This Month Shall Be the Beginning
1 Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2 “This month shall be to you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. 3 Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth day of this month, they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; 4 and if the household is too little for a lamb, then he and his neighbor next to his house shall take one according to the number of the souls. You shall make your count for the lamb according to what everyone can eat. 5 Your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old. You shall take it from the sheep or from the goats. 6 You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at evening. 7 They shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel, on the houses in which they shall eat it. 8 They shall eat the meat in that night, roasted with fire, with unleavened bread. They shall eat it with bitter herbs. 9 Don’t eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted with fire; with its head, its legs and its inner parts. 10 You shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; but that which remains of it until the morning you shall burn with fire. 11 This is how you shall eat it: with your belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste: it is Yahweh’s Passover. 12 For I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and animal. I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. I am Yahweh. 13 The blood shall be to you for a token on the houses where you are. When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. 14 This day shall be a memorial for you. You shall keep it as a feast to Yahweh. You shall keep it as a feast throughout your generations by an ordinance forever. 15 “‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away yeast out of your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel. 16 In the first day there shall be to you a holy convocation, and in the seventh day a holy convocation; no kind of work shall be done in them, except that which every man must eat, only that may be done by you. 17 You shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this same day I have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations by an ordinance forever. 18 In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, until the twenty first day of the month at evening. 19 There shall be no yeast found in your houses for seven days, for whoever eats that which is leavened, that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a foreigner, or one who is born in the land. 20 You shall eat nothing leavened. In all your habitations you shall eat unleavened bread.’”
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.
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. You shall take it from the sheep or from the goats.
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, on the houses in which they shall eat it.
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