the installing of a priest: the sacrifice offered when a man was put into priestly office, and the ceremony itself
The Hebrew Bible has no verb for "ordain" in our sense. To make a man a priest it says that his hands are filled, and this word is built straight from the ordinary verb for filling (מָלֵא). Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8 show what the phrase looked like on the ground: the choice parts of a ram, along with bread from a basket, were placed into Aaron's hands and lifted before the LORD, and the man who had held them was a priest from that day on.
Every use of the word in this sense sits in those two chapters or in the short summary of sacrifices that follows them. It covers a small cluster of things that the ceremony held together:
- the sacrifice itself, listed among the standard offering types
- the ram killed for the occasion, called the ram of installing
- the meat and bread that belonged to that sacrifice, and the basket they came in
- the whole run of seven days over which the ceremony was repeated
The offering and the occasion share one name because here they are not separable. The sacrifice is the installing. Two things follow that are easy to miss. A priest never fills his own hands, so the office is handed to him rather than taken; and the ceremony is a week long rather than a moment, which is why one verse can speak of the days of it running out. The anointing oil (מִשְׁחָה) belongs to the same week, but it is a separate act with its own name.
Nuances
Disputed
What the underlying expression, filling the hand, originally denoted, and therefore what the noun names.
- majorityIt describes the installation rite as Exodus and Leviticus enact it, with the offering portions physically placed into the priest's hands before being burned, so the noun names that offering and the ceremony built around it.; BDB, s.v. מלא; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991), on Leviticus 8
- minorityIt continues an older Semitic expression, attested in Akkadian sources including the Mari correspondence, for assigning a person an office together with its allotted income, so the noun names an investiture whose hand-filling image is already a fixed formula by the time of these texts.; HALOT, s.v. מלא; TDOT, s.v. מלא