1And the LORD said to Moses and to Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2“This month is for you head of months, it is the first for you of the months of the year. 3Speak to all the community of Israel, saying: ‘On the tenth of this month, let every man take a lamb for a father’s house, a lamb for a household. 4And should a household be too small to have a lamb, it must take together with its neighbor who is close to its house, in proportion to the persons, each man according to what he eats shall take his portion of the lamb. 5An unblemished lamb, a yearling male you shall have, from the sheep or from the goats you may take it. 6And it shall be a thing to be kept by you until the fourteenth day of this month, and the whole congregation of the community of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. 7And they shall take from the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel, on the houses in which they will eat it. 8And they shall eat the meat on this night fire-roasted, with flatbread on bitter herbs shall they eat it. 9Do not eat from it raw, nor in any way cooked in water, but fire-roasted, its head with its shanks and with its entrails. 10And you shall leave nothing from it by morning, and what is left of it by morning in fire you shall burn. 11And thus shall you eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, your staff in your hand, and you shall eat it in haste. It is a passover offering to the LORD. 12And I will cross through the land of Egypt on this night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt from man to beast, and from all the gods of Egypt I will exact retributions. I am the LORD. 13And the blood will be a sign for you upon the houses in which you are, and I will see the blood and I will pass over you, and no scourge shall become a Destroyer amongst you when I strike in the land of Egypt. 14And this day shall be a remembrance for you, and you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD through your generations, an everlasting statute you shall celebrate it. 15Seven days shall you eat flat-bread. The very first day you shall expunge leaven from your houses, for whosoever eats leavened bread, that person shall be cut off from Israel, from the first day to the seventh day. 16And on the first day a sacred convocation and on the seventh day a sacred convocation you shall have, no task shall be done on them, only what each person is to eat, that alone will be prepared for you. 17And you shall observe the Flatbread, for on this very day I brought out your battalions from the land of Egypt, and you shall observe this day through your generations, an everlasting statute. 18In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening you shall eat flatbread, until the twenty-first day in the evening. 19Seven days no leaven shall be found in your houses, for whosoever eats what is leavened, that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel, sojourner and native of the land alike. 20Nothing that is leavened shall you eat, in all your dwelling places you shall eat flatbread.’”
21And Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Draw out and take yourselves sheep according to your clans and slaughter the Passover offering. 22And you shall take a bundle of hyssop and you shall dip it in the blood that is in the basin and you shall touch the blood that is in the basin to the lintel and to the two doorposts, and as for you, none of you shall go out from the entrance of his house till morning. 23And the LORD shall cross through to scourge Egypt, and He shall see the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, and the LORD shall pass over the entrance, and He shall not allow the Destroyer to come into your houses to scourge. 24And you shall keep this thing as a statute for you and your sons, everlasting. 25And so when you come to the land that the LORD will give you as He has spoken, you shall keep this service. 26And so should your sons ask you, ‘What is this service to you?,’ 27you shall say, ‘A Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he scourged Egypt and our households He rescued.’” And the people bowed and did obeisance. 28And the Israelites went and did as the LORD had charged Moses and Aaron, thus did they do.
29And it happened at midnight that the LORD struck down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh sitting on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and every firstborn of the beasts. 30And Pharaoh rose at night, he and all his servants and all Egypt, and there was a great outcry in Egypt, for there was no household in which there was no dead. 31And he called to Moses and to Aaron at night and said, “Rise, go out from the midst of my people, both you and the Israelites, and go worship the LORD as you have spoken. 32Both your sheep and your cattle take as you have spoken, and go, and you shall bless me as well.” 33And Egypt bore down on the people to hurry to send them off from the land, for they said, “We are all dead men.” 34And the people carried off their dough before it rose, their kneading pans wrapped in their cloaks on their shoulders. 35And the Israelites had done according to Moses’s word, and they had asked of the Egyptians ornaments of silver and ornaments of gold and cloaks. 36And the LORD had granted the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, who lent to them, and they despoiled Egypt. 37And the Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, some six hundred thousand men on foot, besides the little ones. 38And a motley throng also went up with them, and sheep and cattle, very heavy livestock. 39And they baked the dough that they had brought out of Egypt in rounds of flatbread, for it had not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not tarry, and provisions, too, they could not make for themselves. 40And the settlement of the Israelites which they had settled in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. 41And it happened at the end of four hundred and thirty years and it happened on that very day, all the battalions of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt. 42It is a night of watch for the LORD, for His taking them out of the land of Egypt, this night is the LORD’s, a watch for all the Israelites through their generations.
43And the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the statute of the Passover offering: no foreigner shall eat of it. 44And every man’s slave, purchased with silver, you shall circumcise, then shall he eat of it. 45A settler or hired worker shall not eat of it. 46In one house shall it be eaten, you shall not take out any meat from the house, and no bone shall you break in it. 47All the community of Israel thus shall do. 48And should a sojouner sojourn with you and make the Passover offering to the LORD, he must circumcise every male of his, then may he draw near to do it and he shall be like a native of the land, but no uncircumcised man shall eat of it. 49One law shall there be for the native and for the sojourner who sojourns in your midst.” 50And all the Israelites did as the LORD had charged Moses and Aaron, thus did they do. 51And it happened on that very day that the LORD brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt in their battalions.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. in the land of Egypt. This phrase is usually explained (by Nahmanides and others) as an indication of the unusual setting for the annunciation of this set of legal regulations in contradistinction to the body of Hebrew law that is given in the wilderness. But the phrase also serves to position this passage in the narrative sequence: as the Israelites are poised for the great escape, in the penultimate moment of their 430-year sojourn in Egypt (verse 40), God directs Moses and Aaron to deliver to them, while they are still on Egyptian soil, this law that will be binding on all their descendants.
2. This month is for you head of months. The reasonable inference of many scholars is that this calendric announcement reflects a moment in early Israelite history when there was at least one other competing system that designated a different month as the beginning of the year. (The Talmud later would speak of four different new years, and subsequent Jewish practice sets the beginning of the year in the early fall month of Tishrei, evidently making the calendar correspond to the agricultural cycle rather than to a historical event.) The point of beginning the annual sequence of months with the one in which the Exodus occurred is to coordinate the annual cycle with the event of liberation that is construed as the foundational act for the nation.
3. a lamb. Though the Hebrew seh can refer to both lamb and mature sheep, the indication that the animal should be in its first year—this is Rashi’s plausible construction of the term ben shanah—makes “lamb” the appropriate translation. It is a slightly peculiar lamb, however, because in verse 5 we learn that it also includes “kid.”
6. a thing to be kept. The Hebrew mishmeret is an abstract noun derived from the verbal stem sh-m-r, which has meanings that range from “keep” to “watch” to “observe” (in the ritual sense); all these meanings come into play as the root is repeated through the passage.
8. flatbread. The etymology of the Hebrew matsot remains uncertain. The conventional translation of “unleavened bread” is less than felicitous not only because of its excess of syllables but because it explicitly defines the bread by negation, the lack of leavening, whereas the Hebrew is a positive term. In Genesis 19 Lot serves matsot to the two anonymous guests who were to his house at nightfall, and the implication is that this is a kind of bread that can be baked hastily, with no need to wait for the dough to rise before putting it in the oven.
9. Do not eat from it raw, nor in any way cooked in water, but fire-roasted. Eating raw meat, still suffused with blood, would in any case have been prohibited, but elsewhere there is no restriction on boiled meat (here that would be lamb stew), whether for sacrificial or profane purposes. William H. C. Propp offers what may be the best explanation for this insistence on fire-roasting by observing that it is a more archaic method of cooking meat, without the use of a pot, cooking utensils being the instruments of a more complex culinary technology. In this fashion, he goes on to suggest, fire-roasting would be associated with a kind of purity in the preparation of the meal, just as flatbread (probably baked over an open fire, nomad-style) without any admixture of leaven, might be associated with purity. One could add that these archaically prepared foods enhance the sense of ritual reenactment of what amounts to an archaic moment of national history, when the nation itself was awaiting its foundational liberation as a destroying angel stalked through the Egyptian night and passed over the houses of the Israelites.
10. in fire you shall burn. This seemingly redundant idiom has the force of “burn till utterly consumed” and so when applied to buildings means something like “burned to the ground.”
12. I will cross through the land. The Hebrew verb ʿavarti means to “pass” (over, through, or by) or to “cross.” The usual translation of “pass through” or “pass over” has been avoided in order to obviate the misleading impression that it is the same word as “Passover,” which in the Hebrew reflects an entirely unrelated root, p-s-ḥ.
from all the gods of Egypt I will exact retributions. The least strained construction of this clause is that the absolute impotence of the supposed, or perhaps merely petty, gods of Egypt to protect their adherents will expose their nullity as gods. The idea of some commentators, that the Egyptian idols were smashed in the course of this fateful night, seems fanciful: and the exposure of the inefficacy of the Egyptian gods is in keeping with the preceding plagues.
13. And the blood will be a sign. Much anthropologically informed commentary has been made on the smearing of blood at the entrance of the house to ward off evil spirits, the “Destroyer” (mashḥit) of our narrative being a particularly scary instance of such a spirit. It is equally important, however, to keep in mind the deployment of blood as a recurrent motif in the literary structure of the larger narrative. Moses is thrust from Egypt, and set on the road toward his vocation as prophet, after he sheds the blood of the Egyptian taskmaster. On the way back to Egypt, it is the blood of circumcision that saves his life—a strong foreshadowing of the tenth plague that evidently interprets circumcision as a kind of substitute for the sacrifice of the firstborn. Then the plagues begin with the turning of the water of the Nile into blood.
I will pass over you. The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb pasaḥ is to “skip,” “hop,” “step over.” (There is one occurrence in the biblical corpus where it might mean “defend,” which is scant basis for the claim of some scholars that this is what it means here.) “Pass over” is used in this translation to preserve the pun on the time-honored English name for the festival. It is quite possible that the Hebrew pesaḥ was the independent name for this particular lamb sacrifice and for a spring festival, and that the narrative links that name with the Exodus story through folk etymology.
15. that person shall be cut off from Israel. This punishment (the Hebrew term is karet) will be invoked for a whole series of infractions as the Mosaic law is promulgated. Perhaps the most likely reference is to some form of ostracism, though both medieval and modern commentators have speculated about whether premature death or childlessness might be suggested by the phrase.
17. the Flatbread. Here the term matsot is the name of the festival, which is also called pesaḥ. Some have plausibly conjectured that these were originally two different holidays—matsot agricultural and pesaḥ pastoral—that were drawn together in the literary formulation of this text and hence in Israelite practice.
19. sojourner. As elsewhere, the Hebrew ger refers to a resident alien.
native of the land. The Hebrew reflected in “native,” ʾezraḥ, probably refers to a plant (many think, a grapevine), and so would be a metaphor for the autochthonous character of the native, springing from the soil in purity.
21. Draw out and take. The precise nuance of the first of these two verbs is elusive. It has been proposed that “draw” (mashakh) preceding another verb may have the idiomatic force of “hasten,” “perform urgently.”
22. touch the blood . . . to the lintel. This is precisely the same verb that is used in 4:25 for Zipporah’s placing or smearing the blood of circumcision at someone’s feet. The usage is unusual enough to suggest the possibility of an explicit allusion here to the earlier episode.
25. And so when you come to the land. This is a pointed rupture of the time frame of the story. In the midst of the breathless moment that is the last evening of the Israelites in Egypt, as Moses enjoins them to smear their entranceways with protective blood, the narrative briefly leaps forward to a time when the Israelites, long ago liberated from Egyptian servitude, dwell in their land, and when a generation arises that scarcely knows the meaning of the commemorative Passover ritual, so that telling has to supplement the ritualistic showing.
29. dungeon. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “house of the pit.”
32. and you shall bless me as well. As both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra note, the desperate Pharaoh appears to feel in need of intercession: when you propitiate your god in the wilderness, he is saying, remember to put in a good word for me.
33. Egypt bore down on the people. The literal meaning of the verb is “was strong.” This same verb, ḥazaq, was repeatedly used for the “toughening” of Pharaoh’s heart, and the redeployment here in a different context, with a different grammatical object, is a virtually ironic echo.
We are all dead men. Coupled with the wrenching grief over the death of the firstborn is a note of panic: “the disasters are becoming more and more intolerable, and after the loss of our sons, the next thing that will happen is that we shall all be killed.”
35. and cloaks. The cloaks were not included in the preceding instructions about this event. The mention here is evidently triggered by the report of the cloaks in which the kneading pans were wrapped, as an explanation of where the Hebrews got them. Perhaps it is assumed that as a matter of course abject slaves would possess no more than simple work-tunics, and not the cloaks they would need for a journey. (In Egyptian paintings slaves are often depicted wearing only a short skirt and naked from the waist up.)
37. six hundred thousand men on foot, besides the little ones. “On foot” (ragli), which functions adverbially here, is a military term with the usual meaning as a noun of foot soldier and thus reinforces the idea that the fleeing Hebrews are “the LORD’s battalions.” “The little ones” in this instance would logically have to imply or include the women who nurtured them. The total figure of Israelites thus would be considerably more than two million. This is scarcely credible as a historical datum, but ancient literature (Greek as well as Hebrew) has little notion of numerical accuracy in the way it conjures with numbers.
38. motley throng. Umberto Cassuto plausibly suggests that the Hebrew ʿerev rav has no component that means “multitude” (King James Version, “mixed multitude”) but rather that the last syllable is not an independent word but a duplication of the ultimate syllable of the main word—thus, ʿerevrav—which is a Hebrew formation for pejoratives. (The English “riffraff” comes close.)
very heavy livestock. “Heavy” is a word that shuttles back and forth through the themes of the story, from Pharaoh’s heavy/hard heart to the sundry heavy plagues to the heaviness of the Israelite possessions.
42. a night of watch. The Hebrew leyl shimurim may suggest a vigil or simply a night on which this complex of commemorative rituals is scrupulously kept or observed. In any case, the last phrase of the verse, “through their generations” (or “through their eras”) serves as a transition from the preceding narration of the event of Exodus to the passage of legislation that frames it (verses 43–51), which will be followed by a second unit of legislative material (13:1–16).
43. no foreigner shall eat of it. The Exodus story defines the nation. The Passover ritual, which commemorates that story, is the cultic enactment of membership in the nation.
44. purchased with silver. Literally, the Hebrew is “purchase of silver.”
45. A settler. The Hebrew toshav appears to mean the same thing as ger, that is, “resident alien.” The two words are often coupled in a hendiadys, ger wetoshav, which plainly means resident alien.
hired worker. The obvious implication is a non-Israelite hired worker.
46. no bone shall you break in it. This is often linked to the haste of the eating: there is no time to break bones and suck out the marrow. It may be more likely, however, that the prohibition is meant to preserve the idea of the wholeness of the sacrificial meal. The lamb is fire-roasted whole, after which only the meat that can be cut away is consumed.
48. he must circumcise every male. Circumcision is the mark of belonging to the covenantal community, as God announced to Abraham when He enjoined the practice (Genesis 17); and so circumcision is a prerequisite to participation in the community-defining Passover ritual. But the mention of circumcision also ties in this law with the Bridegroom of Blood episode that was the prelude to Moses’s mission in Egypt: there is a symbolic overlap between the apotropaic blood of circumcision, the apotropaic blood of the lamb on the doorposts, and God’s saving Israel from the bloodbath of Egypt to make them His people.
then may he draw near. In ritual contexts, this verb is often an ellipsis for “draw near to the altar” (to offer sacrifice). The Hebrew for “sacrifice,” qorban, is cognate with the verb “draw near,” qarav.
49. One law. The Hebrew term here is torah, which has the primary meaning of “teaching” or “instruction.”