Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
When Your Children Ask
Exodus 12:21-28
21 Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said to them, “Draw out, and take lambs according to your families, and kill the Passover. · WEB
The instructions are handed to the elders with a door that must not be opened, and with an answer prepared for a question no one has asked yet.
Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said to them, "Draw out, and take lambs according to your families, and kill the Passover" Exodus 12:21.
What was given to Moses is now passed to the heads of households, which is where this rite will live for the rest of Israel's history. There is no priesthood yet, no altar, and no sanctuary. The father of each family kills the lamb, marks his own doorway, and is responsible for everyone inside it.
You shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two door posts Exodus 12:22.
Hyssop is a common brush-like plant, worth nothing, growing out of walls. It is the applicator specified here and afterward in the cleansing rituals of the law Leviticus 14:4, and a man praying for forgiveness centuries later asks to be purged with it Psalms 51:7. The value is entirely in what it carries.
None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning Exodus 12:22.
The protection has an edge to it. Safety is located at a particular address and nowhere else, and a man who wandered out to see what was happening would not have been covered by blood on a doorframe he was no longer behind. There is no charm in the substance. The arrangement is a place of shelter, and it has to be stayed in.
Yahweh will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and when he sees the blood... Yahweh will pass over the door, and will not allow the destroyer to come in to your houses Exodus 12:23.
Two agents appear in a single sentence, and the relation between them is not explained. What is stated is that the destroyer is not permitted through a marked door. The passage is content to leave the mechanism obscure and the outcome exact.
It will happen, when your children ask you, "What do you mean by this service?" Exodus 12:26.
The instruction assumes the question, which means it assumes an annual rite strange enough to provoke one. That is deliberate. A ceremony that blended into ordinary life would raise nothing, and the answer prescribed is not a doctrine but a piece of family history in the first person: he passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt... and spared our houses Exodus 12:27. Our houses, said by people born generations later in another country. Each retelling makes the speaker a participant.
The people bowed their heads and worshiped. The children of Israel went and did so Exodus 12:27–28.
They worship before anything has happened, and then they act. Everything they had been told rested on the word of two men, and the lambs were killed in the afternoon of a day that ended, so far as anyone knew, like every other. The obedience recorded here is the reason the houses were marked when midnight came.
settled What this mark means