What Does Exodus 23:32 Mean?

The blood-ratification ceremony's first half, half the blood in basins, half thrown against the altar, begins the covenant community's most elaborate and physically dramatic ritual. The slaughter of oxen, the collection of blood in basins, and the systematic sprinkling sequence creates the covenant ratification as a sensory-total event: the sound of slaughter, the smell of blood and fire, the visual spectacle of blood against the altar's stone. The covenant is signed in blood because blood is the life: and the covenant partners are binding their lives to each other through the life-substance of the sacrifice.

The altar-blood application (the first half) is the covenant's human-to-YHWH direction: the community presents its sacrifice to YHWH, whose altar receives the blood. The subsequent people-blood application (the second half) is the covenant's YHWH-to-human direction: the blood that has touched YHWH's altar is then returned to the people as the covenant seal on their side. The two applications create a single covenant-blood that both parties share through the same sacrifice. The ritual's logic is the covenant's relational logic: the same life-substance, offered to YHWH and returned to the people, creates covenant solidarity.

Hebrews 9:18-20 explicitly interprets the Sinai blood-covenant through its new covenant fulfillment: "not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats...

and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, 'This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.'" The Sinai ceremony and the Lord's Supper speak the same formula, "this is the blood of the covenant", because they are the typological pair that constitutes the covenant's blood-ratification theology. The same God who signed with bulls' blood at Sinai signs with his Son's blood at Calvary.