"Tell Aaron and his sons: The Israelites will give me gifts and these gifts will become holy. They are mine, so you priests must not take these things. If you use these holy things for yourselves, you will show that you don't respect my holy name. I am the Lord.
If any one of your descendants touches these things, that person will become unclean. That person must be separated from me. The Israelites gave these things to me. I am the Lord.
"If any of Aaron's descendants has one of the bad skin diseases or a discharge, he cannot eat the holy food until he becomes clean. This rule is for any priest who becomes unclean. That priest can become unclean from a dead body or from his own semen.
He can also become unclean if he touches any unclean crawling animals. And he can become unclean if he touches an unclean person. It doesn't matter what made that person unclean.
If he touches any of these things, he will become unclean until evening. He must not eat any of the holy food. Even if he washes with water, he cannot eat the holy food.
"The priests must be very careful when it comes time to serve me. They must be careful not to dishonor the holy things. If they are careful, they will not die. I, the Lord, have separated them from the rest of the people for this special job.
But if the priest buys a person as a slave with his own money, that person may eat some of the holy things. Slaves who were born in the priest's house may also eat some of the priest's food.
A priest's daughter might become a widow, or she might be divorced. If she does not have any children to support her, and she goes back to her father's house where she lived as a child, she can eat some of her father's food. But only people from a priest's family can eat this food.
"Tell Aaron and his sons and all the Israelites: A citizen of Israel or a foreigner might want to bring an offering. It might be because of a promise that person made, or it might just be a special sacrifice that person wanted to bring.
These are gifts that the people bring because they really want to give a gift to God. If the gift is a bull, or a sheep, or a goat, the animal must be a male. And it must not have anything wrong with it. You must not accept any offering that has anything wrong with it. I will not accept that gift.
"You might bring a fellowship offering to the Lord. That fellowship offering might be payment for a special promise that you made. Or maybe it is a special gift that you wanted to give to the Lord. It can be a bull or a sheep, but it must be healthy. There must be nothing wrong with that animal.
You must not offer to the Lord any animal that is blind, that has broken bones or is crippled, that has a discharge or a bad skin disease. You must not offer sick animals as a gift to the Lord. You must not put anything like that on his altar.
"Sometimes a bull or lamb will have a leg that is too long, or a foot that did not grow right. If you want to give that animal as a special gift to the Lord, it will be accepted. But it will not be accepted as payment for a special promise that you made.
"You must not take animals from foreigners as sacrifices to the Lord. The animals might have been hurt in some way. They might have something wrong with them, so they will not be accepted."
"When a calf, or a sheep, or a goat is born, it must stay seven days with its mother. Then from the eighth day on, this animal will be accepted as a sacrifice offered as a gift to the Lord.