Hebrews 9:22 states 'without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins,' yet Leviticus 5:11-13 allows a poor worshiper to bring a flour offering with no blood at all, and still says the priest 'shall make atonement... and you shall be forgiven' -- an internal contradiction on whether blood is strictly necessary for forgiveness.

Hebrews 9:22 itself contains the qualifier routinely dropped in the popular citation: 'under the law almost everything (schedon, nearly) is purified with blood' -- the author explicitly signals he is stating the general, normative rule of the Levitical system, not an absolute without exception, and the grain-offering exception of Lev 5:11-13, itself embedded in the same Torah for the destitute who cannot afford even birds, was almost certainly known to an author this steeped in Levitical detail; the 'almost' is best read as a deliberate nod to precisely this exception. Substantively, the flour offering does not operate as forgiveness independent of blood-based atonement: it is still called a purification offering (chattat) and is burned on an altar that was itself consecrated and purified by blood (Lev 8:15; Ex 29:36-37), so the poor person's offering functions derivatively within, not apart from, the blood-based atonement economy of the sanctuary as a whole.

The consistent center of gravity of the sacrificial system remains blood-based substitutionary atonement (Lev 17:11, 'the life of the flesh is in the blood... it is the blood that makes atonement'), with the flour-offering concession functioning as mercy for the poor within, not against, that system -- anticipating the all-sufficient blood atonement of Christ that Hebrews' argument builds toward (Heb 9:23-28).