs, with grain and drink offerings, plus a goat as a sin offering — and frames the monthly rite as appended to the 'continual burnt offering' (olat tamid) 'throughout your generations' (28:14). Ezekiel 46:6 prescribes for the new moon one young bull, six lambs, and a ram. The animal counts plainly diverge.
The principal harmonization, found in Lamar Cooper's NAC volume and treated more cautiously by Daniel Block, assigns Ezekiel 40-48 to a future, visionary temple distinct from the Mosaic tabernacle/temple cult, so that the two recipes regulate two different cultic orders and need not match. This is a serious and widely held reading: Ezekiel 40-48 is presented as a guided vision of a restored sanctuary with its own architecture, calendar, priesthood, and prince (nasi), and few scholars think it was meant to be enacted as a literal supplement to the Torah's sacrificial code.
The cost of the move is what keeps the tension alive. Numbers 28 labels its prescriptions perpetual — olam, 'throughout your generations.' If Ezekiel's temple program lawfully alters the new-moon recipe (and not only this: Ezekiel also diverges from the Pentateuch on the Passover/Unleavened Bread offerings in 45:21-25, on the daily tamid, which Ezekiel 46:13-15 gives as a single morning lamb against the twice-daily lamb of Numbers 28:3-8, and on the role and offerings of the nasi), then the Pentateuch's 'perpetual statute' is not in fact unalterable. One trades a numerical discrepancy for a conflict about the permanence of Torah law — which is why the difficulty was felt acutely within Judaism itself.
The rabbinic reception is the strongest external evidence that this is a real conflict and not a modern invention. The Babylonian Talmud (b. Shabbat 13b; cf. b. Menahot 45a; b. Hagigah 13a) preserves the tradition that the book of Ezekiel was nearly 'stored away' (i.e. excluded from public use) because its prescriptions contradicted the words of the Torah, and that Hananiah ben Hezekiah ben Garon reconciled them only through a prodigious labor of harmonizing study, consuming three hundred jars of oil in lamplight. The rabbis explicitly classified Ezekiel's sacrificial law as conflicting with the Mosaic law; their solution was to defer the contradictions to the eschatological age, when Elijah would explain them — an admission that they could not resolve them on the texts as they stood.
The critical reading converges with the rabbinic instinct while declining the eschatological deferral. Zimmerli's Hermeneia commentary and Block's NICOT, along with Tuell and Duguid, treat Ezekiel 40-48 as a priestly restoration program — plausibly a Zadokite-oriented blueprint formed in the exile — that diverges from the Pentateuchal P/H system at numerous points. On this view the divergence is not a tidy 'different temple' rule but the trace of competing priestly traditions about the proper cult, neither of which was edited into agreement with the other in the canon.
So the status is genuinely contested. The 'eschatological temple' harmonization is internally coherent and intellectually respectable; it does not so much resolve the contradiction as relocate it from arithmetic to the question of whether a 'perpetual' Torah statute can be superseded.
Where the critical reading lands: disputed — the recipes conflict on their face; the future-temple reading can absorb the conflict only at the price of qualifying the Torah's claim of permanence, a tension that Jewish tradition itself recognized rather than dissolved.
Sources for this reading