Anyone who makes perfume like it and puts it on an outsider must be cut off from their people. The death sentence for making and applying unauthorized anointing oil communicates the severity of treating the sacred as common. The cutting off — being excluded from the covenant community — is the covenant penalty for violating the boundaries of the holy. The fragrance of the anointing oil is inseparable from the holiness it represents: to replicate the fragrance without the authorization is to counterfeit the consecration. The community that protects the boundaries of the sacred protects the integrity of the covenant relationship those boundaries represent.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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