Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
The Bread of Affliction
Deuteronomy 16:1-8
1 Observe the month of Abib, and keep the Passover to Yahweh your God; for in the month of Abib Yahweh your God brought you out of Egypt by night. · WEB
The Passover is moved from the household to the one chosen place, and the bread eaten there is named for the distress it recalls.
The month is named first, and the reason with it. In the month of Abib Yahweh your God brought you out of Egypt by night Deuteronomy 16:1. The calendar is anchored to an event.
What is new here is the location. The original Passover was eaten in houses, with blood on the doorposts of each one Exodus 12:7. Now it is not to be kept locally at all: you may not sacrifice the Passover within any of your gates Deuteronomy 16:5. It must be brought to the place God chooses.
That is a real change, and it belongs to the settled life they are entering. A festival kept in a thousand villages becomes a thousand slightly different festivals. Kept in one place, it stays one thing, and everyone present sees the same rite.
The timing is fixed as tightly as the place: at evening, at the going down of the sun, at the season that you came out of Egypt Deuteronomy 16:6. The hour of the year is matched to the hour of the deliverance.
The unleavened bread is given a name, and it is not a flattering one. It is the bread of affliction Deuteronomy 16:3, and the reason is domestic: for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste. There was no time for dough to rise.
So the annual feast is built around the taste of an emergency. A prosperous farming family, generations later, in a country of wheat and vines, eats flat bread for a week because their ancestors left in a hurry. And the purpose is stated: that you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.
The memory is not left to sentiment. It is attached to a food, a date, an hour and a place, and repeated every year — which is how this book expects anything to survive a generation.
The last instruction is the quietest and the most human. After the night of the feast, in the morning you shall return to your tents Deuteronomy 16:7. They go home. The week continues with unleavened bread and ends in an assembly with no work Deuteronomy 16:8.
settled What this mark means