These annual festivals had their prescribed sacrifices to Jehovah.—Leviticus 23:4-21, 33-43.

33. When was the Day of Atonement held, and why did its sacrifices have to be repeated year after year?

³³ Five days before the celebration of the festival of booths began, the annual “day of atonement” (Yom Kippur) was to be held, on the tenth day of the seventh lunar month as counted from the spring month of Nisan or Abib. That would be on Tishri 10. On this day an atonement would be made for the sins of the whole nation in covenant relationship with Jehovah, this being the one day of the year when the Aaronic high priest would go into the Most Holy of the tent of meeting and sprinkle the blood of the atonement victims (a bull and a goat) before the sacred ark of the covenant, which contained the written Law of Jehovah. (Leviticus 23:26-32; 16:2-34) Of course, the death and sprinkled blood of these subhuman animal victims could not really take away the sins of humans to whom such animals were put in subjection. It was for the very reason that the death and blood of those sacrificed animals did not actually take away the sins of the human kind that the Atonement Day sacrifices had to be repeated year after year.

35. What has happened to the Aaronic priesthood, and so where should the redemptive ransom sacrifice be looked for?

³⁵ The Aaronic priesthood that offered mere animal sacrifices at the sacred house of God passed away nineteen centuries ago, in the year 70 C.E. when Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by the Roman armies. There is nothing else to do but look to the Messianic King whom Jehovah God swore to make a “priest to time indefinite according to the manner of Melchizedek!” (Psalm 110:1-4) This one should be the “seed” of God’s heavenly “woman,” the seed whom God appoints and enables to bruise the head of the wicked one symbolized by that “serpent” in Eden. If this one were not to provide the redemptive ransom for all mankind, then there is no help for us humans, no outlook for eternal life in a righteous new order under Jehovah God. So, then, the animal sacrifices that were offered on Israel’s “day of atonement” down to the first century C.E. must be pictorial; they must picture prophetically the needed ransom sacrifice that was to be offered by the Messiah who becomes the Melchizedekian priest, the Bruiser of the serpent’s head.