Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
This Month Shall Be the Beginning
Exodus 12:1-20
1 Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, · WEB
A nation's calendar is reset around a lamb, and the only protection offered on the last night is blood applied to a doorway.
This month shall be to you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you Exodus 12:2.
Before a single instruction is given, the calendar is moved. A people who had counted their years by Egypt's harvests will now count them from the night they were redeemed, so that every subsequent date in their history is measured from a rescue. Nothing about the arrangement is symbolic only; it is the first act of a free nation, and it is an act of memory.
Your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old Exodus 12:5. Taken on the tenth day, kept until the fourteenth Exodus 12:3–6 — four days in the house, long enough for a family to know the animal before it is killed. The requirements are specific and they are all of one kind: no blemish, no substitution, no shortcut. Whatever else the Passover teaches, it begins by refusing to make the cost invisible.
They shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel Exodus 12:7.
The blood is not drunk, buried, or offered on an altar; it is painted where it can be seen from outside. And the promise attached to it is stated with a precision worth weighing: when I see the blood, I will pass over you Exodus 12:13. Not when I see your descent, your circumcision, your suffering, or your intentions. Israel is not spared because Israel is Israel. Nothing in the Hebrew houses that night differed from the Egyptian houses except a mark applied in obedience to a word, and the mark was not the family's own.
The meal is eaten with your belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste Exodus 12:11 — dressed to leave, by people who are still slaves and have been given no evidence that anything will change by morning. Bitter herbs recall what is being left; unleavened bread admits there was no time to let anything rise.
The whole arrangement is afterward read as a pattern, and Scripture rather than inference makes the connection. A lamb without blemish is what Peter names when he describes the price of redemption 1 Peter 1:19; Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place is stated flatly 1 Corinthians 5:7; and the man who introduces Jesus does it by pointing and saying behold, the Lamb of God John 1:29. The correspondences are not decorative. Chosen beforehand, kept, killed at evening by the whole assembly, its blood applied by each household for itself — every element recurs, including the last, which is why a sacrifice offered once for all is still of no use to anyone who declines to put it on the door.
The seven days of unleavened bread that follow Exodus 12:15–20 extend the night into a week. Yeast spreads invisibly through a whole batch from a fragment, which is exactly the property that makes it a standing figure for corruption in a community 1 Corinthians 5:6, and the removal is ordered to be thorough because a fragment is all it takes.
settled What this mark means