Omer

Exodus 16:36 Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah.

An ephah is 1/10^th of a chomer (Ezekiel 45:11)

A chomer is about 1 modern 55 gallon drum full. See [[Chomer|chomer]] for detailed explanation.

Given that, an omer would be 0.575 gallons, or about 2 liters. If full of grain, it would weigh about 2.5 pounds (a little over 1 kilogram). The word omer comes from the root amar meaning “to press, squeeze, collect, and bind together”. It is often translated as “sheaf” in the Bible:

Ruth 2:7 And she said, I pray you, let me glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves (omers)...

Bundles of wheat

Clearly, this is not speaking of a unit of measure, but of bundles of wheat called “omers”. Traditionally, the wheat was cut with a scythe or knife and the stalks were carefully gathered and tied into a sheaf and left in the field to dry.

Psalms 129:7 ...with which the reaper does not fill his hand nor the binder of sheaves his arms.

Each bundle was gathered, squeezed between the hands and tied off with a piece of string or straw. Each one of these stalks was one sheaf or one omer. This was then stacked into a “stook” to dry by the “binder of sheaves”:

Each omer is a measurement of how many stalks of grain a man’s hand will fit around. How does that equal 0.575 gallons (2 liters)? Think about it! When you extract all the wheat in one sheaf, one omer, it will fill a bowl of a given size. The size of that bowl is one omer’s worth of wheat – the wheat extracted from a single sheaf! Whether you fill that omer-sized bowl with wheat or use it to measure spices, dates or olives, it is one omer!

The beauty of God’s system, as you’ll see again and again, is that not one measurement is EVER arbitrary. An omer is not simply 1/100^thof a donkey load; it is the amount of grain a man’s hands can comfortably bundle in the field, which happens to be exactly 1/100^th of a donkey load!

See Also

The Meanings of the Measures